Category: Chat

How to Build a Chatbot from a Chatbot Template — A detailed guide.

Software is not always hard to build. Chatbots are an example! This is why companies are increasingly adopting its use, and it is predicted that by 2021, $5 billion will be invested in chatbots. If you’re wondering how to build a chatbot, you’re at the right place. Building a chatbot is pretty straightforward with a no-code chatbot building platform, but that’s just the technical aspect of it. For chatbots to enhance customer engagement, you need creativity too.

So how to build a chatbot that is engaging with its text and bound to qualify your leads? Chatbots are marketing tools; hence, conversations on chatbots need to be strategic. You have to ensure a conversational outcome that will enhance your sales in the near run, and chatbot templates facilitate just that.

WotNot has numerous templates that you can use for different business scenarios. Let me guide you through the process of building a chatbot on WotNot using a template.

How to build a chatbot using a chatbot template?

Let’s get started!

First, go to the WotNot home page and click on ‘Try for free.’

Register for free on WotNot’s code-free bot builder. Once your account is created, you can go to the bot builder on the left side’s navigation panel, as shown below.

After going to the bot builder, you click on ‘build a bot.’ You will get two options; either to build a bot from scratch or to build using a template. Click on ‘build from a template’ as shown below:

You will further get an option on where you want to deploy your chatbot- on the web, on Facebook, or WhatsApp. Click on the channel you want to deploy your bot to. Here, for example, let’s build for Web.

Once clicked, you will be loaded to the range of free chatbot templates offered by WotNot!

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?

Now let me guide you through the process of how to build a chatbot with four simple steps!

Step 1: Choose your template

Firstly, determine the motive of your chatbot. Is it to generate leads? Is it to book appointments? Is it to provide customer support? It largely depends on the industry you’re in. WotNot offers a range of free chatbot templates. You can choose an insurance chatbot template, eCommerce chatbot template, real estate chatbot template, etc.

Once you have figured out what you wish you accomplish, you can select your template. For the sake of this example, let us take a look at a schedule visit template for a real estate developer.

Step 2: Edit the template

Once you click on ‘use this template,’ you will be directed to WotNot’s bot builder with in-built script blocks for scheduling property visits.

Using drag and drop and connecting nodes, you can create a chatbot conversational flow and customize the template. Don’t forget to add details of your company such as:

• Your company name
• Property information such as images/addresses/phone numbers etc.
• A brief introduction to your property
• Attaching company brochure

If you want to add few more blocks in between or even want to remove certain blocks, you are free to do so.

While editing, you can also edit the bot to create enticing conversations using WotNot’s carousels, buttons, messages, and collect input features.

Step 3: Preview your creation.

You’re almost there! After adding your desired features, you can click on ‘preview’ in the top right corner.

Preview will show you what your bot will look like to the visitors. So, go ahead and have fun with it. Look for errors and check whether your bot fulfills your purpose. Keep editing till you’re content with it.

Remember to end the conversations by initiating some kind of action from the visitor’s end. The preview will look as shown in the picture below:

Step 4:Ready to Deploy!

Once you are satisfied with your bot, you can click on the ‘deploy’ button, which is right next to the ‘preview’ button.

Deploying your bot to your website is simple. You click on ‘channel configuration’ on the navigation panel on the left side. By clicking on ‘appearance,’ you can also change your bot’s look, including the background colour, header logo, header text, and Chat interface position.

To deploy the bot, you click on ‘configuration’ in the Web drop-down bar. You can add the URL of the site you want to deploy your bot to in the Website URL bar and then copy the snippet circled below and paste it before the <body> tag on every page of your website.

The process is as easy as it can get. Just like how you made a chatbot for real estate, you can build an insurance chatbot using insurance using a free chatbot template for insurance which facilitates lead generation for insurance policies. You can also build a chatbot for an eCommerce site using an eCommerce chatbot template for customer support that helps with tracking online orders, returning products, and speaking with a human representative.

Like how you built a chatbot for the Web, you can also learn how to build a chatbot for other platforms on multiple platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. Overall, remember to modify the template according to your brand image. It’s often not just the conversation that works but also matching sentiments to the brand and using a personalized tone. You need to aim at more value with a limited conversation.

Obviously, your bot will need to be updated with its use. It depends on what your visitors ask and what answers they need. But these free chatbot templates are an excellent introduction to all the benefits chatbots have to offer. Chatbot flow templates can save you time, give you an idea of developing scripts in the future, and increase your qualified leads. Now that you have a ready infrastructure with WotNot’s no-code chatbot building platform and the right chatbot conversation flow template, you really have no excuse not to try this out!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How to Build a Chatbot from a Chatbot Template — A detailed guide — WotNot 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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If there is a silver lining somewhere with the COVID-19 pandemic engulfing the globe, it’s that we have been forced to introspect on the healthcare sector, both public and private, and whether it has the tools it needs — not only to deal with such crises, but to ensure the best possible healthcare outcomes even under normal circumstances.

