How to make a chatbot? – A step-by-step guide for non-tech professionals

Are you intimidated by the idea of building an AI chatbot on your own?

If yes, you need not be. Here’s why chatbot development can be a child’s play.

On an AI-native platform, creating a chatbot is –

1. Easy – can be built entirely by a non-tech professional (no coding skills required)
2. Quick – can be created within minutes with drag-and-drop features
3. Cost-effective – can be integrated using a self-service customer support platform

In this blog post, we will cover the types, the entire chatbot creation process, and the dos and don’ts so that you can build a chatbot that aligns with your goals.

What are the types of chatbots? And which is right for you?

Chatbots come in different types tailored to specific functionalities and purposes. Therefore, businesses can create purpose-driven chatbots to elevate their CX and achieve their business goals.

There are three primary categories with diverse capabilities: Discord bots, conventional bots, and conversational AI assistants.

We have put the three types in a table to give you a comprehensive understanding, along with their similarities and differences, so that you can identify the right chatbot for your business.

Considering that you have landed on this blog, you may be looking for a way to install a chatbot on your own that helps you manage some of your business functions. In such a scenario, DevRev’s AI chatbot – Turing bot can help you assist your customers as well as elevate your product would be an ideal choice.

How to build an AI chatbot?

Creating a chatbot is like adding a jack to your customer support team. It serves as a personal assistant helping users search and make a decision, a service assistant addressing product queries, and a mediator for relaying updates while your customer service agent solves inquiries.

Step one: Define a purpose for your chatbot

Create a foundation: define a purpose. It will help you ensure your AI chatbot aligns with your business objectives and effectively serves your customers. Here’s a questionnaire to find a direction.

1️⃣ What do you want to achieve with a chatbot?

• Customer support automation
• Customer self-service enablement
• Customer engagement, like appointment creation
• Lead generation
• All of the above

2️⃣ Which features of a chatbot will align with your goals above?

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) for understanding and responding to user queries
• Knowledge base integration to access and provide accurate information
• Integration with CRM systems for lead generation and customer data management
• Appointment scheduling functionality
• Analytics and reporting capabilities for performance tracking

3️⃣ What is the process your customer support and business teams follow currently?

4️⃣ Where does a chatbot fit in, in your current process?

5️⃣ Create a detailed document of common queries, outlines, tutorials, etc.

Once you have a clear understanding of the purpose of your AI chatbot, you can proceed with designing one that incorporates all the necessary and relevant features.

Step two: Pick channels for your chatbot

Meet your customers where they are: find the relevant channels. It will enable you to seamlessly engage with your audience and provide convenient access to your services or support.

Understand your target audience's demographics and behavior. Analyze where they spend most of their time online and their preferred communication mediums. It can be websites or social media platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram or Twitter, and even email and SMS. In addition, you can also integrate third-party platforms such as Slack.

With DevRev, you can set up and customize your live chat widget, set up the mechanism to identify the users that interact via chatbot and integrate third-party applications such as WhatsApp and Slack, so that your customers can reach out to you from the platform they are comfortable with.

Consider the nature of conversations your chatbot platform will facilitate. For example, if your chatbot focuses on customer support, integrating it into your website, or using messaging apps would be beneficial. Further, connecting to a conversational agent can help you step up your customer support strategy.

Step three: Configure your chatbot

Install a chatbot on your website (relevant pages of your website), and other platforms.

Through configuration, you can create rules for a chatbot's behavior, determining the specific pages on your website where it appears and where it does not. This allows you to control the chatbot's visibility, ensuring it engages with users only on selected pages while remaining hidden on others.

In a world where all companies are using chatbots, bringing an A-game with an AI-native chatbot, will help you stay ahead of the curve.

Step four

Extend your brand identity to your AI chatbot: give personality, tone, and appearance. Crafting an identity fosters a relatable and engaging user experience, humanizes the conversations, and makes it more trustworthy to customers. DevRev offers a PluG widget to help you incorporate your brand style into your chatbot.

• Define its traits—friendly, professional, humorous, empathetic—aligned with your brand values.
• Extend your visual style – your brand colors, themes, and shapes.
• Choose a communication style—formal or casual—and incorporate visuals, like avatars, for recognition.

Ensure the identity resonates with your audience's preferences. You can later test and refine based on user feedback for engaging and relatable conversations.

The whole process on a chatbot platform takes no more than 15 minutes. With DevRev, you can manage all of this in a single shot via PluG settings.

The style feature helps with visual settings such as launcher logo, alignment, and settings, along with brand identity, logo, appearance, and accent color.

Step five: Integrate automatic reply with your chatbot

You can automate responses on your chatbot platform and personalize the customer experience. To give you a primary understanding, the following are the actions you can take with automated responses, especially on DevRev –

1️⃣ Set the business hours and days for your organization - Let your customers know when you are working by setting working hours and days. Share the details and the next step they can take to get in touch.

2️⃣ Customize auto-reply messages - When your customer sends the first message to your inbox, you can decide what DevRev bot replies to them. You can also set different messages during working and non-working hours.

