Did you know, over 40% of businesses use chatbots for sales purposes and they are capable of handling nearly 70% of the chats from start to finish? Amazing, no?

Chatbots help stimulates human-like conversations with users via chat. There are innumerable advantages and perks of using chatbots for your business such as -

✅24/7 availability for the users

✅Instant response to the site visitors asking queries

✅Improved personalization

✅Robust multi-lingual support

✅Better customer experience

✅Enhanced customer engagement

✅Improved customer relationship management

✅Recovering abandoned shopping carts

And many more!

No wonder chatbots are gaining wide popularity across the globe. To give you a glimpse, 80% of the users have interacted with chatbots for their queries while over 20% of customer service companies are using chatbots.

So, have you ever wondered how to leverage this invention for your business? Or, how to create one? Well, read on, because in this article we will guide you through how to build chatbots! So, let’s start from the basics before we delve deeper.

What Is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is defined as an AI-powered computer program that uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) to stimulate human conversation in a chat. Not only does it help assist the customers with their queries but helps improve the sales funnel by leading them through the right way faster and better.

A chatbot executes routine automated tasks on the basis of specific triggers and algorithms and stimulates human conversation to automate and streamline the whole process. Furthermore, it plays a crucial role in making your website more interactive, reliable, and engaging.

4 Steps to Build a Chatbot

Building a chatbot is not an overnight task. But it can be simpler if you follow the right steps. So, here you go!

1. Decide the Purpose, Features & Appearance

First, you need to decide the purpose of developing your chatbot. You need to have a clear purpose/goal in your mind and develop it accordingly. Answering the following questions will help you with that -

• Why are you developing the chatbot in the first place?

• What are the main goal/goals that you are trying to reach - better customer support, improved lead conversion, enhanced sales funnel, or any other?

• What are the key queries that your chatbot aims to address? Going through the most asked queries by your customers will help you assess this

Based on the above information, list out the top features of your chatbot such as -

• Omnichannel deployment

• Fast and easy customization

• Integration with third-party apps or website

• Interactive flow builder

• Capacity to be trained easily

• High speed and flexibility to answer customer queries

To name a few.

Once you are done with this part, you need to decide its appearance -

• How will its UI, look and feel?

• What will be its name, you can personalize it with human names or generalize it, like can name as relationship manager/customer support executive etc.

• Where the chatbot will appear - your website, social media channels, messaging platforms or in any other place.

• The color, layout, etc.

• Now comes the most crucial question - how are you going to develop the chatbot? There are three options.

  2. Select the Right Mode of Building

  Now comes the most crucial question - how are you going to develop the chatbot? There are three options.

  AI Framework

  If you are good with coding and have experience with working on AI frameworks, then you can build a chatbot in this mode. You can opt for a good chatbot framework like Microsoft Bot, IBM Watson, or Google’s Dialogflow to build your chatbot by coding.

  Chatbot Platforms

  Chatbot platforms help you build a chatbot through the building blocks faster without going through many complex steps like AI frameworks. You can build the features and customize them as per your requirements.

• However, you need to ensure that you are choosing a quality platform as there will be a high dependency on it, even in terms of maintenance, upgrade, support, or integration in the future.

  Outsourcing the Development Process

  You can opt for a third-party development company to build a custom, quality chatbot for your business. All you need to do is choose the right software development company with proven work experience and portfolio in the same field and convey to them the whole idea of the chatbot and you will get it done within the stipulated time.

• See More: How we created a chat bot for our customer support?

  3. Design the Chatbot conversation

In case you are not getting your chatbot developed by any third-party company/team, you need to design the chatbot conversation in a chatbot editor. You just need to follow these steps -

• Open the chatbot editor

• Choose the specific triggers such as conditions like a first-time visit to the site, queries on products, queries on customer orders, and others

• Drag and drop the building blocks to create the respective sequences

• Incorporate the action blocks as needed such as - purchasing our products, taking a free trial, subscribing to newsletters, etc.

  And you are done!

4. Test, Train, and Go!

Before you go live, test your chatbot to ensure that-

• All the triggers are working properly

• The conversation flows are as expected and capable of addressing user queries

• The action blocks are properly placed

• There are no lag/technical glitches

• It can serve its key purposes

• There is provision to easily customize or integrate it with third-party systems

Once you ensure that all these pointers are taken care of and there are no other loopholes, you can make it live. Only if you want your chatbot to be more advanced instead of just following the decision trees, like understanding the customer intent, you need to add NLP triggers to your chatbot and train it accordingly by following this workflow -

Import the Python code libraries → Create the JSON file → process the relevant data to design a neural network model → Build the advanced features and flows

However, this will require extensive knowledge in coding and it is recommended to get it done by expert professionals to ensure the good quality of your chatbot.

The Bottom Line

A chatbot can help you automate and improve the interaction with your leads or potential customers significantly and the above information will help you build one to unleash its potential for your business.

All you need to do is choose the right mode of development. Also, it is recommended to analyze and optimize its performance and upgrade it on a timely basis to ensure it’s not outdated.