There can be no substitute for the inspiring efforts of doctors, medics and other healthcare providers, as the current crisis has demonstrated. But technology can play a key complementary role, enabling them to focus their energies more effectively, and amplifying the impact of their work.

Conversational AI has proven to be highly beneficial to a number of sectors. Chatbots and virtual assistants offer a seamless and engaging conversational interface that boosts the speed, efficiency, and accuracy of key business functions, as well as significantly enhancing end-user experience. All of this can be tremendously beneficial to the healthcare industry as well.

Based on Haptik’s experience of designing and implementing Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) solutions for a number of healthcare providers, we have identified two use cases in particular for which the technology can be implemented with relative ease, and help medical professionals treat their patients with even greater efficiency and care.

Information Dissemination

The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced a lesson that we’ve always known but often forget — the only things that spread faster than infections during a healthcare crisis are misinformation and panic. But even during normal circumstances, inaccurate or false information about health or disease-related issues causes harm to individuals and communities. This either prevents them from making the right decisions or actively encourages them to make the wrong ones.

The need to educate people about the facts behind a particular health-related issue, and to undo the damage caused by misinformation, does place an additional burden on medical professionals. A powerful tool for disseminating accurate and essential information to those who need it would definitely be a great asset, and that’s where Conversational AI can help.

An AI Assistant can answer common queries and FAQs related to a particular disease, health condition or epidemic. It can raise awareness about a specific health-related concern or crisis by offering swift access to accurate, reliable and timely information. All this in an engaging, easy-to-use conversational manner, across a range of digital platforms including websites, social media, messaging apps etc.

At Haptik, we’ve already witnessed the success of this tech-driven conversational approach to raising public health awareness. We recently collaborated with the Government of India to develop the MyGov Corona Helpdesk — a WhatsApp chatbot to answer a wide range of queries about the COVID-19 pandemic, including symptoms and transmission, preventive measures, official government helplines, and more.

Within the first 48 hours of its implementation, the MyGov Corona Helpdesk processed over 5 million conversations from users across the country.

The choice of WhatsApp as a platform was a key factor in ensuring the wide reach of this solution, given that WhatsApp is the world’s largest messaging platform, with over 400 million users in India alone.

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?

LEARN MORE:Haptik Develops WhatsApp Chatbot for Government of India to Raise COVID-19 Awareness

So it’s clear that an AI Assistant can be a force-multiplier to any awareness initiative, particularly when it is deployed on the right platform and easily accessible by its target audience (which, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, is everyone.)

In the long term, Conversational AI can serve as a virtual ‘healthcare consultants’ at any point in time — answering questions that millions of people across the globe have about major and minor health-related issues on a daily basis. It can also help them make more informed decisions about seeking further care. In this regard, a conversation with an AI Assistant would efficiently substitute the initial phone call you might make to your doctor to discuss your concerns, before making an in-person appointment.

Customer Care

When we talk about the healthcare sector, we aren’t referring solely to medical professionals such as doctors, nurses, medics etc. but also to administrative staff at hospitals, clinic and other healthcare facilities. They might be overtaxed at the best of times with the sheer volume of inquiries and questions they need to field on a daily basis. During a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, the situation can become almost unmanageable.

Enterprises have successfully leveraged AI Assistants to automate the response to FAQs and the resolution of routine, repetitive tasks. A well-designed conversational assistant can reduce the need for human intervention in such tasks by as much as 80%! This enables firms to significantly scale up their customer support capacity, be available to offer 24/7 assistance, and allow their human support staff to focus on more critical tasks.

The healthcare sector can certainly benefit tremendously from such AI-driven customer care automation. In fact, Haptik has worked with several healthcare brands to implement such solutions — one of the most successful examples being our work with a leading diagnostics chain, Dr. LalPathLabs.

Haptik’s AI Assistant, deployed on the Dr. LalPathLabs website, provided round-the-clock resolution to a range of patient queries. It facilitated a seamless booking experience by offering information about nearby test centers, and information on available tests and their pricing. It also provided instant responses to queries regarding the status of test reports. The latter was particularly important from a customer experience standpoint, given that there is understandably a lot of anxiety that surrounds an impending test report, which makes a swift response all the more appreciated.

The assistant we implemented for Dr. LalPathLabs interacted with over 400,000 customers within a few months of going live, and received an overwhelmingly positive response from users. Watch the video below to learn more about it:

Transforming Access to Healthcare

The two aforementioned examples highlight how healthcare providers can leverage Conversational AI as a powerful tool for information dissemination and customer care automation. But we’ve barely started to grasp the true transformative impact of this technology on the healthcare sector.

