The Guide to Building a Chatbot for Your Business
The idea of chatbots can be both exciting and intimidating at the same time. Robots warm our hearts, but occasionally the also freak us out. People think robots are here to take over the world, but in reality, they are just here to make our lives easier.
Chatbots have come up and been accepted in the last 2 years. But a lot of brands and businesses still haven’t wrapped their heads around this technology. In this article, we are going to talk about how incredible chatbots are and how to leverage the potential of a chatbot.
What are Chatbots?
Chatbots are basically programs that have the ability to automatically communicate with a received message. Chatbots can be wired into answering a text, in the same manner every time, or they can have different responses based on the keywords, or they can be integrated with machine learning for a response to fit into a situation. Chatbots are not exactly new, but they gained popularity in the last few years. There are chatbot application development companies out there to help you with the process. A customer wants a chatbot to be able to perform a few functions, like:
- A quick answer to a question.
- Resolving a complaint or a problem.
- Offering a detailed answer to a query.
- Help find a human customer service agent.
Read also: Basic Tips on Designing for Mobile Augmented Reality
Why chatbots are valuable?
1. Lead Generation. A chatbot performs the initial interaction with a user and collects all the basic information required. This collection of information will save the time of the agent. The qualified leads are delivered to the sales team to work on them.
2. Guiding Users. Customers are not always sure of what they want or what they are looking for. Think of questions that your chatbot can ask a user in which way it can guide the user to the best possible solution and find what they want.
3. Saves Time & Money. By automating a process that would otherwise require a team of employees, you can save a lot of time and resources. This time and resources can then be allocated to actual business processes.
4. ‘After Hours’ Support. This is probably the most popular use of a chatbot. When the office is closed, there is no one to chat with a user and offer support. This is where a chatbot comes to the rescue as it can converse with the user and guide them to a solution.
Get Started with a Chatbot
1. Have a goal. There are a lot of uses cases for a chatbot to choose from. Choose the one that aligns with your goals and the major objective of your brand.
2. Choose a platform. Different platforms have different kinds of visitors. Depending on the platform you choose, you will need to wire your chatbot accordingly.
3. Content Strategy. Think of the content for the chatbot. Consult your customer service, sales, and marketing teams to know the kind of conversations that happen with a customer and develop content based on those suggestions.
4. Bot’s personality. Be creative and give your bot a personality. Try to create an image and voice for the bot that goes well with your brand and its values.
5. Customer journeys. After the initial questions, map out a customer journey. This can be done using a chat tool or you can create paths using shapes and flowcharts.
6. Best responses. For every question, think of the best response. Develop multiple responses to every question. This way you are more likely to satisfy a user’s needs.
7. Conversation trees. Now you must build a conversation tree depending on the answer a user will choose. Invest time in knowing how a conversation can go and how you can fully satisfy your customer. If the conversation becomes too deep, push it to a human representative. Know where to make the switch.
8. Call-to-action buttons. Call-to-action buttons can lead a user to a particular product. A bot can be the most valuable tool for conversion if the customers are pushed in the right direction.
9. Testing. Test all the conversations that take place and derive feedback from it.
10. Go live and keep an eye. Now it’s time to put your chatbot to use and monitor it for any problems.
Final Word
A chatbot can be the most valuable tool of conversion for a business. So put efforts into developing the best chatbot and hire a chatbot application development company if required.
Nisarg is the Business Development Manager at Nimblechapps, a top mobile game development company and has been with the organisation since its inception in 2014. He likes to update his knowledge on changing trends in technology and marketing and pens his thoughts regarding the same on various blogs and LinkedIn.