About Sunita Maldonado and wemakeit

Sunita Maldonado is responsible for digital product design at wemakeit. Your work includes the further development of the platform and new features, user research and copywriting. Sophie discusses wemakeit’s chatbot with her and what you should look out for in a chatbot dialog.

Wemakeit is the second largest crowdfunding platform in the German-speaking world. On the one hand, they offer the opportunity to finance projects on the platform and, on the other, to let people participate in their own projects. They thus offer an infrastructure for project creators to present their projects as well as the associated payment infrastructure. In addition, wemakeit acts as a knowledge broker in the field of crowdfunding.

The chatbot from wemakeit

Wemakeit is a purely digital crowdfunding platform. Everyone who contacts them does so via digital channels. It is therefore important to offer various opportunities to pick up users, approach them and offer them various contact options. The chatbot is therefore a new digital touchpoint at wemakeit and an important form of communication. [vc_single_image image=”4319″ img_size=”full” onclick=”custom_link” img_link_target=”_blank” label=”” link=”http://wemakeit.com/”]

Benefits of the chatbot

The chatbot is on the home page and is therefore aimed at a large audience. The aim is to pick up users there and introduce them to wemakeit.

Two different target groups were defined for this purpose:

• Those who have a project idea and would like to finance it
• Those who discover projects and would like to participate in them

The aim is to provide guidance to both very different target groups by showing them how best to navigate the website. The chatbot adapts to the respective user and their experience on wemakeit. It tries to find out whether the user already knows the site, what they want here and whether they know what crowdfunding is. Based on this information, they can present projects to users or guide them through the crowdfunding process and offer services.

What should you look out for in a chatbot dialog?

In the chatbot dialog, wemakeit wants to show itself as a team and as a personality. The chatbot should therefore not be something neutral and technical, but something that is fun. It should create a place where people like to spend time and engage with something. The chatbot should also convey something personal, as starting a project is always a big step for people. To create this direct, friendly and personal effect, elements such as small talk or a team picture are built into the chatbot.

Dialog is particularly important for an online platform, but also challenging, as you can only get to know the company and its team virtually. They only show themselves via digital channels. It is therefore particularly important that the chatbot is easy to understand and clearly explains wemakeit’s activities. The balance between getting to the point in a concise manner and at the same time creating a likeable and personal character trait of the chatbot proves to be particularly difficult. To do this, Sunita had to find out what makes chatbots special as a medium and how to find the right language for them.

The wemakeit chatbot has now been online for three months. Sunita now wants to build on this foundation to expand the chatbot or break the rather large dialog down into smaller pieces and divide it into different subpages. Sunita draws inspiration for further development from chatbots on other websites.

Implementation of the chatbot dialog

It’s best to write down everything you want to write down at your leisure. However, you should be careful not to write entire monologues, but to break up the chat. For example, inserting images, GIFs or emojis to a reasonable extent is also no problem.

After the initial writing of the dialog, you should not be afraid of further shortening and should not insist too strongly on your initial ideas. In order to recognize early on where you need to shorten, it also makes sense to insert the dialog from the Word document into the chatbot tool to see whether it is chat-compatible or not. The speech bubbles then make it intuitively clear where the shoe pinches.

Finally, of course, it is important not to forget to always obtain honest and constructive feedback on the chatbot dialog in order to be able to further optimize it.

Learnings

1. chatbots represent a new digital touchpoint and an important form of communication for purely digital companies.

2. Chatbots can offer orientation to very different target groups on the same website by empathizing with the needs of the respective target group.

3. a purely digital company can also express its personality well digitally with a chatbot.

4 The balance between being concise and to the point and at the same time creating a likeable and personal character trait of the chatbot turns out to be particularly difficult.

5 Finding a suitable language for chatbots is not easy. Tips for a successful chatbot dialog include not writing entire monologues and using various aids to break up the chat.

It’s best to listen to the podcast episode with Sophie Hundertmark and Sunita Maldonado for yourself. Have fun!

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