As you use your smartphone, PC, or laptop for searching and browsing, you might encounter a window that pops up and ask you if you need something. You may not be aware of them, but in these situations, you are encountering chatbots. Sometimes, you will be amazed by how these chatbots are dealing with all your questions. Maybe, you will think that chatbots can be of great help when you are busy. With that, you probably will think of how to make a chatbot for yourself or how these companies are making chatbots for their businesses.
In this article, we will discuss what Chatbots are, why are they important, and some of the ways on how to make or build chatbots.
How to Build a Chatbot
Identify Your Objectives for Your Chatbot
The first thing you have to work on before building a chatbot is your objectives. You need to be aware of where the chatbot goes and its purpose. Moreover, you need to look after the benefits that you will gain from your chatbot. However, you need to put into consideration that your chatbot needs to be as simple as possible.
Plan
Planning will help you know how you can best apply your chatbot. Proper planning can help you achieve an easier path to your desired outcome. Moreover, the implementation and communication of your goals will be much easier and more streamlined. The processes in building your chatbot will not be difficult along the way. Careful planning can help you or your team to have a smoother path to accomplishing your objective.
Decide a Channel to Feature your Chatbot
Adding a channel will help you to interact and communicate with your customers. These channels can be your website, SMS, mobile or tablet app, e-mail, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Twitter Direct Message, and other messaging apps. Keep in mind that you need to choose a channel where you can capture your market’s attention. As you can opt to use different channels, you should consider choosing a channel that your target clientele always uses. This will give you more opportunity to access a wide range of audiences and gain a lot of customers.
Design an Awesome Chat Conversation
Your need to design a conversation that will build a good impression on customers. You need to get an introduction that will catch your customer’s attention. They should be basic yet straightforward, so the customer won’t feel bored. Moreover, the conversation should be engaging and should focus on your target market.
With that, you can be sure that the conversation that you designed will have a logical flow. Also, you have to make sure that all the questions that your customer will ask will be covered. This way, all the responses that you will make will have a direction. Furthermore, the communication between your bot and the customer will flow smoothly. This will then help you keep your goals until the end.
Choose the Right Platform
There are a lot of available platforms to choose from when building a chatbot. The platform of your choice should have an intelligent chatbot that can understand and constantly learn from the data gathered from every customer interaction.
Choose Apps for Integration
You have an option to integrate your existing apps that contains all the necessary information that may be required by your customers. Moreover, you can also integrate all the information into the chatbot for future reference. However, you have to make sure that the integration will work well with the software that you are currently using.
Train Your Chatbot To Provide the Right Response
You can now start training your chatbot. This will help improve the utterance recognition of your bot. Moreover, it helps to enhance the intelligence of your chatbot. It will be able to prioritize one task over another and will be able to handle interruptions. Additionally, training your bot will help it deliver efficient and accurate answers that will impress your customers.
Test Your Chatbot
After building and training your chatbot, you have to test your chatbot to check if it can converse well. Moreover, you can see if your chatbot can help you, and you will see if you can still improve it through testing. It will help you see if there is something wrong with that chatbot that you built. With that, you can edit every detail and test it again until you meet your desired use case.
Launch Your Chatbot
After thorough testing of your chatbot, it is now time to deploy it to a channel where user engagement is possible. However, you have to make sure that every response can provide customer satisfaction as customers are becoming more and more demanding. With that, you have to monitor how customers are using your chatbot and determine if there is a need for improvement. It should not bring confusion to customers but keep customers happy instead.
Evaluate Your Chatbot Performance and Give It Voice and Personality
After launching your chatbot for a while, you may need to monitor it and evaluate its performance. Moreover, you have to know if it will be a big plus for your goals. If you want to gain popularity, you can add voice and personality to your chatbot. Giving it a name or adding an avatar that complements your brand will help attract customers. This will encourage them to interact with your chatbot since it can help convey and market your brand.
You can always experiment with your bot. You can do minor or major adjustments depending on your preferences to create your ideal chatbot. Moreover, you can evaluate your chatbot over and over until you are satisfied with it to achieve peace of mind.
Chatbot Builders That You Can Use
MobileMonkey
This chatbot builder lets you create a Facebook Messenger chatbot. It is one of the most popular chatbot building platforms available today. Everyone can use this for marketing since there’s no need for coding experience to create a bot. Moreover, it creates an ideal marketing place between businesses and their customers.
ChatterOn
This is the simplest and one of the faster chatbot builders available today. Creating your very own chatbot will only take as low as five minutes because it already provides more than 20 pre-built chatbots that you can choose from. Moreover, it lets you be creative enough in the creation of your chatbot. It provides a wide range of rich content including videos, GIFs, photos, buttons, and other elements that you can use to customize your chatbot.
Chatfuel
This chatbot builder aims to help a non-skilled developer to create his chatbot on Facebook Messenger. You can personalize your chatbot to recognize commonly used words and phrases and send appropriate responses to the user. It seamlessly integrates with YouTube, Twitter, Messenger, and many others, and the content cards that it adds can be shared automatically with your followers.
PandoraBots
This is one of the oldest chatbot builders in the market. Being the best chatbot with a human-like conversation, it allows its users to create anything that they want by providing a wide range of flexibility. Even though this builder is not for beginners since it requires some programming knowledge, it sure offers a variety of services and tools for creating, launching, and developing a useful chatbot.
Botsify
This is a simple chatbot builder for websites or Facebook Messenger. You just have to drag and drop templates to be able to create chatbots. Moreover, it provides an amazing feature of Easy Integration. You can freely integrate it with Shopify, Alexa, and WordPress. Also, it offers the capability for human staff to acquire or take over the conversation to continue the chatting. You can even customize it to be able to answer some questions, which it failed to answer. It can easily pick up new words and understand queries fast.
