How to Create a Chatbot in 5 Steps

Learning how to create a chatbot will help you improve user experience and offer effective customer support on your website. With a chatbot, everyone who accesses your website can solve their doubts in a few seconds using this feature.

Besides, the chatbot enables you to offer 24/7 user support, and you can analyze the interactions to identify your customer needs and improve service. Setting up a chatbot can be easy and quick. Check out the article to learn more about it.

What Is a Chatbot?#

The chatbot can be defined as a conversational artificial intelligence, which is developed to simulate human dialogue via text or audio. A company will install the software on its website, for example, and set up the chatbot to give the proper answers according to the questions asked.

The chatbots use existing knowledge resources like FAQs, guidelines, and articles to find the best answer. And, you can adjust the software to write using a tone of speech that is adequate to the brand's image and which your target audience will identify with.

You have probably already seen a chat box on the side of a website screen that pops up when you enter it, even with a personalized message, for example. "How can I help you?" or "Send your question here". All you have to do is type what you want, and you will receive an automated response based on how the chatbot was instructed.

Chatbots use different types of technology to provide the best service and give the most accurate answers, such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning. Those assets help to make chatbots sound more natural, so customers can have a better experience.

Using a chatbot doesn't mean replacing all human interaction with your customers. However, it can be useful to save time in case of simple and quickly solvable problems. You can have a live chat as well, which will be aligned with the chatbot. Then, in more complex situations, the customer will be redirected to talk with someone from customer service.

How Does a Chatbot Work?#

Using technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, chatbots analyze the data provided by the company to give the best possible answers according to the questions asked by the customers.

A chatbot will:

• Use a data center to understand how to build the responses;
• Give answers that are as close as possible as a human would do by using NLP;
• Learn how to improve its interaction through machine learning;
• Collect key information;
• Generate automated responses to user inquiries.

Types of Chatbots#

Help Center Chatbots#

The help center chatbots learn using your knowledge base and suggest articles that contain the best solution to help the customers. Instead of using a search engine to find the content the customer is looking for on your website, they will ask for it from the chatbot.

Decision Tree Chatbots#

With the decision tree chatbot, you can customize conversation flows to provide the best answers to your customers. The chatbot can not only send the response, but also suggest articles, or transfer the conversation to a live agent.

You have the option to set triggers, so the chatbot will identify when the demand is best dealt with by an agent. If you don't have coding knowledge, it's advisable to look for software that can be configured without having to make alterations to the code.

Task-Specific Chatbots#

As the name suggests, this type of chatbot is meant to aid customers with specific tasks, delivering highly personalized answers. To do that, though, they require comprehensive training and deep natural language processing skills.

Benefits of Using a Chatbot#

The success of chatbots didn't happen for anything, on the contrary, there are many reasons why this type of software has caught the attention of companies from multiple sectors.

24/7 Customer Support#

When you use a chatbot, everyone who accesses your website can count on 24/7 customer support. Instead of having to wait commercial hours to get in contact with a live agent and solve their questions, customers can enjoy the chatbot. This way, you avoid losing opportunities such as closing a sale or conquering more leads.

Fast Response Time#

The pace of life nowadays is fast and many people don't have the patience to wait more than a few seconds on a page to get an answer. Research shows that 10 seconds is the limit time to keep the user's attention on a dialogue online.

Therefore, counting on a chatbot is very useful. Different from sending an email, for instance, the user will get an immediate response to what they want. This also helps with the brand's image, because it shows the company is concerned about providing great customer service.

Conversion Opportunities#

When someone sends a message through a chatbot, the software can work as a self-service. It presents several options and the person chooses what product or service they want, increasing the chances to convert the user into a lead or a buyer.

An AI-powered chatbot will understand the context of the conversation and may enjoy the opportunity to make a personalized call to action. For example, suggesting a product to the user or inviting them to subscribe to a newsletter.

Even if this doesn't happen, the information collected during the interaction can be valuable to the marketing and sales team to continue with the interaction and get more conversions.

Personalization#

Another great aspect of AI chatbots is that you can set them up to interact as someone from your company would, using the brand's tone of voice.

This already makes the conversation more personal, but aside from that, the best is that the chatbot can use the customer's name when talking to them, and give personalized answers based on the messages that are sent. This way the interaction flows more naturally.

Improve Customer Experience#

Customer experience is a factor that people take into account when deciding to make a purchase or not. When you sell on the internet, whether you have a B2B or B2C business, you may compete with thousands of companies from around the world, which makes it essential to search for ways to distinguish yourself.