We’ve already discussed how AI Assistants can evolve into the first point of contact for patients seeking primary care, which would significantly reduce the burden on medical practitioners and allow them to focus their efforts towards patients with more serious concerns. This is a paradigm shift that would be particularly useful when human resources are spread thin during a healthcare crisis.

A concern that has been expressed when it comes to Conversational AI in healthcare is that it lacks one of the key attributes of a human healthcare provider — empathy. There is some truth in that, and no one can argue that AI Assistants should replace human doctors and nurses entirely!

LEARN MORE:How a Chatbot Can Help Your Healthcare Business

However, Conversational AI will get better at simulating empathy over time, encouraging individuals to speak freely about their health-related issues (sometimes more freely than they would with a human being). Woebot, a chatbot therapist developed by a team of Stanford researchers, is a successful example of this.

Accenture predicts that Conversational AI can save as much as $150 billion a year for the healthcare industry by 2026! So even from a purely dollars-and-cents standpoint, it makes sense for enterprises in this sector to invest in AI Assistants.

A time of crisis can also be a time of opportunity. In the midst of this unprecedented global pandemic, we now have a golden opportunity to appreciate the potential of new and emergent technologies to truly add value to our businesses, our health, and our lives.

Are you interested in developing an Intelligent Virtual Assistant solution for your brand?

Want to develop an Intelligent Virtual Assistant solution for your brand?

GET IN TOUCH

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Conversational AI in Healthcare: 2 Key Use Cases was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Natural Language Processing(NLP) and Natural Language Understanding(NLU), along with other technologies like big data analytics form the core part for providing great Conversational experiences.

Though these technologies have been there for many years, it is only recently that they have obtained the level of accuracy for being adopted by people.

In this article, we will understand how important NLP and NLU are across all of your customer service channels. But first, let us have a basic discussion about the customer service channels and the technologies we are talking about: NLP and NLU.

Understanding the different Customer Service Channels

Different customer service channels refer to the different mediums in which your customers can engage with you to solve their problems.

Phone calls, live chats, and ticket systems are some of the basic examples. However, other forms of channels like Emails, Knowledge bases, forums too provide great help.

The knowledge bases and forums don’t necessarily need to be manually accessed by your customers though, you can use conversational bots that get content from then and serve to the customer (more on this later!)

Another channel that is getting popular lately is social media and also messaging apps like Whatsapp to stay in touch with customers! As you may have predicted, those use conversational experiences.

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?

NLU and NLP Explained

Natural language understanding and natural language processing are very much related and have slight differences. If we talk about NLU vs NLP, one is concerned more about understanding the semantics and correcting the mistakes of natural languages while the other is concerned regarding understanding the entities in the language and splitting the sentences into tokens, etc…

While they might be rule-based initially, many recent versions of NLU and NLP technologies are increasingly being reliant on Machine learning, which are basically statistical models that learn to do all of the things by themselves without manually providing all the logic when large amounts of training data is given to them.

For once, let us think that you have no NLP & NLU across any customer service channels. Much of everything would have to be done manually by your customers. They need to solve their problem by themselves through Knowledge bases or by helping each other out through forums. When they are not able to solve the problem, you need to have dedicated staff personnel for live chat, forums and also answer raised tickets. This would be very costly and is also inefficient.

How NLP and NLU help to improve your Customer Service Channels

Rapid response

A customer service chatbot that is powered by NLP and NLU works really fast and can generate responses quickly! No more waiting for any customer service personnel to take up the request and solve it.

Localization

Today’s technology in NLP and NLU helps to provide conversational experiences in various languages. Not only a literal plain translation, but they would also translate the sentences in a way so that the original intent and tone of the statement do not change. With this, you can achieve a reasonable localization out of the box!

Sentiment analysis

Conversational experiences powered by NLP and NLU are not only able to understand the general meaning of what customers say but also their emotions. With sentiment analysis, your chatbots can clearly understand how the users feel about the service, and by analyzing many instances, they can provide general insights about the efficacy of the customer service.

Integrate knowledge from various sources

There are a lot of sources where useful knowledge exists for customers. Take knowledge bases and forums for instance. With your chatbot readily having access to them, it can easily fetch data that might be or might not be asked directly by the user.

Personalization

Chatbots do not only have immediate information regarding the customer but a pool of big data regarding you. With this information, it can easily determine what you need and tailor the entire experience in a way that suits you.

Less cost and low number of employees

Although you have to spend certain time and money on initial training, which is sometimes challenging, in the long run, virtual assistants cost fairly less than employing a high number of people for doing the same tasks.

Another main thing to consider is the varying volume of requests. In the traditional sense, if you hire employees, they are fixed and if an unusually high volume of requests come, they can’t handle and if a very low volume of requests come, they sit idle.

Virtual assistant software can easily work with any kind of volume: they scale up fastly when there is a huge need. With this, there would not be any kind of worrying about the volume!

