Why You Need to Add a Support Bot to Your Website

Support bots are the present and future of first contact for customers who need help with our product or service. These AI-driven tools streamline the customer support process so you can immediately help those who need help and more reliably refer them to those who can answer their questions and resolve their issues.

Why you would need a support bot is very easy to explain: you can automate certain aspects of support, increase conversion rates, offer a much better level of assistance, achieve better customer engagement, collect information from your customers in a easier and more reliable and reduce your support costs.

So that decision was made. You want or need a support bot. What is the next? This is where things can get a little complicated. Yes, you can always hire a third-party company to develop your bot and integrate it into your website, but this can be expensive. The other option would be to develop it internally. Thanks to open source technology, creating your own support bot is a viable path for any business.

If you take the internal path, what will you need to make it happen? Let's take a look at what you need for a successful support bot deployment.

Well-defined objective

The first thing you should do is define the purpose of your chatbot. Will it be a multipurpose chatbot or specific just for product or service support? This is a crucial step because it will help you decide which platform to choose and how your conversation with the bot will flow. You should ask yourself (or your team) questions like “Why are we building this chatbot?”, “What are the most frequent problems customers have?” and “What features do we want for our chatbot?”

You need to have a solid plan for your chatbot well before you enter the development stages. If you can't create a well-defined purpose for your chatbot, you'll end up trying to do too much with it, which will only end in a failed experiment. You will want to know what the purpose of the chatbot is, who it will serve, and to what extent it will help your customers.

Choose a chatbot platform

You also need to choose a chatbot platform. This doesn't necessarily mean you should use a third-party hosted chatbot. There are many open source chatbot solutions you can use (such as Botkit, Botpress, Rasa, Wit.ai, and OpenDialog). Just know that if you go the open source route, you will need developers on your team who can integrate it with your current website.

Many proprietary chatbot platforms make it really easy to integrate with your website, but they can be more expensive and more limiting in what you can do with them.

Developers

If you go the open source route, you'll need developers skilled in one or more of the popular languages ​​used for chatbots. Right now, the most popular languages ​​for chatbots include Python, Clojure, Ruby, Lisp, and Java.

Many open source chatbots come in the form of a framework, so your developers will need to understand how to use these tools effectively.

A flow of conversation

This is where the rubber meets the road. After gathering all the developers and software, you must design the chatbot conversation. No chatbot has reached the point where it can simply jump into the conversation without first having a script worked out. This is done by creating triggers, decision nodes, and action blocks.

For example, a user launches the chatbot, which triggers the initial interaction. The customer will then ask a question that requires a decision node (for example, Customer A wants help with Product X). Once the decision node reaches a conclusion and an action block (such as entering an email or product serial number).

These conversations can take considerable time to create, and you need to create numerous conversations for all possible use cases that the chatbot handles.

Time to train the bot

After creating the conversation flow, you need to train the chatbot. This is only necessary if your chatbot uses artificial intelligence. If your chatbot is a simpler, rules-based bot, you can skip this step.

For AI-powered bots, this will be a crucial step in creating an effective support chatbot. During the training period, you will use existing datasets (emails, support tickets, and other conversation threads) or third-party purpose datasets to run on the bot so that it can learn how to correctly respond to interactions.

Effective bot training is about predicting what users will say and getting the correct response. To do this, you need to know three main elements: utterances (something a user might say), intent (what a user's utterance means), and entity (parts of a user's utterance that make it clearer, like “today” and “time” in the statement “What is the weather today?”.

In the training process, you must ensure that:

• intentions are distinct and contain numerous statements.
• entities have a purpose.
• the chatbot has personality.
• the chatbot doesn't just rely on text.

Time to test the bot

Finally, you should set aside plenty of time to test your chatbot. One of the most important aspects of the testing process (aside from taking the time necessary to test effectively) is making use of a diverse test pool.

You don't want to only use those who are close to the project (like the developers) to test your bot. Recruit people from other departments so you get completely different verbiage in the testing process. The more diverse your testing team, the more accurate your results will be. If you've trained your bot to succeed only with information from specific user types and only test with those same types, you won't know how and if it will fail when other personalities, nationalities, or skill sets use the tool.

Conclusion

Adding a support chatbot is a great way to effectively handle first contact with customers. Not only that, but support chatbots are a means to an economic end that can pay off in ways you might not be able to see at first. Customer engagement and satisfaction will increase dramatically, which will have a direct impact on your bottom line.

The process of adding a support chatbot may be time-consuming, but the end result will be worth it and your business and your customers will prosper.

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