Many businesses are building chatbots to provide personalized services to fans and customers, and to form a deeper relationship with them. Chatbots allow brands to form one-to-one connections and conversations with their users. Benefits of having a chatbot include:
- The ability to provide personalized content to boost business
- Makes your business easier for users to reach (and vice-versa)
- Provides essential data on your customers
- Frees up time for your customer-focused employees.
If your business is interested in building a chatbot but doesn’t know where to begin, check out our five-step guide on how to make a chatbot.
Step 1: Decide on a Use & Platform
What’s your bot’s purpose? Why should users want to talk to it? Begin with these questions before you build a chatbot. Decide on whether your bot should provide customer support, access to information, make sales or simply serve as a fun conversation partner. Here are some common chatbot use cases:
- Sell products or services and manage orders (e-commerce)
- Deliver relevant content (publishers)
- Provide help with something (tutorials or customer service)
- Entertain (bots taking the role of fictional characters, celebrities, etc.)
- Provide information access (search, statistics, knowledge, etc.)
When choosing a focus and use for your bot, try to envision the typical conversation users will have with it. For example, information-based bots should answer questions quickly; entertaining chatbots should hold and retain user attention for lengthier periods of time; e-commerce bots should form a relationship with users to gather data on their preferences over time.
Next, you’ll want to decide which platform to make your bot available on. You may start with just one, or make your bot more ubiquitous across many. Which platform you’ll choose depends on your audience; WeChat and Line are popular in the east, for example, while the west favors Facebook Messenger, Kik and Telegram. SMS is another option, but can be expensive.
Which platform your bot will exist on will also help you determine the chatbot development platform you’ll use to make it. Many development platforms, for example, integrate easily with Facebook Messenger. When considering how to make a chatbot, keep these three things in mind and ensure they partner well with one another:
- Where your audience is
- Chat platform of choice
- Development platform of choice
Step 2: How Smart Will It Be?
Now that you know how and where people will chat with your bot, you must decide how smart you’ll make it. Basically, this means whether you’ll use true artificial intelligence or machine learning to power it. The alternative is to provide a simple, menu- or command-based conversational UI. Sticking to simple commands is easy to set up in house by designing conversation trees, but if you want machine learning, you’ll likely need an outside source to power it.
It’s worth mentioning that machine learning might make a chatbot seem more sophisticated, but keeping the conversation too open can also be overwhelming for the user; some bots benefit from a simpler approach. Whichever you choose, opt to provide contextual buttons throughout the conversation so users always know how they can respond.
Step 3: Make a Good First Impression
An important step in building a chatbot is designing the way it’ll introduce itself. Your opening messages are important: they’re the first impression your bot will make to users! Let them know up-front what they can do with your bot and why they should care (use your brainstorming from Step 1 for this).
It’s also important to manage expectations up-front; this way, users won’t become disappointed when they try to fulfill a task that isn’t possible. An example of a limitation you’d want to disclose as soon as possible is whether your bot can only react to specific commands.
Finally, make feature discovery fun! Setting up a whimsical tutorial is more entertaining and easier to digest than throwing a long list of features to new users. Introduce functionality bit by bit as it becomes relevant.
Step 4: Get Writing and Build a Chatbot!
It’s time to get started writing your bot’s commands and responses. Brevity is key here: keep responses short and concise so they don’t become overwhelming. When designing your bot’s responses, consider how you’ll keep users interested past day one. Have a sense of drama or mystery so users look forward to the next day. This might include a preview to tomorrow’s content, or offering a tantalizing riddle at the end of the day.
Step 5: Analyze Results and Make Your Chatbot Better
You’re never done building a chatbot. Once you’ve released it, it’s time to use chatbot analytics to see how it can improve. Begin tracking metrics from day one—don’t wait to pull data on how your bot is being used. If you’re not sure where to begin, check out the most important chatbot metrics to track.
With a chatbot analytics platform, you can assess engagement and retention rates to identify your most active users and popular conversation times. And by assessing conversations (both historic and in real time) step-by-step, it’s easy to discover problem areas or moments where the bot or user become confused.