Guide: Build a Simple Chatbot: Talk to your Machine!

Vikas Agarwal

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

The use of chatbots is enhancing the way people interact with both technology as well as other channels. Chatbots are convenient and easy-to-use tool to assist users with service provision, customer service, or entertainment.

In this guide, we are going to create a simple chatbot- an application that you can easily develop on your own and comes in handy to manage common issues. In the end, you will be successful in making a chatbot that can be used to communicate and open opportunities for personal and professional use.

Understanding Chatbots

Chatbots are smart programs that are artificially intelligent, mimic human conversations, and can respond to clients via messages or voice. Depending on their concept, they are either script-driven or based on a set of keywords.

Nowadays, there is increasing interest in adopting chatbots for customer support purposes, scheduling meetings, and other related services as they provide instant replies and work all the time.

Chatbots assist businesses in improving efficiency, increasing customer satisfaction, and collecting insights on consumers’ attitudes and tendencies. All these areas of chatbot development show an increase in their functionality, mainly because of artificial intelligence integration, which enables chatbots to perform various tasks and support clients at a higher level. This evolution automates the handling of contextual minutiae and allows for more accurate and appropriate responses from chatbots, which in turn makes them an effective tool in many uses.

Importance of Building a Chatbot

Chatbot development is extremely helpful in increasing user interaction as it allows for quick responses and individualized attention and response. This distinguishes the service from the product and at the same time increases customer satisfaction and reduces the employer’s work as services do not require long-term interaction with the customer but imply immediate and convenient communication.

Chatbots are available 24*7 and provide customers with equal and similar information to personal support. This means that the users will always have ways that they can get help when they want to, and this will imply that they can rely on your services with much ease and confidence.

Last but not least, chatbots can collect significant data about the preferences and habits of the users. Some of this data can be used to monitor and analyze the services an application provides to understand if they are helping the customer by giving them better services.

How to Make a Chatbot in Simple Steps?

Follow the below steps to make a chatbot in a simple & quick way:

Set a purpose for your chatbot

Without a purpose, you can’t head anywhere so firstly, you need to be clear about the purpose of your chatbot. Be as specific as you can be.

You can ask yourself some of these questions for more clarity:

What is the reason for building the chatbot? Whether it is for customer support, lead generation, or all of them.
What are the use cases of the bot? Outline some examples for understanding
What is the main feature of your chatbot?

Decide where you would like it to appear

Which is your primary method of contact? Do people contact you through social media or live chat widgets on your website?

In any case, make sure your preferred chatbot platform works with the tools you already have so you can meet your clients where they are.

Your website. The bulk of chatbot creation platforms integrate with prominent website providers like WordPress, Magento, and Shopify.
Social media channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, or Telegram.
Other chat systems and technologies in your stack (including Slack).
Alternatively, see whether you can configure the integration manually using a code snippet or an available API.

Choose the chatbot platform

Now that you’ve determined which chatbot versions to construct and which channels to cover, it’s time to select a provider.

The platform or the framework will be your two choices.

AI Framework: The Chatbot frameworks like Dialog flow, IBM, Watson, or Microsoft Bot act as libraries for software developers who then build the chatbots by coding.
Chatbot platforms: These platforms provide simple chatbot builders that help to create a chatbot with building blocks. They are gaining popularity since constructing bots with their assistance is a lot easier and less time-consuming, while producing equivalent results. Not to mention that other platforms, such as Tidio, offer forever-free programs!

After you select the provider, you need to register, log in, and get to work.

Using a chatbot editor, create the dialogue for the chatbot.

You can design the conversation flow by dragging & dropping building blocks so that they create a sequence. Assume you want to provide a product discount to visitors who visit a specific landing page of your yoga accessories shop and provide their email addresses in exchange.

Log in and visit the bot builder to get started. Begin with the trigger – a condition that makes the chatbot signal a welcome message. If you want the chatbot to be visible on a particular landing page, begin with a Visitor opening a specific page node.

