Every conversation is an opportunity for relationship building, whether to win a new customer or strengthen bonds with a longtime fan of your brand. Successful companies leverage conversation design to minimize pain points and build customer trust. The stakes are high for good conversation design.

Think about the last time you got customer support through a company’s app or website or talked to Alexa or Siri on your phone or smart speaker. Did you navigate through an automated voice or text menu? That was a conversation, and it was informed by conversation design (CxD, for short).

Here are 5 tips for designing better, more inclusive conversations:

1. Decide on a conversational style

Conversational style isn’t particularly special — it’s just the way you talk or chat. In the same way that users expect a webpage to visually convey your organization’s brand, users also expect your bot to express brand style through the language it uses.

2. Be descriptive

As a conversation designer, you should always be inclusive, observant, and descriptive. Users represent their social identity through their language, which means language is alive, and the rules are always changing. When you let your preconceived notions about how language “should” work, rather than designing from a descriptive, observatory stance of how language works in practice, you run the risk of alienating users. It becomes a usability issue at best and an equity issue at worst.

3. Be purposefully marked

Once you pick your baseline pattern of communicating with your customer, stick to it, and if you decide to deviate from it, do so purposefully. If you deviate, even unintentionally, from the baseline style of your conversation design, it will send a meta message to your customer about the state of the interaction and relationship at hand.

4. Start with a verb

If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone working on a bot say, “but what about the topic? Can the bot stay on topic? What topics will the bot cover?” Unfortunately, the topic is only one half of the whole. Conversation is also about action. Without considering what the user is trying to DO, we won’t ever actually be able to complete tasks at scale for them.

5. Use discourse markers

Discourse markers show the cohesion between different sentences and ideas and how they relate to each other (Schiffrin, 1987). You can think of them as conjunctions; for example, using “and” means you’re building upon an idea; whereas, “yet” means you’re comparing two things. Similar to omitting these connector words, when we don’t use discourse markers, bots can seem rigid and even confusing. But when you include discourse markers, you design an experience that is more akin to the natural conversations we have as humans. And by creating a natural conversational experience, we can better strengthen a relationship with a customer.

I hope this helps you when building your next conversational design stick to these main 5 principles and you will be fine 😉