Chatbots are increasingly present on corporate websites. They can also help improve customer service and support human agents. To improve your services and have an optimal presence for your clients or prospects, create a bot in an efficient way. Discover 8 easy steps to create your bot.
First, do chatbots improve customer service?
Computer-controlled chatbots make it possible to personalise the customer service after a purchase or a service offered thanks to their data collection. From customer interactions, chatbots collect useful data for further processing. Human customer service agents can use this data to personalise their interactions with customers.
How can chatbots improve your business?
Using chatbots can help your business maintain a high level of consistency in responses and improve your customer service. They can also handle queries from thousands of customers instantly and simultaneously, improving average response time.
Chatbots offer many benefits to customers, such as 24/7 availability, instant responses, handling of simultaneous requests and much more. Since chatbots handle multiple requests simultaneously, they improve the average response time. The omnichannel aspect of bots is also well received by customers. Companies build chatbots to communicate with their customers through different channels such as websites, Facebook Messenger, etc.
Why build a chatbot?
Consumers want real-time interactions, fast and relevant answers to their questions at any time of the day or night! To meet this growing demand for “instant”, chatbots are just the thing. It’s faster and more interesting for a user to contact you via your website with a chatbot than to submit a form that turns into an email request. This costs more time and you risk losing the potential customer or prospect. Chatbots are simply part of the current trend that consumers need to find an answer to their questions quickly.
Some tips to create a good chatbot
1. Define your goals
Before you start creating your bot, it is essential to define your goals. Talk to your team about it, define together the goals of your bot and what it should mainly solve. Of course, before you create a bot, you need to know what chatbots can and cannot do. Artificial intelligence still has some limits. You also need to know what kind of problems you want to solve so that you can adapt your bot to these needs.
2. Customise your chatbot
By customising, you can give your bot a human touch and make the interaction with the user friendlier and more human. For example, you can give your bot a name, choose an avatar, choose the language(s), etc.
3. Choose the right triggers
When you build your chatbot, define triggers for your bot to start a conversation with potential customers or leads. Depending on the type of triggers you choose, the bot can start a conversation. This way, bots start conversations at the moment you define them.
4. Configure synonyms
It is important that your robot can understand all users. Not everyone communicates and writes in the same way. This is where the “synonym” function can be useful. When you create your bot, set up synonyms. This way, your chatbot can better understand the users’ requests and match them with what it already knows.
5. Be Multilingual
Also, when you build your chatbot you can program it to answer questions in the customer’s language. This is a popular feature in the support department and also allows you to screen customers in advance so the human agents know what language to speak.
6. Build the flow of your bot
Let us tackle the most important part of developing your chatbot: building the conversation flow. The purpose of the conversation flow is to shape your bot’s responses.
When creating a bot, you define the flow of your bot with two main elements: nodes and actions. The node is the specific scenario of your bot. This can be a welcome message, for example. The actions are the interactions that the chatbot performs with customers or prospects. Actions can be defined as interactions that chatbots can perform with visitors. They allow you to add different elements such as a text message, a question, a video, an image, a button, an appointment or an email.
7. Develop the sentiment analysis function
Sentiment analysis is a key element when you build a chatbot. Bots with sentiment analysis capabilities can decode customer moods using sentence structures and verbal cues.
Bots use machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to understand emotions from text or speech data. ML and NLP make it possible to go further and analyse customer data by evaluating their opinions or emotions. Robots can then adapt their responses according to the customer’s emotions and further personalise the service.
8. Define the fallback scenario
Bots will never be 100% capable of understanding human queries. Of course, there will always be situations where your bot is unable to respond to your users’ requests. For this reason, defining fallback scenarios is an essential part of chatbot development. If your robot cannot correctly recognise the user’s input, you need a random response. The fallback interaction is a “default response” that is displayed when the bot does not understand the user’s message.
Do you want to create an efficient bot, but need help or still have questions? Our experts are there for you. We have specialised bot experts who hold the Product Analytics Micro certificate.
