Data Collection with Chatbots

Chatbot data collection strategies - how to make the most of your chats 📊

Writing a consistent chatbot scenario that anticipates the user's problems is crucial for your bot's adoption. However, to achieve success with automation, you also need to offer personalization and adapt to the changing needs of the customers. That can happen only if you use proper user data. Relevant user information can help you deliver more accurate chatbot support, which can translate to better business results. 

If you don’t know how chatbots collect data, what primary user data is, or how to use user data to implement customer-focused chat automation, follow this guide!

What is primary user data?

Primary user data (first-party data) is any information the person willingly shares with a brand via emails, social media, live chat, or chatbots. Such data may include the user's email, name, shoe size, color preferences, or feedback regarding your service. 

Chatbots let you gather plenty of primary customer data that you can use to personalize your ongoing chats or improve your support strategy, products, or marketing activities. 

Let's check how ChatBot can help you collect primary customer data. 

Data collection strategies — ChatBot use case

There are several ways your chatbot can collect information about the user while chatting with them. The collected data can help the bot provide more accurate answers and solve the user's problem faster. 

1. User input 

User input is a type of interaction that lets the chatbot save the user's messages. That can be a word, a whole sentence, a PDF file, and the information sent through clicking a button or selecting a card. 

Once the user input is gathered, it's saved in the Archives. You can review your past conversation to understand your target audience's problems better. 

 2. Attributes 

Attributes are data tags that can retrieve specific information like the user name, email, or country from ongoing conversations and assign them to particular users. Once gathered, all the attributes can be seen in the Users section.

You can use data collected via attributes to personalize ongoing chats. However, you can also pass it to web services like your CRM or email marketing tools and use it, for instance, to reconnect with the user when the chat ends.

ChatBot has a set of default attributes that automatically collect data from chats, such as the user name, email, city, or timezone. 

Moreover, you can set up additional custom attributes to help the bot capture data vital for your business. For instance, you can create a chatbot quiz to entertain users and use attributes to collect specific user responses.

3. Entities 

Entities refer to a group of words similar in meaning and, like attributes, they can help you collect data from ongoing chats. 

You can use entities to create product categories and train your chatbot to recognize similar products or their synonyms in the user questions. 

So let's say you sell clothes online. Your users come from different countries and might use different words to describe sweaters. Using entities, you can teach your chatbot to understand that the user wants to buy a sweater anytime they write synonyms on chat, like pullovers, jumpers, cardigans, jerseys, etc. This way, entities will help the bot better understand the user intent.

ChatBot provides ready-to-use system entities that can help you validate the user response. If needed, you can also create custom entities to extract and validate the information that’s essential for your chatbot conversation success.

4. Segments

All right, you already know how to collect chatbot data. Now you need to learn how to make sense of it. The best way to do it is by categorizing it. 

ChatBot lets you group users into segments to better organize your user information and quickly find out what's what. Segments let you assign every user to a particular list based on specific criteria. 

For example, you can create a list called "beta testers" and automatically add every user interested in participating in your product beta tests. Then, you can export that list to a CSV file, pass it to your CRM and connect with your potential testers via email.

In the same way, you can create various lists with new newsletter subscribers, conference attendees, job candidates, or users awaiting your new ebook. 

Thanks to grouping users into segments, you can better know your audience and draw conclusions that can help you personalize your chatbot communication or email campaigns.

5. Attachments 

Sometimes, while serving customers, you need to process documents like invoices or receipts to help the customer solve their issues fully. Chatbots can help with that too!

Your chatbot can process not only text messages but images, videos, and documents required in the customer service process. The user can upload a document as an attachment to the chatbot window. In effect, they won't have to write a separate email to share their documents with you if their case requires them.

How to export chatbot data

Chatbot chats let you find a great deal of information about your users. However, even massive amounts of data are only helpful if used properly. Apps like Zapier or Make enable you to send collected data to external services and reuse it if needed.