Help customer service staff to perform better

Even Though the NLP and NLU enabled virtual conversational agents are very powerful, there would be some cases in which they cannot solve the whole issue. In that scenario too they would be useful.

The way they help is to present a complete picture of the problem to your customer service agent. That includes details of the conversation, sentiment analysis, and also, all of the appropriate data regarding the customer.

Along with them, there would be many other use cases for NLP in your customer service channels.

Final Words

Recent developments in NLP and NLU along with general artificial intelligence and machine learning have taken them to a level that is highly usable and economical.

Implementing AI-enabled conversational experiences in all your customer service channels provide a great advantage through rapid response, personalization and localization, integration of various sources of knowledge, and more.

In all senses, NLP and NLU provide great advantages in all customer service channels including Emails, Live Chat, Social media platforms, and others.

There are also a lot of platforms and NLP services that provide you out-of-the-box tools that you can easily use to develop your own conversational experiences that satisfy your needs.

Do this and improve customer service engagement and provide an overall positive customer service experience!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Importance of NLP & NLU Across All Customer Service Channels was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are many types of eCommerce AI chatbots available today that help with all different aspects of an eCommerce store. AI chatbots can boost sales and revenue by showing shoppers exactly the product they were looking for which was often hidden in complex menus, acting as a shopping assistant providing product recommendations, and aid customer support by immediately answering customer questions about a product, order status, and more.

An AI chatbot built for eCommerce is not that expensive and has a high rate of return. The average increase in revenues when a shopper engages with the chatbot is 20% to 40%. There are also other benefits such as an average reduction in support tickets of 25% to 45%. You can build your own eCommerce chatbot for free to $100 a month or have an AI chatbot company manage and train the AI starting at $500 a month.

In order to build a successful eCommerce AI chatbot, there are some important features and tactics to incorporate into your AI chatbot. While not all AI chatbot platforms are the same, you will want to make sure your AI chatbot has these basic features for your eCommerce store.

Conversational eCommerce Overcomes Sales Obstacles

Every shopper, whether online or in-person, has a question or two (or more!) when browsing products or learning more about your store and brand. Answering these questions in a timely manner can be the difference between winning or losing a sale. Shoppers make split-second decisions when deciding to purchase or not purchase a product so having a knowledgeable AI chatbot answer those questions immediately helps to overcome sales obstacles — leading to more sales.

The more knowledge you pack into your eCommerce AI chatbot the better so it can answer a wide range of shopper questions and inquiries. In addition, pay attention to how shoppers interact and what questions they ask the AI chatbot so you can make it smarter and smarter over time, becoming more efficient and boosting more revenue.

The AI should also be able to recommend products that the shopper is looking for as well as cross-selling other products that go along with the purchase. Shoppers often need a nudge in the right direction to make a purchase. This will not only increase total sales but also increase AOV (average order value).

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?

Reporting & Analysis For Business Insights

Your AI eCommerce chatbot is interacting and having conversations with your shoppers all day long. To improve and optimize your eCommerce business you need to understand your customers’ issues, wants, and desires. A good reporting system should tell you where shoppers are getting stuck in the purchasing process.

For example, if customers ask the AI chatbot a lot of questions on a particular page or about a particular product then you can see what those questions are and improve the product page by answering those questions in the copy. There is a lot of other information you can learn such as what customers compare your product to, trends in the market, site bugs, usability issues and many others.

Track Customer’s Order Status

By far, the most common question customers ask is “Where is my order?!?”. Delivery times vary widely; especially if the products are manufactured by the company. It is important to keep your customer up-to-date on when they should expect to receive their order. Yes, most eCommerce stores provide some sort of tracking number or process to track the order via an email alert or order confirmation but having your eCommerce AI chatbot provide order status when a customer comes back to your website is key to a convenient customer experience.

When your AI chatbot connects to your product database it has access to orders. This allows customers to enter their order number into the AI chatbot which then searches through the order system and retrieves the order status. The status of the customer’s order is then displayed along with a link to track their package through whichever courier is used. This reduces customer service tickets and frees your customer service team from being bogged down by repetitive order status requests allowing the team to focus and give more attention to higher-level customer support issues.

Recover Abandoned Carts Without Email Required

A key piece to boosting revenue through your eCommerce AI chatbot is reminding shoppers of the items left in their cart from a previous eCommerce store visit. Online shoppers love comparing prices among a number of different stores which leads to a high rate of abandoned carts. Prompting shoppers with items previously left in their cart as soon as they return to your site shortens the sales cycle and caters to convenience so shoppers don’t have to waste time re-building their order.

Capturing abandoned carts also gives the shopper a more personalized experience leading to more return customers. There are several ways eCommerce AI chatbots accomplish recovering abandoned carts including one technique: when the shopper returns to the site, the AI chatbot would display the items left in their cart prompting them to checkout instead of asking the introduction or opening question. This can augment your traditional abandoned cart with registered users via email.