How to Make a Facebook Chatbot
You will need a chatbot builder to be able to make a Facebook chatbot. In this guide, we will be using Chatfuel as our chatbot builder.
Building the Chatbot
- Before creating a chatbot with Chatfuel, you need to set up a Chatfuel account first. After that, log in to your Facebook account, and then click the + sign so you can start a new chatbot.
- You’ll have the option to start by copying a template or starting from scratch. Name your chatbot by typing it on the text box.
- Click on the red Create a chatbot button to start creating it. You will then be led to another page.
- Then, press the Connect to Facebook feature and connect it to your page.
- You can either choose your existing Facebook business page or create a new fan page where you intend to install your chatbot.
- After that, click Build to be able to start building your Facebook chatbot. You can find it at the sidebar menu in Chatfuel. There will be a welcoming message on a text card, a default message that the user will see after clicking or tapping the Messenger button from your page.
- You have an option to keep the text card or add another image card.
Inputting Tasks
- Input the features of the card that you have selected. Moreover, you can add buttons to the card. The users will then click those buttons. The buttons can lead them to other options like going or visiting another website, make a phone call, or open a new block.
- There is a default answer, and it is the block that you will see in the Main Menu button when you start. However, you can change the message. It is the first response that will appear when the user starts to ask something.
- You can always add more buttons under this card. You can create additional blocks that contain the information if the users are asking for questions that are commonly asked.
- Click on the + Adblock button to create a new block.
- A new window will pop up upon clicking the button. On that window, you can create new cards and buttons that will serve as a guide to the users for new options.
- After finishing your chatbot and if you are satisfied with it, you can now click Test This Chatbot so you can save the changes.
- Click View on Messenger to test our chatbot.
- Ask some people to test your chatbot using a desktop, smartphone, or tablet. If something goes wrong, and you don’t have any idea of what to do, you can always click on the “Help” icon for further assistance.
What is a Chatbot?
Chatbots are very popular tools in today’s world. They serve as conversational virtual assistants. It is a software application that simulates and processes human conversation that can be done through chat or voice. Chatbots are of great help not only to every business but also to consumers and different industries. Through these chatbots, users can interact with digital services as though they are communicating with a real person. They are capable of multitasking as they can make hotel reservations, place food orders, and book airline tickets. To make it simple, chatbots are capable of atomizing specific tasks.
As virtual assistants, chatbots are somewhat better than human representatives in performing some tasks. Aside from multitasking, they can serve a lot of consumers simultaneously. Moreover, it is easier for them to respond to users to meet their expectations as they use natural language processing technology and artificial intelligence. They can easily understand the needs of the people as they gather and process information. With that, they are becoming much better compared to what they are built for. The responses that they provide are based on predefined scripts. However, they can still provide relevant and personalized answers to every single user.
Chatbots make it easier for us to connect and interact with everyone. They offer information and services that can provide help to a lot of people. These interactions are possible through messaging apps, mobile apps, and websites as Chatbots are widely used and are becoming in-demand nowadays.
Chatbot Benefits
Reduce Customer Waiting Time
Chatbots are a great way to ensure that the customers will not take much of their time waiting for a response. Since the customers are the lifeblood of every business, their satisfaction should always be the first item on the list of any business.
Better Customer Engagement
Chatbots respond to every message that a customer asks. With that, they can maintain customer interaction by providing relevant information. Also, they can keep the customers engaged by continuously answering questions and offering recommendations that may boost customers’ interest.
Accessible Anytime, Anywhere
Chatbots are available anytime, anywhere. If the customer wants to have modifications to their order or they want some clarifications, they can do it anywhere and anytime they wish. Moreover, they can extend customer service in different languages.
Can Handle Several Customers Simultaneously
A human representative can only converse with one customer at a time. For chatbots, they can interact with several customers simultaneously, even if they all have different queries.
Cost-Effective
Employees are used to changing shifts, either through various roles or schedules. With that, there will be variations on how they will deal with the consumers. Also, a business will need to hire many employees to deal with the customers since a lot of employees are needed to deal with a lot of consumers. Chatbots are available 24/7 without a need to pay for overtime work or night differentials.
Gaining Insights
As chatbots are used to collect information from the customers, they can use this information to improve the quality of service. Moreover, this information will be helpful for the development of brands.
Why Get a Chatbot?
Not only is having chatbots cost-effective, but they also help boost efficiency as far as customer service is concerned. They can keep customer engagement and give recommendations, which are essential for businesses’ marketing. As chatbots can be customized and can acquire knowledge, businesses can use every information acquired by the chatbot to help in the development of the product.
Moreover, chatbots can provide a continuous flow of conversation with an unlimited number of customers. It will be much easier for businesses to work on a better approach to satisfy the demands of not only the customers but the business as well.
Create Your Own Chatbot Today!
While we, humans, can multitask, the tasks we juggle aren’t always done well. Chatbots change the way businesses provide customer service. These chatbots enhance the capabilities of humans and help them to be more creative. Also, as chatbots are doing most of the employees’ jobs concerning customer service, the human representative will be able to spend their time thinking about what they can do to improve the business.
Chatbots are of great help not only to businesses but also to consumers. For consumers, there’s no need to wait in line for some information. With one click, they can get the information that they need. Aside from that, they can get recommendations that can sometimes help them. Making a chatbot, even for a small business, will provide a great advantage.
As it can provide extensive customer service, customers who are dealt with well will always become a return customer and provide continuous business. With that, making a chatbot is a win/win situation for both the businesses and customers.