Next, enter the message you wish to deliver and include a decision node that offers prompt responses. Decide which people will receive a discount on your product and send them messages.

Time to test your chatbot

Now is the time to make sure everything is working as it should. To do that, click the “Test it out” option. A window displaying the chatbot’s potential user interface will appear to you. Because of the preview, you can always go back to the editor and correct the flow.

Train your chatbots

You can skip this step if you wish to use basic chatbots that are based on decision tree flows. You must include an NLP trigger in your chatbot if you want it to comprehend the user’s intent.

You must analyze your customer conversations and find the most popular queries and frequent problems. You can do it manually or use the word cloud generator for the same. Next, populate the Visitor Says node with the terms, expressions, and inquiries pertaining to a selected topic (such as shipping).

Collect feedback from users

Your visitors and customers are in the perfect place to rate your chatbot. You can even send an automatic survey asking their customers if they are satisfied with the interaction made with the chatbot.

By the results, you can see where you are best and where you can still improve.

Monitor chatbot analytics to improve it

This will enable you to identify the kinds of chatbots that don’t offer a good customer experience.

Characteristics of a Great Chatbot

Omni-Capable

The chatbot communicates fluidly across numerous digital channels and preserves data and context to provide a consistent experience – in the best circumstances, even sending that information to a human agent if necessary.

Pre-trained

A great chatbot is one that is pre-trained to understand brand-specific or industry-specific knowledge & terms. One step further, it is pre-configured to resolve some of the most common customer requests of a particular industry.

Everyone can now use AI, and while businesses may recognize how AI can benefit their operations, they frequently find it difficult to prioritize initial investment and create a plan of action for integrating AI capabilities into workflows and processes.

Free to explore

In order to quickly obtain pertinent information to address client issues, the chatbot can access, ingest, and process enormous amounts of data, both organized and unstructured. This allows it to surface insights from almost any source.

Autonomous Reasoning

A good chatbot is one that can do all the complex reasoning without the need for human intervention. A top-notch chatbot should be able to deduce solutions, for instance, by looking through pertinent case histories.

Emotionally Intelligent

In order to provide a tailored experience and refer users to a live agent when needed, the chatbot can deduce personality features from the consumer and comprehend mood and tone during an encounter.

Conversational Maturity

Apart from understanding and interacting conversationally, a good chatbot is one that has specific Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to understand the entire context of the conversation in various languages.

Additionally, it can determine the purpose of a question and what is required to give a precise initial response. It can also suggest alternatives to validate or elucidate the purpose. Superior chatbots possess sophisticated conversational functionalities. Even in nonlinear conversations, they can actively seek information and pose clarifying questions.

Integrates with CRM

In the current times, it is very important for a chatbot to integrate with CRM. It can manage simple real-time actions like changing a password all the way up to intricate multistep workflows involving numerous programs.

Conclusion

Lastly, it is evident that the procedure of implementing a chatbot can significantly improve customer relations and organizational efficiency. Following this approach of clearly defining the purpose and objectives of the chatbot, selecting the proper platform to develop it on, and designing the conversational lifecycle, one would be able to engineer an efficient and functional chatbot to meet their needs.

The crucial factor for chatbot effectiveness is the availability of fast and accurate functioning, continuous real-time operations, and adaptation to the emotional features of communicating channels. Mainly, it is essential to emphasize that to ensure high efficiency and effectiveness of its work, there is a need for constant practice, training, and multiple improvements based on users’ message analysis and feedback. When organized, these elements provide the potential for greater utilization of the chatbot in personal and professional areas.

Vikas Agarwal

Vikas Agarwal is the Founder of GrowExx, a Digital Product Development Company specializing in Product Engineering, Data Engineering, Business Intelligence, Web and Mobile Applications. His expertise lies in Technology Innovation, Product Management, Building & nurturing strong and self-managed high-performing Agile teams.

Guide: Build a Simple Chatbot: Talk to your Machine!