Curious about how you can create your own chatbot? We’re diving into the how and the why in this article!
Why should you build a chatbot for your business?
Building and deploying an AI-powered chatbot for your business brings a lot of benefits to the table. Here are a few of them:
Without an intelligent chatbot, all you have is a team of customer support agents who work on fixed schedules. Anyone who wants to get in touch with you outside of your working hours would have to wait for hours before their questions are answered and their issues are resolved.
But that would be a nightmare for someone who needs an issue resolved with great urgency. Such a situation would be reason enough for them to stop doing business with you. An AI-powered chatbot could answer the majority of these questions instantly, rather than making your customers deal with the ordeal of waiting for hours before getting a reply.
Chatbots can reduce your customer support costs and overheads dramatically. They reduce the need for calls and could even reduce the duration of the calls by performing an initial screening. Studies have even shown that deploying an AI-powered chatbot can reduce your customer support costs by 30%, automating a lot of the tasks that would otherwise need to be manually performed by your team.
Chatbots from Engati empower you to smash through the language barrier and be globally local. How? Because they’re multilingual - your chatbot can engage your customers in 50+ languages. This allows you to localize your conversations at scale without needing to hire more agents.
Quicker responses and conversations in the language your customers prefer using - damn right you’re going to create a great customer experience. But it doesn’t stop there - you can turn this great experience into a phenomenal one by going deploying your chatbot on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and 10+ other channels so that your customers can reach you on whichever channel they prefer.
Thought we were done yet? Nope, we’re taking this phenomenal experience and making it mindblowing by making it omnichannel - stitching the conversations across all your channels together so that your bot and your agents always have context and your customers can continue conversations while they hop across channels.
Big, clunky forms are super intimidating… nobody wants to fill them, they just seem like they’d take too much effort to fill. Lead gen chatbots are far more effective because the next question only shows up after they reply to the first one.
54% of online shoppers abandon their purchases because they couldn’t find instant answers to questions that they had about the product that they were evaluating. An intelligent chatbot helps you answer their questions immediately, thus sending your conversion rate through the roof.
And if you deploy your bot on a Shopify store, you can use conversion triggers to tempt your customers with discounts and promotional offers when they land on a product page, spend a certain amount of time on it, scroll through it, are about to exit it, or even when they add or remove a product from their carts.
All these benefits got you wondering how to make an AI chatbot already? We’re walking you through that right now!
How to create your own chatbot?
So, you want to create a chatbot? You’ve got two options before you:
Using Engati's chatbot building platform to build your chatbot has another major advantage - you get to build your chatbot just once and have it interact with your customers in 50+ languages.
So, let’s get started with building your first chatbot on Engati?
After you register with Engati or log in to your account, you’ll be prompted to ‘Create your first bot’. That’s going to take you to a modal box that you can use to name your chatbot.
Now sure, you could just fill your brand name in there and you’d be good, but you could make it so much better. You could add a little spice by using a name that makes your chatbot come alive and embody your brand personality. That way it does seem like your customers are talking to a bot, it makes them feel like they are interacting with your brand’s mascot.
Picked a fun name? Great, now on to the next step.
We decided to make it as easy as possible for you to build your AI-powered chatbots and start engaging your customers. So we figured, ‘why not give you guys a shortcut?’. So that’s exactly what we did.
We’ve created multiple chatbot templates with pre-defined user journeys that you can tweak and customize to suit your brand’s needs. The whole idea is that you don’t need to start building a chatbot from scratch unless you’ve got a rather unique usecase in mind. In addition to your basic customer service chatbots, we’ve also got templates for every usecase from eCommerce to HR.
So, pick a template that works for you or, if you’d like to build your bot from scratch, select ‘Blank Bot Canvas’ and click on ‘Create Bot’.
After doing that, you’ll reach the Bot Overview page. That page is going to walk you through the three steps that you have to go through before your bot is live and can interact with your customers or employees.
These steps are:
- Building conversational flows: This is all about setting up user journeys for your customers and employees in the bot.
- Training the bot: This step involves training your bot to answer questions that you expect from your users.
- Deploying the bot: Here’s where you deploy your bot across 15+ channels for your customers and other stakeholders to interact with it.
Building conversation flows on your chatbot
While building your chatbot’s conversation flows, you need to figure out who your users will be and what purpose will they be interacting with your chatbot for.
You also need to define what you want to achieve with your chatbot. You could have a bot that serves multiple purposes, but it won’t work out unless you define them. You need to have it planned out, just winging it might not be the best idea for you.
Now, once you have that figured out, you’d want to make a rough flow chart that helps you define how you’d like the conversations to go. You don’t need to fill in the responses just yet, just write down the purpose that you’d want the message to serve.
After that, you can get into Engati’s no-code conversation flow builder (you’ll reach there when you press ‘Build Paths’ on the Bot Overview page).
This lets you build conversation flows for various scenarios in different paths and connect these paths to each other via the Trigger Path node.