3️⃣ Actionable replies - You can use the buttons in your auto-replies to prompt your users to take action, such as booking a demo, watching a video, or reading documentation.

DevRev, an AI-native and user-friendly chatbot platform, allows you to manage all of these at a time using auto cutomer reply settings.

Step six: Take a test and a trial of your chatbot

Initiate comprehensive trials covering various scenarios and user interactions. Test its responses, functionalities, and integrations across multiple channels. You can identify potential issues, refine conversation flows, and validate the accuracy of information provided by the chatbot.

You can conduct the test and trial internally and externally. Conducting both internal and external tests ensures a comprehensive evaluation, enabling you to refine the chatbot iteratively, guaranteeing a polished and user-friendly product before its official launch.

Internal testing

You can conduct the test internally by involving team members across different departments to simulate diverse user interactions and scenarios. Internal testing helps in refining the chatbot's functionalities, ensuring it aligns with your business objectives.

External testing

External testing involves engaging real users or a selected group of beta testers. Solicit feedback from these external participants to evaluate the chatbot's usability, effectiveness in resolving queries, and overall user experience. Their insights will provide you with valuable perspectives on how the chatbot performs in real-world scenarios.

Throughout the testing phase, keep track of any issues encountered, user feedback, and areas for improvement. It's essential to iterate on these findings, making necessary adjustments to enhance the chatbot's performance, responsiveness, and accuracy.

Collect feedback from your customers and improve your chatbot

Once you have integrated your AI chatbot, you can keep improving by following the below strategy.

1. Gather user feedback regularly through surveys or direct interactions
2. Analyze input to identify common issues and suggestions
3. Implement necessary improvements in functionality and responses
4. Continuously monitor metrics and refine the chatbot based on user insights to ensure ongoing relevance and user satisfaction
5. Keep your audience informed about updates based on their feedback to maintain engagement

Add-on modules with DevRev snap-ins

You can ensure the ease of use of your chatbot for your customers and management for your customer support team with snap-ins. Some of the types include:

Integrations: To help you connect DevRev with existing systems such as Slack and Jira.

Automation: To help you perform tasks with DevRev based on events, like responding to customer conversations and linking tickets and issues.

Imports: To bring data from external sources to DevRev and keep your operations in sync.

Learn about snap-ins in detail to streamline communication between your customers and the support team.

What are the dos and don’ts to consider while creating a chatbot?

Chatbot development requires a careful balance between innovation and user-centricity. In the world of AI-driven conversations, understanding the pivotal dos and don'ts is essential to crafting a successful and engaging chatbot. These guidelines delineate the crucial considerations that shape an effective chatbot, emphasizing the strategies to embrace and the pitfalls to avoid during the creation process.

AI-powered chatbot platforms help companies provide experiences that resonate with users, foster meaningful engagements, and deliver seamless assistance.

Dos

1. Add a human touch: Implement a conversational tone to create a relatable chatbot persona that connects with users on a personal level, enhancing engagement and user satisfaction.
2. Keep it short and clear: Craft concise responses that directly address user queries. In this situation, clarity and brevity ensure users quickly obtain relevant information without confusion or unnecessary details.
3. Enable smooth hand-off to a human agent: Integrate seamless mechanisms for users to escalate queries beyond the chatbot's capabilities, human agents. You can maintain context and provide clear options for human intervention enhancing user assistance when needed.
4. Provide a near-human conversation experience: Employ NLP models for nuanced understanding, enabling the chatbot to interpret context and intent. It fosters relevant conversations for users and elevates the overall interaction to a near-human experience.
5. Provide fallback choices: Incorporate intuitive prompts or predefined options for users to navigate through uncertainties, ensuring a smooth interaction even when queries are misunderstood and offering alternative pathways or suggestions to steer conversations back on track effectively.

Don’ts

1. Create dead-end conversations: Avoid creating scenarios where the chatbot cannot proceed further or assist the user. You can ensure the conversation flow includes options or pathways to guide users toward solutions or human support if needed.
2. Rely on text alone: Refrain from limiting interactions to text only. Incorporate multimedia elements like images, videos, or buttons to enhance engagement and deliver information more effectively, catering to diverse user preferences.
3. Allow too open-intent conversation: Avoid overly open-ended conversations lacking clear direction or purpose. You can define the chatbot's scope and functionalities to guide conversations, preventing confusion and ensuring more focused and productive interactions.
4. Stop training: Avoid halting the training of your chatbot. You can ensure continuous learning and refinement to improve its capabilities. Further, you can regularly update its knowledge base, refine algorithms, and incorporate new data to enhance its accuracy, responsiveness, and overall performance over time.

Bring your customer’s voice to software development

Utilize a chatbot as a tool to gather invaluable data from your customers. You can use the insights to enhance sales, refine customer experiences, improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and more.

Taking your product to the next level, you can create a customer-centric product development and enhancement system. You can identify recurring pain points to fortify your product and further incorporate customer queries, and feedback garnered through the chatbot into your product enhancement efforts, ensuring your developments align with customer needs.