Planning your messaging rollout

Articles in the series

• Messaging deployment guide: Introduction
• Part 1: About messaging
• Part 2: Designing your messaging customer experience
• Part 3: Planning your staffing and operational requirements for messaging
• Part 4: Planning your messaging rollout

When you have a good idea about how you want your customer experience to unfold, you can get down to the nuts and bolts of the bot design, and how you’re going to roll it out.

In this article, we’ll discuss the following topics:

• Map your rollout
• Design your conversation bot

Map your rollout

Make sure you include the tasks below in your plan, and include detailed sub-tasks and time estimates where you an.

• Agent training
• Internal education
• Design
• Impact assessment
• Communications plans (internal and external)

If possible, we strongly recommend taking a phased approach to managing the change from your current customer support to messaging. If you’re creating a new support team from scratch, a single development phase might work best for you.

Design your conversation bot

When you have a high-level idea about the type of approach you want to take to moving to messaging, you should take some time to physically map out the flow for your conversation bot.

If you’re making the change all at once, your job here is easy (or at least easier). A single version of the conversation bot is all you need. If you’re taking a phased approach, you might need multiple versions of the conversation bot, each one adding functionality and options to the bot’s flow, until it is as intricate as you want it to be.

But before you open the bot builder and start building your conversation bot, you need to plan out the flow of the experience in a way that everyone can understand and, most importantly, can refer back to.

We suggest using process mapping to create this plan. You can use any tool you find helpful here. Take a look at existing process mapping software programs. You can create your own flow chart or spreadsheet. You can even use a whiteboard with a bunch of arrows and sticky notes on it. Whatever method works best for you is the one you should use.

What’s key is that you have a visual representation of every action the customer can take when interacting with your conversation bot, where those actions take them, and – most importantly – label these actions with the bot step type, feature, or messaging functionality that makes them possible. Add article suggestions throughout the bot flow to encourage self-service. Present options to customers to choose from to tightly manage the directions the conversation can go in, or leave room for free-text entry if you want a less rigid conversation. Drop in an escape hatch for the customer to immediately be added to a live agent’s queue. Whatever option you want to offer to your customers, put it on the process map and label it with the method for including it in the conversation bot (our messaging documentation can help with this). Capture every step and every expected event.