The number of abandoned carts is much higher for those that have not registered increasing revenues as high as 30% for some stores.

Shopping Directly Through Your Chatbot

Online shopping has changed over the years and continues to evolve into a richer shopping experience. Soon shoppers won’t have to scroll through numerous static website pages to find the product they are looking for. With AI chatbots, shoppers can engage your eCommerce store in a conversation to help them find the right product for them.

AI chatbots try to mimic a conversation your shoppers would normally have with a salesperson over the phone or in person. Crafting that AI chatbot conversation correctly is crucial to the shopping experience and increasing revenue. Possessing the ability for shoppers to ask the chatbot for product recommendations then adding the product to their cart all through the chatbot window is a major driver for eCommerce chatbots boosting revenue.

AI chatbots are able to display the product description, image, and pricing for the shopper to review plus a button to add the product to their cart and a button to bring them to the product page for a further product review. eCommerce AI chatbots guide shoppers to the right product — quickly — then adding products to their cart — quickly — transforming the online shopping experience into convenience and ease.

Engaging Customers Wherever They Are In Their Shopping Journey

Every shopper has their own unique eCommerce shopping journey but, for the most part, all follow a general path or format. eCommerce AI chatbots help stores engage their customers differently depending on where they are in that journey.

For example, when a shopper lands on the home page the AI chatbot would ask an introduction or opening question: “How can I help you today?” Or a question about the problem they are trying to solve. Then, when the shopper goes to a product page the chatbot could display a few button options about popular product FAQs, product sizing guides, or social groups to join to connect to the product community.

Finally, when on the checkout page the AI chatbot could offer button options for warranty or shipping information to help the shopper feel more confident in their purchase. These tactics all help boost revenue by first guiding the shopper to the product they are looking for then overcoming sales obstacles at multiple points in the shopper’s journey.

When evaluating your shopper’s general journey try to identify those points where the AI chatbot could engage your shoppers in a helpful and non-bothersome way.

Conclusion

Adding an AI chatbot to your eCommerce store is a paradigm shift in how you engage with your shoppers. The key to success is always thinking about your customers’ shopping experience. Your eCommerce chatbot should help not hinder that experience. Your eCommerce store will not only increase revenues but your business will grow with the business insights you gain from the AI chatbot

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How To Grow Your eCommerce Revenue With An eCommerce AI Chatbot? 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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Slack is good for a lot more than sending hilarious cat GIFs to your coworkers.

Slack can help teams who are used to working at an office stay well while working from home.

Here are 16 Slack apps that will help you in promoting healthy habits and wellness for your team.

1. Trivia

Trivia is the new way to connect with your remote team while playing exciting quizzes and remote games on Slack and Microsoft Teams! Get summarised results at the end of every Trivia quiz and find your very own Quizzard!

2. Count It

Count.It hosts physical activity challenges for teams, and now you can bring all that action into your Slack @channels. Connect tracking apps/devices, get live notifications, check out the leaderboard, right from Slack.

3. Leaderboard

Track your office battles with Leaderboard App! Challenge your co-workers for a game of Mario Kart, Ping Pong, Table Football… And when you’re finished playing, report your score. Ready? set, go! Climb the leaderboard today and be the office champion.

4. Health Hero

Health Hero makes it easy to get the whole workplace to log their #meal, #move and #mind in the way that works for them. Using text or images just tell the Health Hero bot about that healthy meal, that morning run or that bit of meditation this afternoon and it will track your progress.

5. Motivation

Receive motivational reminders directly in Slack. Whether you’re going through hard times, need an extra push to get stuff done, or like sharing inspirational quotes with your team, Motivation has you covered.

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?

6. WFH Surveys

Taking feedback from your remote employees has never been this simple and effortless. Just a simple addition to your Slack app and you’re ready to sail. WFH Surveys helps you take feedback from your remote employees via AI-enabled interactive chat.

7. Good Job

Good Job‘s happiness tracker gives you the data you need to be happier at work. Track your workplace experience daily, to identify trends in what makes you happy and what causes you stress at work.

8. Gratitudely

Gratitudely is a simple, fresh way for your Slack team to keep a shared gratitude journal — a “gratitude wall”. Improve team well-being (boost morale, reduce stress, and more!) by keeping a shared gratitude journal.

9. Platterz

Integrating your Platterz account with Slack makes it effortless to keep your team updated and engaged with your culture programs. The Platterz app will automatically engage each employee with reminders of upcoming meals, and requests for ratings and preferences.

10. Gyroscope

Sitting in an office can be very unhealthy and cause people to have low steps each day. Gyroscope helps to fix this by building software to track your life, encourage workouts and make improvements to your health.

