Building a Chatbot for Your Business

Chatbots have made customer interaction a lot easier and more efficient. With full-time availability, no customer goes without their query being addressed. That makes chatbots very beneficial for your business as it attracts more customers and business with a greater number of active conversions of leads. It is due to the enhanced customer relationship that businesses are looking for chatbot solutions and building chatbots for their businesses. While technology like AI makes it even more engaging for the customers, chatbots are a real treat for your business.

If you are considering the idea of building a chatbot for your business and are still wondering how to go ahead with it, then here are the basic details that you should know as a beginner.

Introduction to Chatbots

Chatbots have gained a lot of traction in the business world among the companies who are seeking new solutions to enhance the customer experience and strengthen their rapport with the target audience.

But the question arises what makes the chatbot everyone’s absolute favourite? Well! To engage with customers actively and address their queries, one needs to constantly work out interacting with them. But, since the business demands a lot of time in other operational activities remaining active online 24/7 could be a big challenge. This is where chatbots give a helping hand by addressing the queries of clients at scale and at any time of the day.

To leverage these benefits, here are all the basics of building a chatbot. Before building a chatbot it is essential to get a clear understanding of the layers of customer engagement and figure out where you belong.

The Layers of Customer Engagement

Here are the three layers of customer engagement that make an important part of the strategy:

1. Providing customers with fundamental information. The first layer of customer engagement includes the capability of providing basic information to the customer. The main aim behind this kind of engagement is to get the attention from the customers and make them interested, marking the beginning of their engagement with your business.

An IVR based system that provides a menu-based list is a good way to take the customers to the next level of engagement.

2. Resolution of queries in the minimum stipulated time. Time is an important factor in customer engagement. The minimum is the time taken to address the queries, the more satisfying experience it is for the customers.  Thus, having a predetermined set of queries and their solutions could be a great way to address the customer queries in an easy way.

3. Giving a fully-fledged solution to the customer. A detailed solution is often required to address the customers with complex queries who seek an explanation. Although this is not a general case, and the frequency of such conversations is considerably low, yet they consume a lot of time and effort while requiring expertise in the subject. This layer of engagement seeks more human-like interaction abilities for effective communication.

Stages of Chatbot Development

Once the layer of customer engagement is identified, here are the stages of Chatbot Development that you should follow to build a Chatbot for your business:

1. The inception stage. This is the first stage of chatbot development where the requirements of the chatbot are put together. In this stage, the customer’s expectations, pain points, and the platform which can serve the underlying purpose in the best way are set.

2. Determining the customer Engagement model. The customer engagement model is an important step to make customer communication effective. Determine the right model that meets with your requirements in maximum capacity serving the purpose in an optimized manner.

3. Developing the chatbot. Based on the requirements and the customer engagement model, in this stage, you need to develop the chatbot using advanced technologies like AI, NLP, and ML to get the best results. Using Agile Software Development methodologies could be very fruitful in bringing out the most favourable outcomes.

4. Testing the chatbot. Once developed, it is essential that you test the chatbot which is developed to ensure that it successfully fulfils the requirements and performs well in all circumstances. user acceptance testing is the most important way to ensure that the chatbot not only performs well but is also very user-friendly.

5. Adding more features to the chatbot. While the basic required functionalities are being met successfully adding more features, could ass more value to your chatbot and make it even better. This would not only make the customer communication more effective but would also enhance the level of engagement, keeping your business ahead of the contemporaries.

In a Nutshell

Building a chatbot is important to make the communication more seamless and effective that can result in better conversion of the leads bringing in better business opportunities for your enterprise.

In an attempt to make the business more fruitful with highly satisfied customers, addressing their queries actively is quite essential, and nothing can do this better than a chatbot. Thus, by following the above steps you can successfully build a chatbot for your business and tap into new business opportunities with active lead conversions.