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Commitment and Consistency in Chatbot Design

howdy chatbot fans and welcome back in this section, we're gonna be talking about some psychological principles of persuasion in chatbot design designing your bots effectively for human beings. The reason why I'm including this whole section here is because no matter how well you learn how to use mobile monkey, no matter how well you learn how to build facebook bots, no matter how many sophisticated use cases you could design, your body will not work unless, you know a little bit about human psychology, about persuasion about proven techniques and tactics that have worked for many, many, many years in every single form of salesmanship at the end of the day when you really strip it down from all its technological underpinnings, what we're dealing here with here is trying to sell stuff to people, we're trying to get people to comply with our requests, were trying to get people to promote our brand. We're trying to get people to buy our products and sign up for our services or read our e ...

books and knowing some basic principles of how to persuade people effectively to do these things and to make it more likely that they'll actually do it. Of course you can't twist anybody's arm. But if you use some of these principles, well, I promise you it'll be the most important and effective and worthwhile thing you ever learned in your life as a digital advertiser and I can attest to this first hand, going back a few years when I started implementing these principles and these concepts of psychological persuasion in my own business at adventure media, but also in all our client's businesses, we saw an immediate increase in the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns and it takes time and it takes practice and the more you understand and the more you practice these principles and the more you implement them in your chat bots, the more effective and more engaging your chatbots are going to be. And these are principles that you could apply to all channels to email marketing, to dealing with employees to signing new clients to how do you price your services and your products um to organic facebook posts really like because if you think about it, every piece of marketing collateral and marketing and all the marketing efforts that you that you develop are really to get people to do something that you want them to do that's at its core. And these are principles that is really worth taking time to understand. So we're gonna start off with the concepts of commitment and consistency. These are some very, very powerful concepts. People have a huge bias to act in ways that are consistent with our previous behaviors and actions. Um and it's very, very powerful and deep part of the human psyche Um in a study that was done by Knox and Inkster in 1968, they found that racetrack bettors, people who were betting on horses at the racetrack were significantly more confident in their bet the moment after the moment, right after placing the bet than they were the very moment before placing the bet and nothing else changed. They didn't get any more information about the horse or the actual likelihood that the horse would win, but they were much more confident after placing the bet because they took a stand. Remember we were talking about in the previous lectures by asking for referrals, making sure your customers take a stand and actually go on record, saying that they had a good experience with your brand. This is why that is so important. The principle of consistency. When a person takes a stand and says they like your product or that racetrack better actually places the bet and takes an action. They are much more psychologically um primed to act now and to talk in ways and to behave consistent with that previous action. It's very, very powerful. And as marketers, we could tap into that, we have an obsessive need to act that way. We have an obsessive need to act and appear to other people consistent with our previous choices and actions. And then when we encounter future choices, we will find crazy ways to justify a decision that appears consistent with previous actions. And this happens in relationships, right? People who invest a lot in relationships and this is a good thing in relationships. People who invest hard work and effort into a relationship are more motivated to to, you know, overlook a shortcoming of the other person and that's because they I mean, part of it might be, there's a lot of different reasons why these things could happen, but a big part of it is because I want to be consistent. I want to be right. I want my previous hard work to be justified. If you drive further to go see a movie, you're more likely to like the movie because otherwise you're gonna have what's called cognitive dissonance, a a something disparity between your current behaviors and your previous actions. So if I drive a really if I expend a lot of effort to go see a movie, it's going to make and that movie's bad. It'll make my previous choices. Expend that effort look wrong. So I'm more psychologically. Um I'm going to more likely rationalize that I like that movie and we could employ this principle in all of our marketing channels. So that mechanic part of our of our psyche typically is in our best interest. This is why we use it. Like it's