Are you considering creating a chatbot for your company’s website?
But aren’t sure where to start.
Well, you are not alone.
Presently, almost every business wants to integrate a chatbot in their system to deliver better customer service and support. And thus, everybody wants to know how to create a chatbot for their business, which fulfills its needs and delivers its brands persona in the market.
So, more people are having questions about the best ways to approach creating a chatbot from scratch in order to cut out the third party involvement and do it themselves.
Step By Step Approaches For Creating A Chatbot From Scratch
Chatbot usage has rapidly increased in the past decade. It has been reported by Business Insider, 80% of the businesses want their communication to be done through a bot messenger by 2020. And Gartner revealed, by 2019 – 2020 percent of brands will abandon their mobile apps, as they are not delivering the level of adoption and customer engagement they expected.
So, to keep themselves in the competition and with the trend, brands are considering adding a chatbot to their company’s website. And if you are one of them, but aren’t sure where to start, here are the steps to create a highly functional chatbot.
1. Crafting a Prototype of your Chatbot
Most of the businesses do not consider prototyping their chatbots. They straight away start coding. While in the start, creating a chatbot might look like a single loop, but the reality is far from it.
Prototyping allows you to think about the ways users and your brand can achieve your goals while building the best paths.
Start by discovering the core users of your bot. Brainstorm how you can quickly and easily achieve your goals. List all the pain points customers are experiencing on the current website.
Once you have jotted down all these points, you can create the conversations of your bot that addresses these issues.
Now, create a functional prototype.
There are several tools for creating a prototype of your chatbot without writing a single code. This section begins by creating the conversation flow your chatbot. You can create a base conversation, duplicate it several times, and make changes to it to match the variables in the chat.
By specifying the flow and design of your chatbot in the prototype, you can get clarity on how you want your bot to function and where all the necessary changes are to be done.
2. Equip Coders and Analytics Experts
Building a chatbot requires the right team to make it right and effective. So, every organization should hire some experienced AI developers and analysts to be indispensable –
- Natural Language Processing Trainers – These professionals help in maintaining conversation tree, chatbot replies, DialogStates, expressions for existing intents, and creation of new intents.
- Natural Language Processing Gatekeepers – Maintaining the conversation structure and testing any confusions.
- Coders – For chatbot integration on various digital platforms.
- Analytics – They can analyze the user’s request to identify the user intent and to extract relevant entities.
A combination of coders and analytics help in building the right algorithm for our customers.
3. Developing your Chatbot’s Real Persona
Chatbots were initially developed to answer the basic question, but as the industry started to take a leap, chatbots functionality started increasing. And the bot started to require a higher level of AI, where it could understand the context of the conversation in depth and respond accordingly.
So, to become successful the chatbot was given a more humanized approach that brings out meaningful conversation. To accomplish this, the bot needs to –
- Have Memories ( Store the conversation) – Your bot needs to store the information that they get from the customer. Sometimes a small fact about the consumer can create a huge difference in customer support and sales. Saving the details of previous purchases helps the bot in cross-selling or up-selling, giving the customer’s choice of preferences.
- Develop a character – Although it might feel weird talking to a chatbot, there can be ways where the bot can eliminate the gap, and straight-up create a connection with humor.
- Carry the Brand Face – Adding a brand voice to your bot creates countless opportunities for brands who seek engagement through personalized scale. It has been seen that chatbots need to be based on a personality for effective selling.
Mirroring the customer’s personality and talking to them the way they would interact with their friends is the key to engagement. Designing such a character can help you create ideal customer support.
4. Capitalizing Correctly
Before building a bot, try and identify its deployment costs correctly. This must include the following points –
- Prototyping costs – These are the upfront or annual fees associated with the solution.
- Chatbot development costs – Time and effort will it take to develop both simple and complex tasks
- Cost to develop additional features – Does the platform require enterprise features like – SSO integration, encryption support, or service orchestration framework.
- Cost to add enterprise features – Features like agent transfer, session management support, or the ability for bots to pull reports from enterprise systems; needs to be included.
- Operational costs – Inclusion of data center operation required or not?
- Maintenance and software enhancement costs – The ongoing maintenance cost of the platform.
It is also important that you include the cost due to inadequate productivity. It is reported that inefficiency costs 20% to 30% of revenue every year. Therefore, identifying the associated costs help solidify chatbot business case.
5. Preparing for Challenges
The most important challenge your chatbot is going to face the time is Chatbot Security. It is imperative that your bot is trusted by the user in terms of data privacy and security.
The bot should ensure that only relevant information is being asked and captured as an input, and is being safely transmitted over the internet.
This trust needs to be part of the Business DNA , which are going to adopt Chatbot tools to serve the customer needs.
Businesses should ensure that no hacker gets access to the chats or the stored information of the users.
Additionally, careful management and thoughtful construction of the front-end can greatly minimize potential problems coming in the way. However, if things still go wrong, there should be a contingency plan to avoid any problem.
- Ensure that your tech team is up to date with the functionality of the chatbot
- Make sure to have robust security measures
- Take regular feedback from your users, so that they can timely report any issue.
6. Understanding the Technical Aspects
If you are developing an AI-chatbot from scratch, it is important that you equip your team with AI developers who are expert in Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, computer science. It is important that your organization deeply knows about the linguistics, dependency parsing, and part of speech for the successful functioning of your chatbot.
The above-listed points are the most important approaches that every enterprise should follow to develop and deploy a successfully functioning chatbot. So, before you take up the chatbot challenge equip yourself with a great team, a proper chatbot software, and the right approaches.
