10 steps to create chatbots for website
There are two ways of building a chatbot for your website. You can either build it from scratch or by using different chatbot templates.
To build a chatbot from scratch, follow these steps:
#1. Define your goals
Before building a chatbot for your website, you must set clear goals and understand what you want to achieve. Identify the tasks you want the chatbot to automate and know what it can and cannot do.
Here are some reasons why you might need a chatbot for your business:
Driving sales and collecting leads: The chatbot can help with booking appointments, scheduling demos, and capturing sign-ups, which can boost sales and gather potential customer information.
Enhancing your online presence: The chatbot can engage customers 24/7 when your support team is busy, which will ensure a strong online presence.
Automating customer support: By using FAQs, the chatbot can handle simple queries and transfer complex ones to live agents, providing efficient customer support.
Collecting customer feedback: The chatbot can gather feedback to improve customer satisfaction and enhance the overall experience.
By defining your goals and understanding the chatbot's capabilities, you can effectively leverage it for your business.
#2. Customize your bot profile
Customizing your bot's profile is important because it makes the bot seem more like a human and creates a friendly experience for users. When you customize the bot's personality and tone, you understand better what you want to accomplish. By choosing the right language, tone, and style, the bot can communicate with users in a way that feels more natural and easy to understand.
To customize your bot's profile:
- Log in to your bot dashboard.
- Go to the "Bot Builder" or a similar section.
- Create a new bot or edit the existing one.
Here are a few things you can customize:
- Bot name: Give your bot an internal name, such as "Sales Bot" or "Customer Service Bot.”
- Display name: Choose a name that matches the bot's personality, such as "Zara" or "Adam.”
- Tagline: Set a short description or designation for the bot.
- Avatar: Personalize the bot by selecting an avatar from a gallery or uploading a custom image.
- Omnichannel: Decide where the bot will be available, such as your website or social media.
- Bot accuracy levels: Adjust how accurately the bot matches queries.
- Priority: Determine the order of communication between the bot and human agents.
Customizing these aspects can make your bot more tailored to your business and provide a better user experience.
#3. Choose the triggers for your chatbot
Chatbots can start conversations based on triggers you set. You decide when the bot chats with customers.
There are different triggers you can choose from:
- All visitors: The bot talks to everyone who visits your website.
- New visitors: The bot chats with people who are visiting your website for the first time. It welcomes them and asks how it can help.
- Returning visitors: The bot recognizes people who have been to your website before. It greets them and offers assistance.
#4. Build your bot flow
Creating a conversational flow helps you organize your chatbot's responses clearly and effectively. Nodes represent different parts of the conversation, like greetings or product information. Actions are the specific interactions the chatbot can have with users, such as displaying text, images, or videos. You can customize the flow based on your business needs and test it before launching it on your website.
#5. Create intent sample
You should create an intent sample to help your chatbot understand why users send messages. In chatbots, intents refer to the user's purpose or intention.
Every message the chatbot receives has a specific intention behind it. By creating an intent sample, you provide the bot with examples tcovering different reasonscustomers reach out. This allows the chatbot to use AI trends and machine learning to recognize user intent accurately.
Here's how to create an intent sample:
- Create new sections: Add new sections to your chatbot to create the intent sample.
- Enter example queries: Write down example queries that have the same meaning and represent various intentions of the customers.
- Build a list: After entering the example queries, a list will pop up. The chatbot uses this list to handle customer conversations effectively and understand their intentions better.
#6. Develop the bot’s sentiment analysis feature
Sentiment analysis is a chatbot feature that helps understand customer emotions from text or voice data. It analyzes thoughts, opinions, and sentiments, enabling the bot to adapt its responses through algorithms accordingly.
Here's how to use the chatbot sentiment analysis feature:
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Configure your chatbot to recognize and respond to offensive or negative words and emojis.
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Add a range of offensive words and emojis for the bot to identify user sentiments during conversations. If needed, the bot can transfer the conversation to a human agent.
By leveraging sentiment analysis, chatbots can better analyze and respond to customer emotions, and follow up, enhancing the overall user experience.
#7. Configure a synonym for your bot
To help your chatbot understand different variations of text and respond better to users, you can use a feature called "synonym."
When you configure synonyms in the bot builder, you're essentially creating a chatbot design that can understand user queries more effectively. This helps the bot match the queries with the relevant knowledge base, leading to improved responses.
#8. Define the fallback scenario
Bots can't always understand human queries perfectly. There will be times when your bot fails to give a proper response.
To handle these situations, you need to prepare your bot for cases where it can't understand the user's input. This is where defining fallback scenarios comes in.
Fallback interaction is a default response that appears when the bot doesn't understand the user's message.
Here's how to define the fallback scenario:
- Fallback message: Customize a message for when the bot can't understand user requests.
- Triggering fallback: Set the number of unknown queries that trigger the fallback option.
- Repeated queries: Define how many times the same query will be repeated before triggering the fallback.
- Fallback options: Choose whether the bot should show a fallback message or connect with a human agent.
By defining fallback scenarios, you help your bot handle situations where it struggles to understand, improving the user experience.
#9. Add FAQs
To make sure your bot knows about your business, products, and services, you should create FAQs and train the bot to give accurate responses based on user intent.
Here's how to create FAQs for your bot:
- Enter your question: Write down the question and include different possible answers to help the bot understand different scenarios.
- Enter the response: Provide the right answer for each question or user intention. It can be a simple text message or a specific action within the bot builder.
#10. Train your bot
To make sure your bot handles queries well, you need to train it to communicate effectively with users. Export the training data, make any necessary changes, and import it back to improve the bot's performance.
Congratulations on creating your website's chatbot! You can easily access and manage it whenever you want.