Updated on February 13, 2025

An illustration depicting the importance of conversational design in chatbots. A woman is standing in front of a computer screen pointing at a flowchart labeled "Empathy and Explanation." A chatbot is sitting at a desk with a laptop, labeled "Intents and Entities." The image conveys the idea that effective chatbots require both empathy and explanation, as well as well-defined intents and entities.

Cathy Pearl, a design manager for Google Assistant, said, “Conversational design in chatbot creates conversational experiences that teach computers how to interact like humans.”

With the increasing use of chatbot technology across different business domains, the domain of conversational design has become more popular and significant. 

For context, Conversational Design in chatbots teaches them how to answer customer questions, be empathetic, and solve problems.

Everything from Amazon Alexa to ChatGPT uses some conversational design to answer questions. 

This article will explain how conversational design works and its importance. We’ll cover:

1. What Is Conversational Design?

2. Why Do We Use Conversational Design?

3. The Importance of Conversational Design

4. How to Design Conversations?

5. Principles of Conversational Design

6. Conclusion

What is Conversational Design?

Conversational design is designing a two-way interaction between a computer and a human. It is a relatively recent discipline that evolved alongside the rise of IVR technologies and Facebook chatbots. 

However, with the advent of AI, conversational design has become more involved. In early systems, conversational design used rulesets to design the conversational experience. 

Building Memorable Conversational AI Experiences

A chatbot was designed to answer a particular question with a specific answer. 

With AI, fine-tuning processes help people guide the LLM toward a specific answer. However, the advanced NLP capabilities of chatbots mean that these chatbots are more capable of dealing with a variety of questions. 

So, conversational designers must design multiple use cases and fallback systems that guide the user.

34% of customers are already comfortable with AI chatbots for customer service in eCommerce, and as many as 43% prefer using chatbots for banking customer service. Combine these two statistics, and you’ll understand why conversational design has become a huge buzzword in recent years. 

But why use conversational design at all? Let’s discuss that in the next section. 

Why Do We Use Conversational Design?

 An infographic titled "Why do we use Conversational Design?" with three main sections: Complexity, Multi-Layered, and Ambiguous. Each section has an icon and text explaining the challenges of conversational design, such as language variation, understanding implicit meanings, and handling ambiguity.
Build effective chatbots.

Since humans can naturally converse with each other with relative ease, the complexity of human conversations might initially seem unintuitive. However, in scientific terms, translating human conversational skills to machines has been a challenging endeavor. Three features of our conversations usually create this barrier:

1. Complexity

Humans would often change the meaning of a word depending on the context. Let’s take a simple example from everyday speech:

“My laptop won’t switch on.” and “My computer has died.” are the same sentence in terms of meaning but are described entirely differently. 

Add in colloquialisms and AAVE and phrases like “Straight fire,” “Lit,” and “No Cap.” These phrases and words have meanings dissociated from the dictionary definitions of these concepts. 

While your customers might use a different terminology, how they interact with your business will vary. Conversational design and NLP have to account for this variance while building chatbots.

2. Layers

There are often implicit meanings behind human interactions. 

Let’s take a simple example:

  • If you ask a student to tell you the answer to “2+2,” you expect him to answer. 
  • However, if you type “2+2” into a computer program, you must specify that it must print the answer.

Computers don’t understand the multi-layered meaning behind sentences, which can be problematic. When a customer asks, “Can you help me with this problem?” the expectation is that the chatbot will immediately start helping instead of answering the question. 

Your customers might become frustrated if chatbots don’t respond appropriately to multi-layered questions. 

3. Ambiguity

Ambiguous questions and statements are relatively standard in human conversations. You might want to talk with a shopkeeper and tell them that you don’t like to eat chocolates daily while telling him to give you chocolates.

These are contradictory statements, and you want empathy from the shopkeeper when you say them. However, a chatbot can’t navigate contradictory statements very well. 

