How To Make A Chatbot: Development Nuances in a Competitive Market

It looks like you are planning chatbot development. Why not!! Everyone is doing it, and there are plenty of reasons why you should do it for your own business.

Nowadays, anyone can make an AI chatbot using drag/drop editors. However, many people feel intimidated by the process. They think that it is a complex task. Well, the plus side of AI-bot development is, anyone can do it.

While we tell you how to make a chatbot, click on the link to read about building chatbots powered by AI (based on Topflight Apps’ experience).

The Rise of Chatbots

Alexa, Bixby, Siri, and many other fancy names have been dominating the market, allowing users to optimize there day to day tasks using minimal effort. Even though popular chatbots like Facebook M and Google Allo have been dead, many still believe that chatbots are game changers. And honestly, the recent trends show that they are a flipper.

According to the report by CB Insights, in the COVID era, the chatbot market is estimated at $7.7 Billion. The future of chatbots also looks promising. Gartner claims that chatbots will be the technological paradigm for businesses in 2021. Gartner also claimed that more than 50% of enterprises would prefer chatbot developers over mobile apps.

Juniper stated that the chatbot market would optimize the e-commerce industry. And Globe News Wire said that the chatbots market will reach 10.8 Billion by the end of 2026.

These analytics have proven to be true, and as of 2023, many businesses prefer to integrate chatbots into their business. This will allow them to optimize the costs better and handle customer services in a more proficient way.

Why You Should Make Your Own Chatbot

In this technological revolution, Chatbots are more than a fad. Now, developers are making custom-specific chatbots that meet business needs. For example, an efficient chatbot can

• Help customers in getting an answer to the question
• Conduct multiple conversations at a single go
• Make websites more interactive and fun to visit
• Collect feedback which can be used to target future leads

Today, the e-commerce sector is on the boom. Chatbots can help in reducing as much as 30% of customer management costs. A business’s own chatbot can help in

• Advanced automation that is based on the website
• Deeper integration with the technology stack
• Tailormade customer experience
• More customer interactions

Benefits of Introducing Chatbots in The business

Before going towards telling you how you can make an AI bot, let’s talk about the major benefits of integrating a custom-made chatbot into the system. Here is what these bots can offer

Accessibility

The most prominent advantage of a chatbot is that it can make your business available around the clock. Chatbots can handle multiple customers without slowing down, taking a break, or crashing. These bots will provide a complete buying experience, making customers satisfied and happy.

Mining Data

One of the most notorious advantages of chatbots is that they can mine data. That data can be used to provide customer-specific needs. The bots will learn about what a customer is buying and will provide suggestions according to that.

Optimization

From the business perspective, chatbots will optimize the work of the company. For example, JB Morgan cut down millions of hours of reviewing contracts to seconds using a bot. Chatbots can help in increasing efficiency while taking down the costs associated with that.

Read More: Troubles Of Online Tuition & How To Overcome Them

The Right Steps for Chatbot Development

We have compiled an 8-Step tutorial guide on how you can make an AI chatbot. This section will guide you on what type of tech stack to select, how to start, and how to design the conversational flow. Let’s dive in.

Giving the Purpose

The first step towards building an AI-based chat is telling it what it will do. The more specific you are, the better the results will be. What you can do is, ask yourself some of the questions. Some questions are

• What will the chatbot do? Is it for customer interaction? Or do you want it for lead generation? It can be both of them.
• What are the uses cases of these chatbots? Research the market and outline the detail.
• What will be the main attractive feature of this chatbot? Will you answer questions using autopilot? Should It save the cart? Or convert leads into potential customers.

Once you have an answer to these questions, it will make it helpful to design the one that is best suited for your own business.

Where It Will Appear

What is your business’s main communication channel? Are you using Facebook Chats, or is there a chat option on your website? In both cases, check whether the chatbot platform you are using has the support or not. Here are some of the ways you can interact with your customers using an AI chatbot.

• Your Website
• Your Social Media accounts
• Messaging tools such as Slack

There are a lot of chatbot platforms that offer multiple integrations. We prefer going for such platforms because they will help in scaling the chatbot capabilities in the future.

Choosing the Chatbot Platform

This is where the fun starts to begin. Choosing the platform that you will use to develop your own chatbot. There are two options.

• AI frameworks
• Drag/drop chatbots

AI frameworks chatbots are the ones that developers use for coding. They are libraries that developers can integrate into the code. Some examples are Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson, and Microsoft Bot.

Read More: How to Hire Python Developers: A Guide to Finding Natural Coding Talents Worldwide

Designing the Chatbot Conversation

The next step is designing the conversation that your bot will have with the customer. Suppose you want to give a discount to the customer when he/she lands on a specific page.

For that, chatbot platforms have a specific trigger button that gives a welcome message. If you want your bot to appear on a specific page, you can select the “Visitor opens specific page” node.

These all are drag/drop options, and they create a sequence. So they are easy to design and integrate.

Testing and Troubleshooting

Once you have developed a sequence for your chatbot, it is time to test the bot by going into stealth testing mode. Visit the page you’ve designed using the node and see whether it is responding or not. Ask gibberish questions to see whether the bot will crash or not. Do deep testing and troubleshoot the results.

Integrate the Bot

Now that the bot has been tested, it is time to introduce that bot into the business. Add features that are relevant to the business and integrate the whole bot model into the store or webpage. After this chatbot development, the only task that you will need to do is to maintain and optimize the bot.