11. Icliniq

The Icliniq slack app is an extension of Icliniq, a leading online telehealth consulting portal for Slack Teams. For any team to use Icliniq, the admin has to authorise the app for their respective teams.

12. &frankly

The &frankly bot notifiers users about open questions they have to answer, and pushes the results to users, groups and the company in order to quickly see what is going on in the company and what you can improve.

13. blankit health

With blankitbot for Slack, your employees can ask questions about their coverage and get an immediate reply. Blankitbot for Slack responds to simple phrases like “”Do I have coverage for a root canal?” and “Can I include my spouse on the plan?” There’s no need to learn new commands to chat with blankitbot.

14. Kiki

In these extraordinary times, we’re all adapting to new ways of working. Kiki is here to help! Kiki helps teams perform regular check-ins and easily share responses. It’s 100% free-to-use, and quick to get started.

15. Joyride

Getting to know people on your team just got a lot easier. Joyride uses icebreakers and fun questions to keep the laughs coming. Team engagement skyrockets. When you add to Slack, a channel called #theride is created and your team is invited in.

16. enso

Meet enso — the first slack bot whose notifications will reduce stress, instead of causing it. Every once in a while he will remind you to pause and breathe. That’s all. And as simple as it may sound, it will turn out to be transformative in practice.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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16 Slack Bots to Promote Wellness at Your Workplace was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Have you ever wondered what the future holds for chatbots? The chatbot industry is growing exponentially, and many people are wondering whether or not they should invest in this new technology. In this blog post, we will explore the history of chatbots, their business applications, and how chatbots might be used in the future.

What is an AI Chatbot?

A bot is any virtual agent or software application that interacts with customers on social media channels by using either text or voice messages. “AI” stands for “artificial intelligence,” which means these applications have are given anthropomorphic properties so they can think like people do. Applications such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa all fit the bill of a chatbot.

Not all Chatbots use ai. Some can be pretty efficient with the help of conditional logic trees built by a human programmer. But the best chat solutions employ both the human-built touch and artificial intelligence.

Chatbots have many uses that range from helping you navigate your bank account to providing customer service for business customers.

Businesses often use them in industries such as healthcare, retail, and travel. Some popular applications include Hipchat bot (Atlassian), Alexa (Amazon Echo), and Facebook messenger bots (Facebook). Instagram also recently jumped on the chatbot bandwagon by releasing Instagram Automations.

Back to the Future: A Brief History of Chatbots and Ai

The first type of chatbot was created on May 13, 1966, by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab). The ELIZA program ran conversational text with a human user to simulate conversation while using keywords from an input dialogue to respond accordingly. It then replied to those inputs until it reached another keyword triggering a new response.

In 1973, a variation of ELIZA was created by Kenneth Colby at Stanford University called PARRY. Unlike ELIZA, PARRY simulated conversation with a human user and attempted to respond as if it were paranoid or schizophrenic in nature. Weizenbaum had programmed ELIZA using psychoanalytic principles from his studies at Harvard Medical School. He worked there between 1964–1970. He had developed an interest in psychiatry because of its close relationship to artificial intelligence research: “I felt that psychiatrists should be more concerned about AI than most.”

Since these first chatbots emerged onto the scene, any number of bots have been coded, including SmarterChild (1999), Cleverbot (2005), and AliceBot (2006).

Chatbots can be built and maintained by humans or artificial intelligence. And while many small businesses previously struggled to tap into these fast-moving technologies, new tools and platforms have emerged to help companies tap into these technologies.

Tools like ManyChat allow you to build conditional logic and intelligent chatbot automation for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and even your website using their visual builder tools. No coding experience is needed. They even offer a free course! You can also learn about ManyChat and use the platform on the Baby Got Bot YouTube Channel.

If you want to integrate ai into your ManyChat Chatbots, you can use tools like Janis AI or DialogFlow by Google to create your chatbot, train it with natural language processing and build an engaging experience for customers.

Another excellent tool for those in the Restaurant industry is Feebi which is ai built specifically for the Restaurant industry. Feebi allows the chatbot to answer up to 80% of chat inquiries that come in and quickly hands off messages that need the human touch.

Also, for Restaurants, there is an all-in-one platform called Tap The Table, making a fully integrated chat automation strategy a breeze.

These tools make it easy for companies to start using Chat automation to help more customers and land more business.

Many businesses wrongly believe that chatbots are annoying and may scare customers away, but the numbers tell a different story. The vast majority (87.2%) of consumers have neutral or positive experiences with chatbots (Source: Drift). Additionally, the average satisfaction rate of bot-only chats is 87.58%. This is almost two percentage points higher than the satisfaction rate for conversations that get passed over to human agents! (Source: Comm100)

The vast majority (87.2%) of consumers have neutral or positive experiences with chatbots

Businesses that are not utilizing chatbots cite a lack of knowledge about the technology and its potential. In addition, some companies may worry that bots will replace human employees. Still, in reality, they’re more than happy to work alongside their robotic counterparts — especially when it comes to repetitive tasks where humans excel.