To help chatbots with this problem, they need to be trained to understand some level of ambiguity when they answer questions. 

These three points contribute to the complexity of human conversations and make conversational design a challenging task. However, there are benefits to designing a chatbot that can perfectly mimic humans. Let’s talk about them. 

What is the Importance of Conversational Design?

Conversational design helps your chatbot sound more natural and human. Naturally, it increases the credibility and effectiveness of your chatbots overall. 

So, the basic competitive advantages of conversation design are:

1. Higher CSAT

Your customers want your chatbots to solve their problems. A chatbot designed to understand user questions and provide concise and prompt answers also raises customer satisfaction.
Since chatbots also work at scale and can provide consistent customer experiences, it raises your CSAT scores further. 

2. Lower CES

Customer Effort Score measures the effort a customer has to put in to get to a solution to their problem. With a chatbot that understands human language and converses better, this effort score is significantly lowered. 

Overall, your customers get their answers with less effort and less time with a well-designed chatbot. 

3. Faster Resolutions

Lower effort and more natural conversations translate to faster problem resolution. This helps your customers find faster solutions so that their workflows are not disturbed.

Image advertising a tool for creating custom customer support chatbots, with positive ratings from G2 and Capterra.

 4. Better Conversions

In the eCommerce context, better conversational design directly translates to more conversions at scale. This is because when your chatbot can understand and answer your customer’s product questions, it can provide better recommendations and sell more products. 

Given that an increase in CSAT also increases revenue, businesses have a proper incentive to create better conversational designs. 

In the next section, we’ll discuss how conversational designs are made. 

Also: Use Flow Designer to Streamline Your Chatbot Development

Also Read: Conversational AI: A Complete Guide for Business in 2024

Also Read: Chatbots vs Conversational AI: Is There Any Difference?

How Do You Design Conversations?

When you design conversations, you use a conversational flow builder like Kompose from Kommunicate. These flow designers let you map out the conversation flows and create different versions so your customers can ask various questions. 

 An infographic titled "Conversation Design Process" with a circular diagram showing the steps involved in creating a chatbot. The steps include understanding customer needs, defining chatbot personality, designing conversation, testing internally, piloting for validation, and monitoring and iterating. Each step is represented by an icon and a brief description.
Conversation Design Process

The process that we recommend is as follows:

1. Understand Customer Needs – Strategically map out your customers’ questions frequently and try to answer them. Work with the customer support team to understand the most common use cases for your customer base and document them. These documents will then inform the rest of the process. 

2. Define Chatbot Personality – Remember that your chatbot is mimicking a human. Design a personality that appeals to your user base. If your business caters to Gen Z, you might want to use some basic vocabulary from the generation. Similarly, for a B2B business, you might need to design a more professional and formal chatbot tone. 

3. Design the Conversation Flow – Using the documents and chatbot personality to guide and design conversation flows. Consider how a customer will interact with the chatbot, and include as many variations as possible. Since a chatbot will effectively memorize these patterns, having multiple variants of each question will help your chatbot be more efficient. 

4. Internal Testing – It’s not possible to account for every conversation a chatbot needs to have. So, run an initial test with your team to understand what you might have missed during the first design.
Incorporate these designs and re-iterate until the chatbot is ready for launch. 

5. Validate with Pilot – We always recommend a more minor pilot program. This will give you actual customer insights into your conversational design. You will learn of multiple points of failure and be able to re-iterate before you launch to your entire customer base. 

6. Monitor and Iterate – Conversational patterns change with time, and you will discover that your customers will ask new questions and find more faults with your initial designs. Keep improving your designs with time and create a robust conversational flow that will satisfy your customers. 

This process is intuitive, and we’ve seen it work across multiple enterprises. However, while following this process, there are some basic principles that you must keep in mind; let’s discuss them next.

What are the Core Principles of Conversational Design?

