What is a website chatbot?

Your website is the face of your business. Consumers no longer visit a store to see products or order services; they visit websites to take action. People want to make educated purchases, get updates on their orders, and get easy, fast solutions to their issues. However, building a support team to handle this surge in customer engagement is difficult and expensive.

Enter chatbots. A chatbot for website is a chatbot that is specifically designed to engage with your webpage visitors. These chatbots can be easily deployed on your website to engage with customers and offer support 24/7. 

Businesses have realized that websites are no longer a one-way communication channel. Before chatbots, conversion rates on websites were as low as 2%. Once early adopters deployed chatbots, they saw conversion rates rise exponentially as the conversational chatbots made their websites more engaging. 

There are two different types of chatbots you can deploy on your website. One is a simple,  rule-based or answer bot which can handle common and frequently asked questions. However, the second kind - those AI-powered chatbots can offer conversational engagement, proactively reach out to visitors, guide them to a purchase decision, understand user intent, and offer precise resolutions.

How to add a chatbot to your website

Select a chatbot that works best for your business

There are two types of chatbots you can choose from - rule-based bots and AI chatbots. Rule-based bots are best for multiple-choice questions and information collection. In contrast, AI chatbots are best for real-time automated conversations based on the customer’s intent. You can choose to use a hybrid chatbot that combines the capabilities of rules-based bots and AI chatbots. 

Note: If you have built your own chatbot, you can connect it with a full-fledged live chat software solution to expand its capabilities, and use conversational APIs to enable agent-facing features.
 

Design conversations that deliver results

Set a goal for your chatbots and identify the best method to reach it. Your bots can simply answer frequently asked questions or undertake complex workflows and conversation flows that cater to your business processes. Either way, create chatbot templates that offer comprehensive solutions and the highest level of customer experience. To ensure success in the chatbot development process, understand how your visitors use your website - focus on the user experience, and you'll spend less time tinkering with your bot later.
 

Test and publish your chatbot

Once you’re done setting it up, don’t forget to test your chatbot conversations, both from a technical perspective and a user experience perspective. Once that’s done, you can take your chatbot live. 

The best AI chatbots can also be trained through Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems to understand a customer’s intent, identify gaps in their workflows and if necessary, either request more information or transfer to a human agent. Come back to your chatbot regularly and fix the nooks and crannies that you might have missed out on.

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:

Here are a few things you can customize:

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:

#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:

#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:

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:

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:

#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.

Benefits of adding a chatbot to your website

Increase Engagement Rates

50% of website visitors are likely to engage after receiving just one response via chat. For your team to manually respond to every visitor is time-intensive, requires high effort, and often creates a bottleneck of unanswered conversations. Chatbots remove this bottleneck entirely by auto-responding to every user who reaches out through chat and guiding them closer to a purchase decision. 

Reduce repetitive questions

The majority of queries that come in on your website are most likely to be repetitive questions. For example, if you run a store, the most common question you could get is, ‘what are the timings of your store?’. If you are a medical practitioner, you are likely to get questions about scheduling appointments. With the help of a chatbot on your website, you can transfer the responsibility of answering routine questions to your bot. 

Improve core messaging

Chatbots can also gather data from their interactions with website visitors, which you can use to improve your messaging strategy. For instance, if you want to offer a discount specifically to high-quality leads, the chatbot can collect information such as time spent on the conversation, page navigations, conversation history, or other lead-scoring criteria to qualify the lead. Based on this information, you can decide whether the lead is qualified for the discount, and even set up automatic triggers to offer the discount to qualified leads, with zero manual effort. 

Maximize on localized interactions

A study records that nearly 75% of customers preferred making purchases in their non-English, native language sites, indicating that your global audiences will be more responsive if you can interact in more than one language. Chatbots can be created to automatically recognize and respond in common international languages.

How to add a chatbot to your website

Select a chatbot that works best for your business

There are two types of chatbots you can choose from - rule-based bots and AI chatbots. Rule-based bots are best for multiple-choice questions and information collection. In contrast, AI chatbots are best for real-time automated conversations based on the customer’s intent. You can choose to use a hybrid chatbot that combines the capabilities of rules-based bots and AI chatbots. 

Note: If you have built your own chatbot, you can connect it with a full-fledged live chat software solution to expand its capabilities, and use conversational APIs to enable agent-facing features.

