How to plan a chatbot for your organization

Chatbots have been around for quite a while, but lately, most of the enterprises have started adopting chatbots as a new channel of communication and to reach customers with better efficiency. Before you start building a chatbot for your enterprise, you need to plan.

In this article, I have mentioned the steps which can help you have the right mindset while developing a bot for your organization.

Purpose of chatbot

Before you begin building a chatbot, you should know the reason for building it. In order to know the reason, you will have to find answers to these questions:

• What problem will the bot solve?
• What is the reason for building the bot?
• What kind of requests or queries will the chatbot handle?

For example, you might need a helpdesk bot to reduce the queries received by your helpdesk team or a sales bot to provide the team with required data or to set up meetings. There are various fields in which chatbot can be integrated. Decide the purpose carefully and if your chatbot has to solve more than one purpose split them and build conversation for each purpose individually.

Target Audience

Deciding the audience is the second step while building a chatbot. It is essential to understand the way people of a geographical area converse so that the bot can use the words and phrases used by the target audience. Also, one must understand the age group of the target audience and whether the chat must be friendly or formal. All these factors play a crucial role in building interesting conversations to engage the target audience.  

Building engaging conversations

To be able to construct engaging conversation the purpose of developing the chatbot has to be clear. For example, if the bot is for real estate sales, then the bot should be able to build interesting conversations around this topic. Here are some tips for creating a query data set that can engage the users in interesting discussions.

1. The conversations should not sound like FAQs or queries and answers written to the point. The communications should be seamless, and the user should not realize the presence of a machine behind the bot.
2. Create category-based use-cases. Below is an example of a use-case.

Bot: Hello, how can I help you?
User: I am looking for a property
Bot: oh! Can I know the purpose of the purchase?
For residential
For business
User: Residential
Bot: Are you looking for a
House
Flat
Villa
User: Flat
Bot: Ok, for how many members are you looking for?
User: 4
Bot: which location would you prefer? (Options can be displayed)
User: Mumbai
Bot: Here are some 2-3 BHK options. Have a look.
The conversation can go long based on user inputs and queries.

3. All the use cases of the bot have to be identified and then split into queries.
4. Once the queries are identified note down the answers/responses for these queries.
5. Some queries can be answered by giving multiple options to users.

Deciding the right technology for your chatbot

The technology of the chatbot can play a significant role in managing the cost and timeline. Currently, there are many technologies available like Microsoft Bot Framework with LUIS, Dialog Flow with Node JS or MBF, IBM Watson Conversation, Wit.AI to name a few.

Based on the technologies your organization has currently quipped the technology for chatbot can be decided.

It doesn’t end there…

Although chatbot technology is extensively used, building a chatbot is a complex task as numerous aspects have to be considered in order to create interesting conversations. The process of building a bot does not end once it is deployed, but the bot has to be observed and retrained for the queries that are not present in the datasheet.

Our team of experts at Advaiya can help you in chatbot implementation which can be customized and integrated with existing services in your organization.