An infographic titled "4 Principles of Conversation Design" with four quadrants representing the key principles: Orient Your Users, Provide Short Answers, Incorporate Manners, and Facilitate Understanding Trust. Each quadrant has an icon and a brief description.
Principles of Conversation Design

There are four basic principles that you need while designing conversations. This is especially relevant if you create a generative AI chatbot for customer service

These are:

Orient Your Users

You need to help your users through your conversation flow. This means that you need to incorporate the following into your flow:

1. Welcome Message – The first message your customers will see when they open your chatbot. This should include a gentle guide to your chatbot’s functions. 

2. Help – Always provide quick links that will allow your customers to return to the main menu within your chatbot. This will help them re-orient themselves when they can’t find the answer in a particular path. 

3. Exit – AI chatbots can often trap your customers in a loop without fallback systems. Build chatbot to human handoff into your conversation flow to avoid these instances. 

4. Hints – You can suggest related questions or provide hints for additional conversation functionality. This helps your customer go down the funnel much more easily. 

Orientation helps your customers find resolution time and rate way around your chatbot much more quickly and enables you to improve resolution time and rate.

Facilitate Mutual Understanding

You want human beings to understand your chatbot’s language and mannerisms. This means that you should design your conversation flows with:

1. Plain Language – Avoid jargon wherever possible and stick to domain-specific keywords. This will help your customers understand your chatbot better.

2. Use Variations – As we pointed out earlier, chatbots will learn based on the variation you can provide with your answers and questions. Having multiple variants of QA pairs will help your customers get better results.

3. Disambiguate – Don’t create ambiguous conversation pairs. Be explicit in your answers and use simple language whenever possible. 

Mutual understanding is critical to providing concise and satisfactory help to your customers. A chatbot that facilitates understanding has higher CSAT scores.

Good Manners

Remember, you’re effectively simulating a service interaction through a computer. In essence, you want it to be able to provide engaging conversation that solves problems. For this you need:

1. Empathy – While AI-based modern chatbots are powered by modern NLP, they still lack the capability to carry out empathetic conversations. To that end, its necessary to build in empathy using conversational design.

You can do this by modulating the language in which a chatbot answers. For example: if a customers says that they’re unable to solve a problem, the chatbot can say: “I understand, here’s an alternate method.”

However, don’t overdo empathy because it can appear disingenuous.

2. Small Talk – Customers often engage is some small talk with chatbots. Its important to build in responses to small questions like “How are you doing?,” “What can you do for me?” 

This helps your customer feel safer and more comfortable with their interactions while increasing satisfaction. 

Good manners is not a quantitative metric but, it can make a world of difference for the end-customer. Having a proper empathetic conversation can help your chatbot solve problems faster while providing your business with higher CSAT.

 Banner promoting Kommunicate Bot Builder, a tool for building conversational flows. The banner includes a button to try the builder, a rating of 4.8/5 on G2, and a rating of 4.6/5 on Capterra

Short Interactions

Finally, it’s important to focus on two major things while you’re designing a conversation. Your answers should be:

1. Concise

2. Comprehensive

This allows your customers to get to solutions faster. Also with comprehensive answers they have access to the complete information. There should be no ambiguity or guesswork in your conversational design. 

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Conclusion

Conversational design is an important area of chatbots that is often overlooked. However, as AI-based chatbot developers, we understand first-hand how impactful the discipline can be. 

Designing empathetic and effective chatbots is crucial to creating customer service chatbots

And the process of conversational design is also fairly intuitive. 

It includes steps for designing the flow according to data insights and then iterating based on the feedback you receive from teammates and customers. Given that there are outsized benefits from these efforts, more businesses will focus on conversational design in the future. 

Looking to create seamless, engaging conversations with your customers? Kommunicate offers powerful tools to help you design chatbots that enhance user experience and boost customer satisfaction. Get started today and transform your chatbot with smart conversational design. Try Kommunicate for free!

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