How to build AI Chatbot for your business

Understanding the latest technology and how it can help your business goals

The AI Chatbot is no longer a stranger in most sectors. The adoption of this technology accelerated massively since 2016. By 2020, 80 percent of businesses intend to build a chatbot to serve their customers, more so for brands with customer-facing products.

Let’s take a look at some popular benefits of AI Chatbot for businesses:

Always-On
Instead of relying on a large group of 24/7 customer support agents, AI Chatbot is a fantastic way to provide around the clock support if you are serving customers across the globe. This technology allows us to automate repetitive tasks so live agents can assist more complex cases rather than spending most of the time addressing time consuming simple tasks.

“Call centers, websites, and mobile apps are no longer the only means of interaction with brands. Chatbots are fast becoming a business imperative for businesses that want to engage with their customers. Online chat through chatbots has grown faster than any prior channel.”
— Eileen Brown, ZDNet

Higher Conversion
AI Chatbot serves as a great addition to a website, especially for e-commerce. Customers can get quick facts from you in the decision-making process, making the overall buying experience much easier than before. With automation, AI Chatbot helps us to make orders or transactions possible without any human assistance.

“Ironically, a lot of people think that they’ve never used a chatbot, they’ve never experienced it, when in fact they have. Because Siri and Google and Alexa and all those voice-activated speaking bots, if you will, those are actually audio chatbots.”
 — Kelly Noble Mirabella, Spiderworking

High Handling Capacity
From 10 to 100 questions at a time, an AI chatbot can answer them in fast and accurate manner. On top of that, customers who prefer to take their time in the evaluation process can freely ask as many questions as they want without feeling unwelcome.

Data & Insights
A huge advantage of using AI Chatbot is its ability to capture customer behaviour insights accurately. Data gives insights into how consumers interact with brands and products throughout the consumer decision journey. On top of that, other possible information such as demographic data and personal interests help companies learn who their customers are. Successful businesses use these inputs and respond by providing unconventional digital experiences to their customers.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

So, how exactly should businesses leverage AI chatbot technology?

There is no shortcut in developing a successful AI Chatbot. Much evaluation and internal engagement are required to determine the success of its implementation.

With the experiences we have gathered as a team, we discovered that the following must be considered ahead:

Set your priorities right
Be goal-oriented in your approach by identifying your business pain points and opportunities. Here’s the most important question businesses should ask themselves before getting started:

“What are you trying to solve?”

Whether it is managing product enquiries or assisting customers to check account balance, a good AI Chatbot focuses on its key tasks. This helps businesses to improve productivity by responding to pain points or opportunities more effectively.

Form realistic expectations
Most businesses expect AI Chatbot to know as much as Wikipedia, and more. That is not what it should be. An AI Chatbot is only as good as what it is trained to do and its knowledge base should be designed around your business and your customer needs. This helps to increase response accuracy on what truly matters. Focus on your user journey flow and keep the conversation within what is relevant. When your AI Chatbot is able to solve 80% of your customers’ needs, it is a winner.

Build one-to-many AI Chatbot
Customers tend to reach out to businesses through various channels from websites to social media platforms. These channels hold different strengths and challenges, which makes building one AI chatbot to fit all an incredibly challenging some time ago. With Meta owning most of the popular platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram, you can now build one that works for most if not all of them. While it is not without limitations imposed by each platform, an attempt at such unified approach can make training and performance tracking much more effective and cohesive for business in the long term.

Expect iteration and training
AI Chatbot can only improve when it gets more unsupervised conversations to learn what is important in serving your customers hence businesses should anticipate the need to train and iterate in the initial stage of the launch. The sooner your AI Chatbot is made available to the public, the faster it can achieve its best performance. Adopting this agile method allows you to identify the market opportunities and respond to it faster than your competitors.

Understand the technology limitations
One of the biggest misconceptions about AI Chatbot is that it can self-learn and improve without human intervention. That is not the case. For most businesses, intelligent and hybrid chatbots need to be developed and trained by humans. Such supervised learning is still essential for accuracy because true machine learning currently requires large amounts data and very few businesses have enough of data to use machine learning meaningfully. Instead of fully relying on your AI Chatbot to run on its own, businesses should always run regular reviews of what it has learned.