Counting with a chatbot that delivers personalized interaction, is quick and effective in solving people's problems, and can make you stand out from the crowd. However, you must choose a chatbot that is up-to-date with the latest technology and offers all the features you need.

Scalability#

When choosing the best chatbot for your company, make sure that it's capable of dealing with a high number of people accessing it at the same time. Certainly, you aim to grow your company, right?

As you conquer visibility and more customers, the traffic on your website is expected to increase, and so is the number of people who will use the chatbot. Therefore, it's essential to count on a chatbot whose software was developed to deal with that, without presenting instabilities.

Cost-Effective#

Using a chatbot also helps you to save money. It's a cheaper solution to offer good customer service than building a platform of your own or hiring new employees. Besides, as you increase the conversion rate and diminish the response time, you increase the chances of selling more, therefore increasing your revenue.

Monitor and Analyze Customer Data#

Chatbots collect information from every interaction it has, which is valuable to get to know your target audience. You may use this data to identify customer main demands, and your company's weak and strong points, have insights, and understand how to improve and solve your target audience's pains.

Increase Sales#

As a consequence of all the benefits offered by having a chatbot, your sales will likely increase too. With good customer service, people tend to trust companies more. Also, when the chatbot is set up to make product and service recommendations based on the user profile, it can encourage the customer to make more purchases

How to Create a Chatbot Using JivoChat#

When it comes to how to create a chatbot, the good news is you don't need to know how to code to have a personalized chatbot, with a design that matches your brand identity and customized messages. You can enjoy easy-to-use solutions, such as JivoChat, and set up your chatbot as you desire. It just takes a few steps.

1. Define the Purpose of Your Chatbot#

Before you start creating your chatbot, answer the question "What is the purpose of your chatbot?". This will guide you through the next steps to create a user-friendly interface and personalize the messages, so you can assist your website visitors.

Chabots are used for different purposes, for example, as a sales assistant to convince your customers to make purchases. Another use is for customer support, so your clients can solve their doubts, and access tutorials about your brand.

2. Decide Where You Will Place the Chatbot#

Another important factor that will influence your chatbot design is where you want to put it on your website pages. You can choose to place it only on specific sections, such as the home page, and product pages, or set it up to appear on every page of your website.

It's also important to choose where the chatbot will be displayed on the screen. A common place is in the right bottom corner, so it doesn't interfere with the other elements.

You can set up messages that will pop up on the screen based on user activities to compel them to interact with the chatbot and also enable users to minimize the chatbot once they are done using it.

3. Choose a Chatbot Platform#

The most important step, to ensure you will have an efficient chatbot that meets your customer needs, is choosing a chatbot platform. You need to choose a platform that allows you to easily create a personalized chatbot, without having to be an expert in this area. Pay attention if they offer the features you are looking for, and are AI-powered.

For instance, with JivoChat, you can create a completely customized chatbot and count on software that is constantly evolving to provide you with the best services. You can even integrate it with WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, and several other apps. It's also possible to connect it with AI solutions such as dahi.ai, ChatMeAI, and Plantt.

4. Configure the Chatbot#

Configuring a chatbot with JivoChat is simple and takes just a few minutes. First, you need to create an account and choose the plan that suits you best.

There are three different plans, the Basic, which is for free, the Professional, and the Enterprise. All of them provide you with not only chatbot solutions, but a platform to centralize communications that your agents can enjoy.

After selecting the plan, and installing JivoChat software on your computer, you can start setting up the chatbot. Use the chat design feature to personalize the chatbot interface and align it with your brand's visual identity. You can choose the color palette, the font type and size, and the chat window format, size, and position on each page.

Then, you have to personalize the messages that will appear in the chatbot. Choose the trigger actions and write the text that shall be displayed for each case. Check the preview to ensure the chatbot is displayed correctly, and review the text.

5. Analyze Data to Improve the Chatbot#

Once you have finished setting up the chatbot, it's time to test it on your website. You can create more than one version of the website to make a/b tests and find out the design that works better for you.

JivoChat provides analytical tools that will help you collect and analyze data from interactions users have with the chatbot installed on your website. This way, you can identify where you need to improve to achieve your goals.

Enjoy JivoChat to Create Your Chatbot#

Now that you have learned how to create a chatbot. What about testing JivoChat to have a personalized chatbot on your website? You can test it for free and upgrade the plan whenever you want. Enjoy this opportunity to provide the best customer experience to your clients, it will help you to increase sales and conquer loyal customers.