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1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

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3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

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

Use Cases for Chatbots

Let’s explore how companies use chatbots today to help customers, drive sales, and become more efficient.

Chatbots drive sales:

By 2023, $112 billion worth of eCommerce transactions will be made via chatbots. By leveraging push factors to drive retail sales and upselling certain products, the power of a Chatbot can help your company reach new levels in both online marketing and cart recovery notifications which keeps customers coming back for more. As Juniper Research predicts, it’s only going to grow exponentially from here on out!

Using abandoned cart chatbots alongside Messenger boosts eCommerce revenue by 7–25%.

Chatbots can also help recover lost sales with the help of abandoned cart automation. According to Chatbots Magazine, using abandoned cart chatbots alongside Messenger boosts eCommerce revenue by 7–25%. And Consumers are not turned off by chatbots either. Approximately 74% of consumers say they use chatbots to research or buy products and services.

Kia is one such company that is using Messenger bots to drive engagement and sales. Users can interact with Kia’s ‘Kian’ by searching ‘Kia Motors America’ in the Messenger app. Kian began as a promotional tool during the 52nd Super Bowl in February 2018 for the new Niro car model. Since then, Kian has expanded to handle any of the questions that a salesperson would be able to answer. Kian can also help with roadside assistance, bill payment, and locating a Kia dealership near you.

The Kia Messenger bot sees 115,000 users per week on average and gets three times more interactions than the Kia Website. Octane AI developed Kian in conjunction with CarLabs and mobile agency Ansible. Learn more about this case study at https://digiday.com/marketing/personalization-allows-media-optimization-kia-seeing-3-times-conversions-chatbot-website/.

Chatbots simplify customer service support and answering FAQs.

Chatbots can help take a huge chunk of the burden of customer service and inquiry off of human agents, plus save a company thousands of dollars. Chatbots can save businesses as much as 30% on customer support costs. (Source: IBM).

A great example of a FAQ and customer service support bot is Evernote. The Evernote Chatbot was created using Sprout Social and helps customers with technical issues, customer support ticket status, and feature requests. It also Prompts customers for the information that agents need to assist the customer (e.g., ticket number, version number), making the chatbot to human handoff efficient and straightforward.

The Evernote chatbot has been a success with a reported 18% decrease in replies sent per conversation, and an 80% increase in customers helped on Twitter (this is a Twitter chatbot). (Source: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/case-studies)

Another company that found profound success with a chatbot is Charter Communications. Charter Communications found a way to save its company money and time by switching to an automated chatbot. Before, they received 200,000 live chats per month, with 38% of these being forgotten passwords or usernames for services that can be handled automatically through the bot. When Charter switched over, it only took six months before there was 300% ROI, and the bot managed 83% of all of the chat communications! (Source)

When Charter switched over, it only took six months before there was 300% ROI, and the bot managed 83% of all of the chat communications!

Chatbots for lead generation:

When a company creates an engaging chatbot experience on their website or social media page (and gets shared), this helps create leads for companies without using advertising dollars. 55% of businesses that use chatbots generate more high-quality leads. (Source: Drift)

One of the easiest ways to drive lead generation and sales is through a Facebook Messenger bot and a comment growth tool. The Comment Growth tool enables a Facebook business page to automatically initiate a Messenger conversation after a user comments on a page post. This means you can make money directly from your Facebook posts, and even better, you can track the user and the sale from beginning to end.

Book Tickets To Events/Shows With Chatbots

Chatbots are used to purchase tickets. For example, built into Ticketmaster’s mobile app, users can chat with a bot which then helps them navigate their way through the purchasing process and ensures they get the best seats possible for their budget! The Ticketmaster chatbot utilizes natural language processing to help users search for tickets and purchase them. Payments happen via lined Credit Card or Gift cards right inside the app, and e-ticket and receipts are delivered instantly in the user’s linked email account. The Ticketmaster app is made more intelligent by using Google Dialogflow ai technology. (source: https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow/docs/case-studies/ticketmaster)

Use Chatbots to book appointments.

Many businesses are using chatbots to help manage customer inquiries and book appointments. For example, Sales Rabbit Is a company that books meetings for sales teams. They were using a form that then exchanges emails between the rep and prospect. After switching to a chatbot, they can qualify leads and immediately book time on their sales team’s calendar. SalesRabbit has a 40% lift in the conversion rate of requests to meetings held and a 50% increase in qualified leads. source https://www.drift.com/case-studies/

These are only some of the ways chatbots are helping businesses and consumers alike. No matter what industry you’re in, there are likely many ways your business can be helped by using Chat automation with bots! As We say in the chat marketing industry, “There is a bot for that.”

