What if you had an employee who could engage your potential customers, answer their questions, collect their email addresses, and boost your sales, all without getting paid, asking for job benefits, or requesting vacation time?
Obviously, you know that your dedicated employees are your most valuable assets, and you would never think of not paying them for their hard work. But what if you added a chatbot to your team?
A chatbot will never replace your employees, but it could improve the shopping experience of a customer visiting your website at any hour of the day or night. And the good news is you can create one today! If you want to know how to make a chatbot for a website, follow these instructions:
1. Decide which platform you want to use
Anyone can make a simple chatbot, even if they don’t know how to code. And depending on what you want your chatbot to achieve, a simple chatbot might be able to perfectly meet your needs.
However, if you want a more complex chatbot that can interact with your customers almost as well as a human employee would, you will need to turn to a developer who will be better equipped to build such a chatbot.
If you want to make a simple chatbot, you will first have to choose a platform. It’s possible to make a chatbot that will chat with your customers through Facebook Messenger, or to add one to your website. For more sophisticated features, there is a variety of chatbot software that can offer you the tools and templates you need to get started.
2. Think about the purpose of your chatbot
Which mission do you want to give to your chatbot? Do you simply want it to grab the attention of anyone who visits your website, and to engage with your customers? Do you want it to provide customer support?
Do you want it to share the latest news concerning your products or services, or to collect the email addresses of your visitors in exchange for a free gift?
You need to determine what you want your chatbot to say and to do before you start creating it. Knowing the purpose of your chatbot will help you decide which type of chatbot will meet your needs.
3. Think about your target audience
Before you make your chatbot talk, you need to have a good idea of who it will be talking to. Think about the target audience for your products or services.
If your target audience is young and trendy, your chatbot should express itself differently than if you were targeting adults with an elegant and luxurious lifestyle.
Even though your audience will quickly realize they are chatting with a bot, it doesn’t mean this bot can’t have its own personality. In fact, your customers will be more interested in chatting with a chatbot with a unique personality, than with one that sounds like a boring robot.
4. Decide which type of chatbot you want to create
There are two types of chatbots you can create. A generative chatbot is complex, and unless you know how to code, and Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing have no secrets for you, you should seek the help of a developer to create one. This type of chatbot analyzes the sentences typed by a human, and responds to them in the best way that it can.
A retrieval based chatbot, on the other hand, usually asks a question to the human they are engaging with, and suggests different answers. What the chatbot will say next depends on which answer the human will choose. This type of chatbot is the one you can create on your own, by building a dialog flow chart.
5. Build the dialog flow of your chatbot
To create your retrieval based chatbot, you simply need to plan what it will say. Start by deciding how the chatbot will greet your potential customers, and think of different responses the customer will be able to choose from.
For example, if your goal is to collect email addresses, the chatbot could start by greeting your website visitors, and asking them if they would like to know more about the products you sell.
If a visitor chooses to reply with “No, thanks.”, the chatbot could say something like “Oh, that’s ok. Hit me up if ever you have a question!”
If a visitor chooses to reply with “Yes, please tell me more!”, the chatbot could say “Great! Simply give me your email address, and I will send you our brand new catalogue along with a special offer!”.
6. Create your chatbot and test it
Now that you have written the dialog flow of your chatbot, simply use the platform of your choice to create it. You should be able to use different tools and templates that will make the job easier.
After you have installed your chatbot, all you have to do is test it out to make sure it works as you want it to.
