Advances in artificial intelligence have made it easier and more affordable to answer vital customer queries with a custom chatbot.
Budding entrepreneurs know that the quality of the customer experience can make or break a small business in its early days.
Even business owners learning how to make a website as a beginner understand that customer service overheads can be too high when first getting a business off the ground.
Recently, machine learning and language processing has narrowed the gap between human agents and virtual assistants in answering questions and solving customer issues.
Smart chatbot building platforms are one of the most cost-effective trends to improve customer service. They have made it easier to create a chatbot, and here’s how to implement one for your business.
1. Define the Chatbot’s Purpose
Research shows users are increasingly happy to talk to intelligent chatbots because getting an immediate response is the most important factor in assisting customers and website visitors.
That said, a user’s patience with a conversation bot will only last as long as the AI chatbot flow can help with user intent. For that reason, defining the purpose of a new bot is of utmost importance.
Whether it’s a simple welcome message, a basic FAQ bot, or a whole Facebook messenger chat widget, defining the purpose of chatbots means knowing where on the site it will go and defining the customer journey with that chatbot.
2.Choose Your Own Chatbot Platform
You don’t need to create a chatbot from scratch to improve customer service through conversational software. Companies are finding that it is possible to cut customer service costs by 30% with the help of a conversational bot.
It’s easy to integrate chatbot software into your business site with the help of popular chatbot platforms such as WotNot, Intercom, Drift, and others. The chatbot builder you choose for your website depends on your budget, traffic, and what you want it to do.
For example, creating a bot landing page can interactively share information and lead users through the conversion funnel.
Meanwhile, developing a bot profile built on user input, such as opening a chat window after a given amount of time on specific web pages, is a chatbot application that may be more useful in terms of ROI than putting together a customer service team.
3. Plan the Chatbot Conversational Flow
With the correct conversation flow, smart chatbots can fulfill almost everything users expect from a human customer support agent.
Chatbot developers might do this in several ways. Using a rule-based chatbot, either from a bot builder, or creating a simple chatbot flow available on messaging platforms such as Telegram, WhatsApp, or Messenger, is the fastest way to build a chatbot.
Simple chatbots and rule-based bots are familiar to most users and may follow a basic algorithm or even auto-direct customer requests to a different resource.
The time and budget that your business has available to dedicate to creating chatbots depend on how far these algorithms go and also how personalized the responses of these chatbots are.
4. Personalize the Chatbot Actions
When building chatbots, there are a few popular ways to replicate the human feeling of live chat support.
One method is to create chatbots based on a service personality. This is what is known as a bot avatar, and we are all familiar with the idea.
It stretches back as early as Clippy, the Microsoft Office assistant, but the same idea is at play in much more complex iterations like Siri or Alexa.
The prevalence of chatbots like these is a sign that consumers are used to interacting with more and more complex AI assistants in place of their human counterparts.
On the other hand, if you are using a premium chatbot builder account such as Intercom for your business, then you may be able to personalize responses based on client data.
For example, depending on your business, you may know individual clients’ names, addresses, and subscriptions without having to manually look this information up.
However, overusing this information may be offputting to a user if they feel that too much of their personal information is being shared while trying to solve a simple issue.
5. Training and Testing Conversational Bots
The most effective chatbots rely on the ability to retrieve data, iterate, and develop new responses based on this information, and what, in software development terminology, is understood as a powerful natural language processing (NLP) engine.
Creating bots like these is expensive, complex, and more likely found in R&D at companies like Meta and Google than the average eCommerce website.
Still, while the effectiveness of the early chatbot rested heavily on straightforward algorithms, the standard has risen rapidly in recent years due to the proliferation of online user data.
It enables training bots with vast information and possible circumstances before being applied to your business.
These days, few, if any, small business owners need to train their bots. However, testing the bot flows for bugs and logic loops is still recommended before launch.
Minor, easily fixed issues, such as breaks in the logic, have an overwhelmingly negative impact on the user experience, especially when a customer may feel more connected to a human support agent.
6. Launch the Chatbot
Once you’ve tried and tested your chatbot to meet the needs and expectations of your website visitors, it’s time to take it live.
This could be as easy as setting up a business account on your social media, running a script, or installing a plug-in on your website.
Implementing this WordPress website chatbot plugin is as simple as learning how to install any WordPress plugin. After that, it’s time to gauge the reaction to your new customer service chatbot.
7. Collect and Analyze Customer Feedback
The first indication of how well your chatbot is performing is whether you have to devote more time in your day to assist customers that have been let down by the chatbot or whether your inbox is clear.
One of the most important indicators of success is the feedback you receive on your chatbot. If it works well, it will receive less feedback than if it doesn’t.
However, the easiest way to find that out is to encourage detailed feedback.
Start with a star-rating system or an NPS score, and then ask for more detailed feedback. Be careful not to ask for too much feedback at one time, as this can make implementing those changes more difficult.
Start small, and make improvements one by one, but always remember that this is an iterative process. Just like customer success representatives, chatbots need training and time to be applied most effectively.
Finding The Right Chatbot Platforms For Your Business
Following this chatbot tutorial is the first step in modernizing your business in line with the current marketing trends from thought leaders. Already a $5.6 billion sector, projections estimate a 713% growth in the value of eCommerce-implemented chatbots by 2026.
At around $46.4 billion in the next three years, this AI-powered eCommerce trend is the easiest and most effective way to utilize preexisting assets, such as customer data, to empower your business into the future.
Using these steps, you can easily implement your first chatbot and grow your business.
- Define the chatbot’s purpose
- Choose your own chatbot platform
- Plan the chatbot conversational flow
- Personalize the chatbot actions
- Training and testing AI chatbots
- Launch the AI-powered chatbot
- Collect and analyze customer feedback
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lorene S, Content Editor at PRable.org
Lorene is a Content Editor at PRable.org. She started her first blog when she was at school. Started by reviewing movies that she loves, writing some random-poem then now she scales up into digital growth. She loves to write articles about marketing, technology, and business. She is excited to research recent trends time by time to give her ideas because from her point of view – anything that is advantageous, she needs to share with people through her writing. Besides writing, movies and music accompany her to give pleasure.
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