usually a good thing to be consistent with our previous actions in our previous beliefs. But what we've done is people have become to rely on this automatically even if it's not logically in their best interest. So if we and what do I mean by not logically in their best interest, we can get people to promote our brand, we can get people more likely to buy our product just by asking them a question and having them say something like like yes or agreeing with something. And then even that even if that sense of agreement that they verbalize is not necessarily a rational analysis of whether or not what I'm selling is good for them or better than the competition. We are still going to be able to get them to comply more frequently than if they hadn't said anything in the past. So commitment. What does commitment come into the picture? Commitment is what activates the need to be consistent once you take a stand, once a customer or prospect or leads or a lead goes on record with an opinion or once anybody goes on record with opinion, I as a marketer can exploit your future. Need to remain consistent with your earlier commitments. That's how commitment and consistency play with each other. And just a quick example, researchers posing as canvassers collecting charitable donations in the form of buying cookies for the Hunger Relief Committee. Um, this was an incredible study. The first set of researchers went out to the local houses knocked on the door, person answered and they started the conversation by saying, would you like to buy some cookies for hungry Children as part of this campaign for the Hunger Relief Committee, 18% of people went ahead and bought cookies. But when the researchers in a second group changed the starting question, which was, how are you feeling this evening? Hello, How are you feeling this evening? And the vast majority of people responded, I'm good, I'm feeling great, I'm happy. And then went off to say would you like to buy cookies for the Hunger Relief fund, 89% of people asked bought cookies and this was an incredible, incredible finding, what they saw was the commitment and consistency principle in action. Even though the question, how are you feeling was totally inconsequential. It wasn't even related to the cookies itself. But when a person went on record saying and and claiming their own favorable circumstances, I'm feeling good things are going well for me. The contrast of now not helping out others in need who are in less favorable circumstances became very awkward. It created this psychological tension and furthermore, these were the same types of people. There was no reason to assume that the first set of people that were asked to buy cookies were not feeling good. We're not happy, they just didn't verbalize it. They weren't asked point blank, how are you feeling? And I had to respond to your face. I am feeling very good, I'm happy now. You asked me for a favor. You exploited me. I went on record saying I'm feeling great, You were now able to exploit me by making me very uncomfortable saying no to helping out hungry Children by not buying a box of cookies. So it went from the results went from 18 to 89% by employing this commitment and consistency consistency principle. I I personally, I love this stuff and I want to quickly just read one quick example from a book called influence by robert Ghiraldini. If you guys haven't read this book, I highly highly recommend you reading this book. I'm just gonna read a quick snippet from this this book which illustrates this point beautifully of commitment and consistency. So here goes take as proof what happened when psychologist thomas, moriarty staged thefts on a new york city beach to see if onlookers would risk personal harm to halt the crime In the study, a research accomplice would would put a beach blanket down five ft from the blanket of a randomly chosen individual. The experimental subject. After a couple of minutes on the blanket, spent relaxing and listening to music from a portable radio. The accomplice would stand up and leave the blanket to stroll down the beach. A few minutes later, a second researcher pretending to be a thief would approach grabbed the radio and try to hurry away with it. As you might guess under normal conditions, Subjects were very reluctant to put themselves in harm's way by challenging the thief. Only four people did so in the 20 times that the theft was staged. But when the same procedure was tried another 20 times with a slight twist, the results were drastically different in these incidents. Before taking his stroll the accomplice would simply ask the subject to please watch my things, which each of them agreed to do. Now propelled by the rule for consistency, 19 of the 20 subjects became a virtual vigilantes running after and stopping the thief demanding an explanation and often restraining the thief physically or snatching the radio away 19 out of the 20 once the consistency principle was employed verse four out of the 20 before a single sentence of will you please watch my things for me? Like this is pretty wild stuff like this is not a joke, this stuff works and you could use this in your chat bots and you must use this in your chatbots. So here's a quick example so what you're seeing on the right hand side of the screen is just a an actual chat about that I built um and it's a screenshot of that and