There are four types of nodes that you can use while building your conversation flows:
These are used to share information with your users. Some nodes that come under this category are:
You can use these notes to gather data from your users. Some of these nodes are:
These nodes are used to process information and make decisions regarding conversation flow branching. Some of these nodes include:
These nodes allow you to integrate your artificial intelligence chatbot with third-party systems, making it possible for your chatbot to play well with your other support, marketing, and sales software.
Tip: If you want to understand flows better and get a detailed explanation of the nodes listed above, check out our article on building chatbot flows.
Training your chatbot
There are three methods that you can use to train your chatbot.
If you have very specific questions coming in from your customers, you can upload your frequently asked questions individually. You can also categorize relevant FAQs together and tag entities within an FAQ if a group of values leads to the same answer rather than setting up individual FAQs for every variable.
If you have a whole lot of questions that come in across multiple categories, you could upload your FAQs in bulk at one time. All you’d have to do is compile your FAQs in a formatted CSV file and upload it to train your chatbot.
This part is where we take things from good to awesome. We’ve made the chatbot training process so easy that you don’t even have to list out your FAQs and upload them. All you have to do is upload a document that contains answers to the questions that your customers might ask.
This document does not even need to be structured in the question and answer format. It could just be a document from your knowledge base or it could be a document detailing your policies. When you upload the document, your bot will be able to directly pull answers to user queries from it.
When a user asks your bot a question, the chatbot can use the DocuSense feature to parse through your document at a speed of 12 pages every 8 seconds, pull answers from it and deliver them to the user in real time. It could even send the document to your chatbot users, highlighting the section from which the answer was pulled.
Deploying your chatbot
Engati allows you to deploy your chatbot on 14+ channels including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Telegram, making it possible for you to create a truly omnichannel experience for your customers. If you deploy your bot on your website, you can even have a custom background, style, and font for your chatbot, along with a custom chatbot avatar to use as the icon.
How to make a chatbot for your website?
Now that you’ve seen how to create an AI chatbot, we’re going to show you how you can deploy it on your website.
We’ve made it really easy for you to do that. You can access web deployment by clicking on the ‘Edit Settings’ button under Configure, then go to Deployment and open up Website Chatbot.
You could either use the chatbot as a direct link, or as a widget on your website.
To use the chatbot as a widget, you’d just have to include a simple javascript within your Webpage HTML. You can find the script under Script in the Website Chatbot section. You can even choose whether you want to position the widget on the bottom left or the bottom right of your website.
5 tips for building your own chatbot
You can’t just randomly decide to build a chatbot for a specific use case without knowing what your customers actually need. Your aim with building a chatbot is to create a better experience for your customers. That involves actually understanding the problems that your customers are facing and what they need.
Carry out a survey, conduct market research, construct a user persona. Figure out their pain points and what they would expect to be able to do with your chatbot. This information will guide you in the chatbot-building process.
Should your users know that they’re chatting with a bot? Yes. Should that bot sound robotic? Absolutely not!
Even when they know that they’re talking to a chatbot, your customers still want to feel like they’re having a conversation with a human. Make sure that your flows don’t sound robotic. You don’t want your customers to get bored and even frustrated while chatting with your bot.
You could consider this to be an extension of the previous tip. Make your bot come alive by giving it a personality. Better yet, let your brand’s personality shine through your chatbot.
If your brand positions itself as a rebel, let that show in your bot conversations as well. If your social media is full of quirky content, it just wouldn’t feel right if your chatbot sounded dull.
Look at your analytics dashboard to see how your users are interacting with your chatbot. See what kinds of questions your users are asking and what percentage of them your chatbot is able to answer. This will help you identify gaps and understand what questions you should train your chatbot for.
The analytics will even show you which channels your users interact with your chatbot over. This allows you to provide a better experience on these channels. If you want even deeper insights about user behavior on your chatbot, integrate your Engati chatbot with Google Analytics.
Your chatbots use artificial intelligence and machine learning to answer around 80% of your customers’ questions on their own, without human assistance. But there are some complex and situational questions that they can’t handle on their own.
That’s where live chat comes in. Your agents can take care of these complicated questions while your chatbot deals with the easier, repetitive ones. This ensures that your customers get quick answers to all their questions, no matter how complicated these questions are.
The other advantage to using chatbots and live chat together is that your agents get to focus on resolving complex questions without hurrying them along to keep up with the flood of repetitive queries that keeps flowing through. This means that your agents will be able to tackle these issues in-depth, offering your customers more effective solutions.
FAQs
Yes, it’s rather easy to build an intelligent chatbot, especially when you use Engati’s low-to-no code, visual drag and drop chatbot flow builder. We’ve made your work as a bot builder even easier by creating a library of chatbot templates for a range of use cases that you can customize and expand upon.
Chatbots use intents and entities with natural language processing (NLP) to understand the meaning of a user’s text messages and voice commands.
These bots use natural language understanding (NLU) to understand the user’s message and natural language generation to frame an appropriate response.
A chatbot can learn through machine learning and will also learn through the FAQs and documents you can notarize documents with an online notary, become an online notary and notarize all your documents that you train it on. You can look at your chatbot’s analytics to identify questions that your users keep asking but your chatbot is not able to answer. Now you can train the bot for that question so that it will be able to answer it in the future.
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