“To the user, chatbots seem to be “intelligent” due to their informative skills. However, chatbots are only as intelligent as the underlying database.”
 — Peter Gentsch

Moving beyond customer service

As a small business or large enterprise, AI Chatbot has a role to assist businesses in many ways beyond customer experience. The technology is seen to manage HR matters, business process automation as well as website concierge and assistance.

Throughout the years, we see promising technological advancements in Artificial Intelligence. Chatbot has moved beyond its conventional keyword-based approach to fully relying on Natural Language Processing (NLP) in building conversations.

With AI Chatbots becoming more intelligent, we will see new opportunities where the technology will bring seamless customer communication in small businesses as well as enterprises.

Well, what do you think?

If you are interested to read more about AI Chabot for businesses, here are some write-ups which we find useful:

1. Top 5 Chatbot Misconceptions: What You Should Know
2. 11 Myths You Must Know About Chatbot Implementation and Its Usage
3. 80% of Businesses Want Chatbots By 2020
4. Chatbot Use Cases
5. How NLP plays a role in deciding if your AI Chatbot is good or great

XIMNET is a digital solutions provider with two decades of track records specialising in web application development, AI Chatbot and system integration.

XIMNET is introducing a brand new way of building AI Chatbot with XYAN. Get in touch with us to find out more.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How to build an AI Chatbot for your business was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Creating a chatbot using the free open source Bot Libre chatbot platform

Businesses in today’s world thrive by serving their customers and making sure their clients are satisfied. When it comes to customer service, customers value their time and expect quick responses. Chatbots provide the ideal solution in today 24×7 world to service your customer service on the web, mobile, and social media.

There are many ways to create a chatbot, from using a chatbot platform, to hand coding your own solution. In this article we create a bot using Bot Libre, which is a free open source chatbot platform. Bot Libre makes creating a chatbot and connecting it to the web, mobile, and social media easy. No programming is required, and you can train the bot using natural language.

Here you can learn on how to create your own chat bot in 10 easy steps:

Click 1 — Bot Libre

First go to the Bot Libre website.

Click 2 — Sign Up

You can browse and chat with public bots anonymously, but to create your own bot you must create an account by clicking Sign Up. Creating an account is free and easy. To create an account, one only need to enter a unique user ID and a password. Your name and email are optional, if you wish to remain anonymous, you may do so.

Click 3 — Create Account

Click ‘Sign Up’ to create your account.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

Click 4 — Create Bot

To create a new bot click New Bot from browse. You can give your bot a name and description.

The bots you create on Bot Libre belong to you. When you create a bot you can specify the license you wish to share it under.

You can create a bot from the default template, or select one of the other predefined templates. Your bot will start as a clone of the template bot, and replicate its entire memory (brain). You can also fork your own bot, using it as a template to create other bots.

You can add tags to your bot, to help classify it, and help other users find it. Some relevant tags include ‘fun’, ‘business’, ‘help’, and ‘avatar’. The tags are entered as a comma separated list.

You can create either a public bot that will be accessible by other users, or a private bot that will be accessible only by you. You can control the users that can access and administer your bot.

You can choose if you want your bot to learn as it interacts with other users. If you disable learning, then your bot will only learn from its administrator when you ‘correct’ it, from chat logs you upload from the ‘Training & Chat Logs’ page in its ‘Admin Console’, or from AIML and Self scripts you add from the ‘Scripts’ page. Caution should be used in allowing learning, as other users may teach your bot offensive responses. Bot Libre provides a profanity filter, but it cannot catch everything. If you are creating a bot for business, such as for customer service, then you should disable learning.

Click 5 — Create

Click ‘Create’ to create your bot.

That’s it, your done, and we still have 5 clicks left.

You can now chat with you bot by clicking ‘Chat’. To find your bot again click ‘Search’ and search for it in ‘my bots’ (be sure to sign in first).