• Create Salesforce and HubSpot leads out of chatbot chats. You can collect the customer name and emails and pass them automatically to your Salesforce lists.

• Pass data to Google Sheets. You can collect any necessary information and store it in your Google Sheet documents for further analysis. 

• Create events in Google Calendar. You can allow the customer to schedule a call or visit and automatically add this meeting to your calendar.  

• Create new leads in Autopilot, Mailchimp, or Active Campaign. You can let your visitors sign up for your newsletter by using a chatbot and send the collected emails to your email marketing software.

• Create Shopify orders. Your customer can purchase your Shopify products via the chatbot interface. The information about every new order can be sent automatically from ChatBot to Shopify. 

• Send Slack or Discord messages. When the users start chatting with your bot, you can get a message on your Slack or Discord channels.

• Send tickets to HelpDesk. When the user issue is out of the bot's scope, they can leave a message for your support team, and ChatBot can then pass it as a support ticket to HelpDesk.  

How to use third-party data in chatbots

Conversational agents let you collect data while chatting. Additionally, you can feed them with external data by integrating them with third-party services. This way, your bot can actively reuse data obtained via an external tool while chatting with the user. 

For example, Messenger, LiveChat, or Slack integrations can pass to ChatBot information about the user name. Thanks to that, the bot can address the person by name in the welcome message. 

What's more, you can create a bilingual bot that provides answers in German and Spanish. If the user speaks German and your chatbot receives such information via the Facebook integration, you can automatically pass the user along to the flow written in German. This way, you can engage the user faster and boost chatbot adoption.

Apart from the external integrations with 3rd party services, chatbots can retrieve some basic information about the customer from their IP or the website they are visiting.

For instance, you can use website data to detect whether the user is already logged into your service. Knowing which customers are signed up, you can prepare two chatbot welcome messages — one that offers a discount for logged users and another with information about the discount rules for users who haven't signed up yet. This way, you can customize your communication for better engagement. 

Quick ideas to use chatbot data in your business activities

Personalize your chatbot customer service

Using chatbots lets you polish your customer communication to the user's needs and characteristics. The bot can verify whether the user is a new visitor or a regular customer and what's their referring address or location. Based on that information, it can personalize the welcome message or the whole chatbot flow.

It can also provide the customer with customized product recommendations based on their previous purchases or expressed preferences.

Generate sales leads

Chatbot work just fine as website engagement tools. They can attract visitors with a catchy greeting and offer them some helpful information. Then, if a chatbot manages to engage the customer with your offers and gains their trust, it will be more likely to get the visitor's contact information. Your sales team can later nurture that lead and move the potential customer further down the sales funnel.

Build up your newsletter lists

You can use your bot to offer special offers or exclusive content incentives like reports and ebooks or share links to webinars. This way, you can encourage users to subscribe to your newsletter.

Gather customer feedback

Customer satisfaction surveys and chatbot quizzes are innovative ways to better understand your customer. They're more engaging than static web forms and can help you gather customer feedback without engaging your team. Up-to-date customer insights can help you polish your business strategies to better meet customer expectations. 

Track trends and changes in customer behavior 

By monitoring and analyzing your chatbot's past chats, you can learn about your customers’ changing behavior, interests, or the problems that bother them most.

Customer behavior data can give hints on modifying your marketing and communication strategies or building up your FAQs to deliver up-to-date service. 

Moreover, past conversations can provide plenty of chatbot training data that lets you improve your chatbot flows over time.

Chatbot data security

You already know how vital chatbot data collection is to your business. By analyzing it and making conclusions, you can get fresh insight into offering a better customer experience and achieving more business goals.

Remember, though, that while dealing with customer data, you must always protect user privacy. If your customers don't feel they can trust your brand, they won't share any information with you via any channel, including your chatbot. 

An excellent way to build your brand reliability is to educate your target audience about your data storage and publish information about your data policy. Here you can learn more about ChatBot’s security measures and policies.