says it starts off, hey there Isaac how are you doing today? And I reply I'm feeling great with a smiley face, that's great to hear, I'm feeling pretty good myself. Quick question, how do you feel in general about brands offering discounts and I offer two different choices if you could see that one is I love to save money and one is I hate discounts, people are like unlikely to hit, I hate discount because unless you're really weird who hates discounts and this, you probably have seen these annoying things before and you think oh so stupid, they're not stupid, they're brilliant, they're smart and they work and they're used by the most sophisticated marketers in the world, if I go on record by a saying I'm feeling great, be saying I love to save money and I love discounts. I am much more likely now to use the discount code that you provide me in the next step of the chat. So this is important stuff. You might go ahead and build your body by just throwing out a coupon code to your customers. No mistake, prime them to use it by employing the psychological principles of commitment and consistency. Try and start with a question, prompting the user to confirm something positive, right and feel free to use only one possible answer. This works better than you'd even care to think. So for example, in the chat bot that you're looking here on the right hand side of the screen this little image when I said hi hi there Isaac how are you feeling today? I only offered the answer through the chaplain if I'm feeling great and it works. It really works. Just going on record, we just read two different examples. Two different studies um that were scientific studies that show that this works Confirming preference for discounts will make users 20% more likely to actually use the discount you offer them right? And again, you're seeing that in this example here ask users to rate your product compared to a competitive product, they will be more likely to buy from you when the time comes. So we run campaigns for furniture, client of ours, comparing our furniture to bob's discount furniture. And I've spoken about this example before, but when you do that and you get and you can actually get a customer to say themselves or to click a button that they go on record saying I like this couch or I like this recliner better than the other one from the other competitor. They are now way more likely to actually buy from you when the time comes, Even if that's how they always felt verbalizing it matters, telling it to you, matters a whole lot. Service businesses as well. Can get a user to confirm they've been having a problem. Right? So um for example, a client of ours that runs negotiating seminars, we would ask, what do you think you can benefit by learning how to negotiate better. Don't just start off by telling people we have the best negotiating seminar in the world. Come and check us out. No. Like what's your opinion? Like I want to get you to go on record and say that this is something that would benefit me in my old life. If I could say that and then I offer you a way to do that, you're much more likely to take it out of the desire to avoid psychological tension with current actions and previous actions. It's an incredibly powerful thing and this could be applied to all of your businesses. Um an e commerce company can ask what would make you the most likely to purchase a blank today, Whatever you're selling a bluetooth headset today, is it free shipping? Quality craftsmanship? Would it be a cheaper price through a discount code? Then you could follow up through facebook chatbots with specific chat funnels for each of those replies, confirming and promoting their specific preferences. So if you ask somebody, what's the most important thing um for our products or what, what would make you the most likely to buy our product today? And they say if you offer free shipping and then you could talk about, well, we actually offer free shipping and that is way more powerful of an approach than just promoting the fact that you offer free shipping. The point I'm trying to get across here is when you ask the question, you have to get the user to to plant his feet on the ground, You have to get the user to offer an opinion and when you get the user to offer an opinion, you can as a marketer, you could exploit that quite quite well. So begin thinking about how you're going to use commitment and consistency in your own chatbots. Um, as you can see, I'm very animated about this stuff because I use this all day in in in paid search and email campaigns and chat about campaigns, we use commitment consistency, we use scarcity, likability, social proof reciprocity. We're gonna talk about all these things in the coming lectures, but commitment and consistency are two of my favorite concepts because they're so powerful and they're so easy to implement and they're so subtle um and there's so much fun to see them in action. So I will see you in a couple minutes in the next lecture where we start talking about reciprocity, but in the meantime, seriously start writing down 2 to 3 ideas for a chat bot that you could use and how you would implement these concepts of commitment and when a person makes a commitment, there need to be consistent with that commitment. I hope this was exciting. I look forward to seeing you guys in a couple of seconds in the very next lecture.