Design conversations that deliver results

Set a goal for your chatbots and identify the best method to reach it. Your bots can simply answer frequently asked questions or undertake complex workflows that cater to your business processes. Either way, create chatbot templates that offer comprehensive solutions and the highest level of customer experience. To ensure success in the chatbot development process, understand how your visitors use your website - focus on the user experience, and you'll spend less time tinkering with your bot later.

Test and publish your chatbot

Once you’re done setting it up, don’t forget to test your chatbot conversations, both from a technical perspective, and a user experience perspective. Once that’s done, you can take your chatbot live. 

The best AI chatbots can also be trained through Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing systems to understand a customer’s intent, identify gaps in their workflows and if necessary, either request more information or transfer to a human agent, or .
Come back to your chatbot regularly and fix the nooks and crannies that you might have missed out on.

What are the different functions of AI chatbots for websites?

Chatbots offer a plethora of creative solutions. No matter which customer-facing team is looking to automate a process, there is a chatbot use-case for them. Sales teams can use chatbots for lead generation, Marketers can use chatbots on landing pages, and support teams can alleviate the load of high volume tickets. Here are some chatbot examples that you can implement right away.

Support Experience Engagement
Upgrade Subscription Book an appointment Promote content offers
Makes changes to orders Convert visitors to sign-ups Collect feedback
Offer intent-based transfer Nurture visitors Drive website registrations
Cancel orders Onboard new visitors Collect memership information
Converse outside business hours Nudge customers for repurchase Proactively communicate offers
Track packages Open an account
Answer payment queries Reduce cart abandonment
Respond to queries and grievances Upsell to users

Different use cases of website chatbots 

Take a look at how website chatbots work

book meeting book meeting
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Schedule meetings with one click
Chatbot for website Chatbot for website
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Collect customer information 
course inquiry course inquiry
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Find answers to common queries 
get user feedback get user feedback
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Collect feedback and satisfaction scores
reduce cart abandonment reduce cart abandonment
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Execute customized workflows 
queires and grievence queires and grievence
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Answer user-specific queries 

Why do you need a website bot?

Website chatbots are interactive interfaces that engage with users who visit a website or application. Instead of interacting with a live person, chatbot software can handle online conversations. Businesses use them in messaging apps to engage with visitors. They simulate human-like conversations and can communicate through text or speech.

A website chatbot is essential for your business for several reasons. Here's why you should consider using one:

By implementing a website chatbot, you can enhance customer satisfaction, boost conversions, and gain valuable insights to drive your business forward.

How to select the best AI chatbot for your website

Selecting the right chatbot for your website can be difficult, but it is critical to find the one that will set you up for success. Here are some questions to ask your chatbot provider to ensure you get the best conversational AI chatbot for your website. 

 

Can chatbots have a conversion?

The chatbot software should be able to handle all the use cases you need it to - whether that is in customer engagement or customer service. If you are looking for a conversational chatbot, pick one that is built on AI so that queries can be resolved within the widget itself, and not merely redirected to an FAQ page. This will increase the resolution rate and reduce the dependence on live agents.  

Can chatbots understand a conversation?

Chatbots should help your visitors find what they are looking for. While two people might ask the same question in two different ways, chatbots that have Natural Language Processing (NLP) will be able to make sense of problems, no matter the phrasing, to provide exact resolutions.

Can chatbots help you identify information gaps?

Chatbots that use ML learn from your knowledge base - the more information it is given, the more accurate the answers will be. When your chatbot fails to answer a question, it should notify you to train it to cover informational gaps.

Can chatbots capture the intent of the visitor?

By identifying the visitor's intent based on their activity, the chatbot should target them with the right messaging. For instance, visitors looking to purchase from the pricing page should trigger offers to encourage conversions.

Can chatbots integrate with your helpdesk and ITSM software?

Siloed conversations affect your customer service goals. To avoid this, your chatbot should integrate with platforms to provide end-to-end service solutions. This way, information is always handy when resolving queries.

Can chatbots integrate with your existing tech stack?

Chatbots are most effective when they integrate with the tools you use daily. This could be mobile apps such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or it could be your blog site like WordPress. If you are an e-commerce site and use tools that you can integrate with your chatbot to display products right within the chat.

Why choose Freshchat website chatbots for your business?

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