When you select your bot, you can click ‘Edit Details’ it to change any of its information. You can change your bot’s picture or choose an animated avatar from the ‘Avatars’ page under ‘Admin’. You can also connect your bot to Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Skype, Slack, Kik, WeChat, email, SMS, Alexa, or Google Assistant.

You can import response lists or chat logs. You can import data from the web and WikiData. You can browse your bot’s knowledge base. If your are technical, you can script your bot using AIML or the Self scripting language.

To link to your bot you can select it and copy its URL from your browser, this is its unique URL, or you can give it its own subdomain. You can also embed your bot on your website or blog, just click on ‘Embed’ and copy the code to your website.

You can also view this video on “How to create your own chat bot in 10 clicks” on YouTube.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How to create a chatbot without any programming was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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WhatsApp is the new buzzword for digital conversations as the post-pandemic world gets more digital-savvy and contactless shopping emerges as the new trend.

According to a Statista report, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform with more than 2 billion active users outranking Facebook Messenger at 1.3 billion and WeChat at 1.2 billion users. Not only this, it has become the world’s third-largest social networking platform after Facebook and YouTube.

Given the popularity and demand of this new messaging channel, businesses too have started to turn their ships, the WhatsApp way. Also, recent innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) make WhatsApp more profitable for businesses. AI-powered virtual assistants, also known as WhatsApp Bots have helped businesses engage, support, and serve their customers virtually while igniting a new spark of online sales, known as WhatsApp Commerce. It simply means:

Offering and selling products and services to customers on WhatsApp

Using WhatsApp Bot to assist and personalize customer’s buying journey

Delivering a high-quality customer experience throughout the conversation.

What are the Benefits of using a WhatsApp Bot?

• Establish real-time conversations with instant messaging
• Help customers to explore the entire product catalog in one place
• Provide a secure platform for conversation with WhatsApp end-to-end encryption
• Deliver top-class virtual support with personalized communication
• Strengthen the trust between the customer and the brand

How to figure out the best WhatsApp Bot?

• It should solve the preexisting sales/support problem that the business is already facing?
• It should communicate, personalize and empathize like humans.
• It should understand the customer’s context and intent.
• It shouldn’t ask to subscribe/register/install anything to use a WhatsApp bot.
• It should be easy to use without any technical/coding expertise required.

Now that you have already dipped your toes into knowing WhatsApp bots, their capabilities and benefits, let us explore the best WhatsApp bots that can help brands drive their online sales and support, like never before.

In this article, we are covering 6 renowned brands in India that are successfully using WhatsApp bots as a conversational channel for their customers.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

#1 Personal Shopper by Shoppers Stop

Shoppers Stop, one of the leading online shopping brands in India, offers seamless virtual shopping with Personal Shopper. It is a WhatsApp bot that answers all purchase/support-related queries at Shoppers Stop. If you are looking to shop online, you can directly WhatsApp your Personal Shopper with your requirements and they will help you find the best product with the best deals. It also provides a secure payment link via SMS to make instant and safe payments. Once done, your order will be delivered to you without you having to step out.

#2 Dottie by Indigo Airlines

Dottie — a conversational AI-powered chatbot has been designed to help customers with commonly asked queries. With Dottie available at your service, you don’t need to call customer care, you can find answers to FAQs on several topics such as revised travel mandates, baggage related queries, refunds, COVID-19 travel queries, flight cancellation, flight status, change booking, about credit shell, it’s usage and much more.

Not only this, but customers can also book a flight, web check-in, and perform an array of tasks related to their booking using this WhatsApp bot. The bot understands short phrases and keywords in a better way, so it is advisable to keep your query short while interacting with Dottie. In an unlikely situation wherein Dottie is unable to understand a customer’s query, it immediately transfers your query to a live agent to assist you better.

For example — To find out what you carry on our flights, try saying ‘conditions of carriage’ or say ‘baggage allowance’ instead of ‘Can I carry 30 kg as check-in baggage on my flight.’

