So you’ve got your website running and have got your contact phone number and email posted. You’ve got a contact form for your visitors to connect with you. Perhaps you even added a chat plugin on your website. You set up social sites for your brand, your Facebook page providing your customers another way of connecting with you. And now you are manning the chat on your website and messages on Facebook page in your limited time. Your customers however don’t always follow your working hours and they will be greeted with a chat window that doesn’t respond when they need to ask questions.
That’s where a chatbot on your website comes in. A chatbot understands what your customers are saying and responds with information or options for action without your intervention. Say Hi to Crimini, our cute little mushroom bot on the Inverted Mushrooms website and Inverted Mushrooms Facebook Page messenger. Currently Crimini is young and taking baby steps. We are hoping she’ll grow up to a fine bot that grows with conversations with you.
So how do you get started with your own chatbot? First, figure out what you want it to do. Is it primarily for customer service? Do you need to find things in your inventory? What about taking care of routine tasks? Once you know what you want, you can start making detailed scripts to plan for it.
There are many platforms and tools, with different complexity levels, expressive powers, and integration capabilities that can help you create chatbots. You could create relatively simple Flow based chatbots that require no coding knowledge. Or you could create more complex natural language understanding (NLU) based chatbots and AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) based chatbots.