#3 Mr. Simple by Tata Mutual Fund

Part of the Tata group, Tata Mutual Fund is the most trusted fund house in India offering a range of investment solutions for financial planning and wealth creation. With an investor base of over 3 million, the brand manages funds across the entire risk-return spectrum targeting investors of all ages and risk profiles. In such scenarios, providing top-class instant support to their customers became a critical factor for business success.As a solution to challenges like delayed response and a broken customer experience, Tata Mutual Fund introduced an AI-powered support bot known as

Mr. Simple. It brought a game-changing experience to TMF’s customer support by resolving 90% of queries end-to-end resulting in a reduction of call center calls by 67%.

Check out this Case Study to learn more about Mr. Simple and its contribution to TMF’s business

#4 MyGov Corona Helpdesk

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Government of India wanted a solution that would eradicate misinformation and empower citizens with the right steps to take precautionary measures and stay safe. The idea was to offer a 24/7 help desk that can answer all sorts of COVID-19 queries and help prevent the spread of false information.

Haptik, one of the world’s largest Conversational AI companies, accepted this challenge to handle and resolve the diversity of queries coming from millions of users across the country in English & Hindi. As a result, Haptik built the MyGov Corona Helpdesk, a WhatsApp bot that helped users check symptoms and get a diagnosis, provided tips and precautionary measures to stay safe, and shared the latest updates and advisories from the Ministry of Health.

Check out this Case Study to learn how Haptik helped India fight COVID with a WhatsApp Bot

#5 JioMart WhatsApp Bot by Reliance

JioMart is an eCommerce venture launched and run by India’s most valued firm, Reliance Industries. It is an offline to online grocery service that allows you to order online and the product is delivered to you from a local nearby store. JioMart offers a selection of 50,000+ products and processes over 250,000 orders per day.

With increasing orders every day, JioMart started experiencing 3x more traffic than expected. Soon, they realized an immediate need to automate and upgrade their customer support. As a result, JioMart built a WhatsApp bot that later emerged as the primary go-to channel for users to shop with JioMart. Also, JioMart observed that the WhatsApp bot is capable of resolving 88% of the queries with a reduction in response time by 62%. Some of the key use cases of this WhatsApp bot are Check Order Status, Delay in Delivery, Replacement Request, Refund Related Query, etc.

Check out this Case Study to learn how JioMart Handles 40% of Customer Support on WhatsApp

#6 WhatsApp Banking by HDFC

HDFC Bank is the second-largest private bank in India with a customer base of more than 19 million. With an objective to be available for customers 24/7 x 365 and provide uninterrupted customer service to everyone, HDFC too reaches its customers — the WhatsApp way, known as WhatsApp Banking.

HDFC WhatsApp bots help customers get information about their cards, important updates, regulatory messages, payment alerts, and a number of other banking queries like:

• What documents do I require for a car loan?
• What is the available limit on my credit card?
• What is my pre-approved loan offer?

5 Reasons why you should use WhatsApp Bot in banking

• It is available round the clock and even on holidays.
• All the messages sent on WhatsApp are encrypted and remain totally safe.
• Non-HDFC Customers can also use WhatsApp Banking for inquiring about the services of the bank.
• It is absolutely free. All you need is an active internet connection.
• Resolves almost all kinds of queries related to your account and associated cards.

Final Words

As WhatsApp commerce takes the center stage in the eCommerce journey of India, WhatsApp bots will play an extremely important role in shaping the future of Conversational Commerce in India.

So far, we were able to conclude the scope and capabilities of a WhatsApp bot. We also saw leading brands leveraging this AI-driven innovation to scale up their online sales and support performance. Now that you are also clear about the best WhatsApp bots in India, it is time to choose the best one for your business.

Surprisingly, the best part of a WhatsApp bot is that you can get it up and running in very little time. Unlike a website or app, which requires a long development phase, it is possible for a brand to deploy a WhatsApp bot, in as little as 7 days!

Interested to explore more about WhatsApp bots or want a WhatsApp chatbot for your business?

Interested to explore more or want to try out a chatbot of your own?

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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6 Best WhatsApp Chatbots in India was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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