The Future of Chatbots

Chatbots will continue to grow in popularity and increase their use cases. They will be used as customer service, sales assistants, among other tasks. The chatbot market size is projected to grow from $2.6 billion in 2021 to $9.4 billion by 2024 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.7%. (BusinessInsider) More Businesses will adopt this technology, with 80% of businesses expected to have chatbot automation by the end of 2021. (Outgrow).

The chatbot market size is projected to grow from $2.6 billion in 2021.

And with more messaging users than actual social media users already here and that number to continue to grow, the future of chat is bright. We’ll see how this technology evolves, but one thing is sure: business applications lie ahead for those who invest now!

Are you ready to learn more about Chatbots? I have many resources for you to explore!

• Free Chat Marketing and Automation tutorials on Baby Got Bot YouTube Channel.
• My other Chat Marketing Services can be found at www.StellarMediaMarketing.com

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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A Beginner’s Guide to the History, Business Applications, and Future of Chatbots was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I can say for sure that many of us have already noticed the increase of Amazon Echo users worldwide. This means more people will use Alexa Skills, which means more users for those who create Alexa Skills.

But, creating successful Alexa Skills is not that easy. You may have the best idea for a Skill, but it won’t reach enough users or probably none if not executed correctly.

What to consider when you want to learn to create Alexa Skills?

There are a few things to consider when creating an Alexa Skill. Starting from the type of Skill you will build, to its design. In between, you will have to take care of the customer journey, its conversational capabilities, and the quality of the content provided to the user.

So, the next time you ask yourself how to create an Alexa Skill, these are the main checkpoint you will need to go through. This is where Ipervox can help you with an entire course dedicated to the process of creating a successful Alexa Skill, along with use cases and best practices.

What’s in it for you with Ipervox

The voice world is filled with apps from individuals & companies that can make your life easier.

They do so by letting you communicate in a way that’s more natural and efficient. Voice technology has changed the way we connect — and it’s only going to get better.

In our increasingly voice-driven space, it is of the utmost importance that you are included in the growing voice market. And we have no doubt you already know that. However, you should consider that voice apps are being used around the world to improve every service we already use — and even offer new ones — through voice commands.

What Ipervox offers in its courses is the possibility to start learning more about how voice applications work, how to create one, and their potential.

Here are the phases you can go through:

Learning the basics of Alexa Skills

With Ipervox, the first step in your learning process to create Alexa Skills is the free training called “Play with Ipervox”. It is constructed in such a way, it will allow you to learn the internals of how a voice application works. To make things easier to understand the course is focused only on Alexa Skills.

This first course is separated into 9 different chapters, explaining different steps to follow during the Skill development, which is focused on:

• How to navigate the Ipervox Dashboard during the development process.
• How to create a new Alexa Skill, how to name it, and the type of Skill you can create.
• The variety of content you can add to your voice app and how to channel it.
• How to test your Skill, send it for approval by Amazon, publish it and later on analyze its performance.

Of course, everything mentioned above you can complete using our platform. Here you don’t need to have coding knowledge since it has been simplified to make the development process available for everyone. However, if you want to do so, you will have the option available.

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1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

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3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

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

Taking the first steps towards successful Alexa Skills

With this course, called Voice Tech Starter, you will go deeper into the voice development space.

You will learn how to create and implement a Voice Application in your business using the right tools for your industry and sector. You will know the features an application should have, how to engage with users, and set up your product for success in a competitive market.

In this course, you will learn about topics like:

• Why Voice & Why Alexa.
• Are Voice Apps Ok for every business category?
• Principles of Voice Designing.
• Choosing the best activation phrase.
• Numerous case studies to take into consideration.

This, along with the needed materials & tools to put into test your newly acquired capabilities.

Mastering the process of creating Alexa Skills

If you want to build your own voice applications and get ahead of the competition, then this course is for you. It’s packed with with more than 60 lessons in which we cover everything from planning to testing. We have included all the relevant videos so that you can learn how to plan, build, and promote a successful voice application. It’s also really well-designed with a great course layout that makes it easy to navigate and follow along.

Here you will learn about how to:

• Find the best voice application needed for a specific brand or business.
• Find the right kind of content the voice app will contain.
• Create a Voice Project from scratch.
• Create the customer journey throughout the voice app.
• Create a unique yet helpful experience for every user.
• How to create voice apps for marketing or monetization.
• How to use a voice app for lead generation.

Voice search is becoming a growing trend. It has taken off because it’s convenient and the best way to navigate through web pages. Voice-based search is useful for older audiences as well as younger generations.

To become discoverable by voice-based searches, web content should be optimized to sound like what people say when they ask a question. This means using keywords that match the user’s actual query and making the search results sound similar to the way people speak.

Well, do not worry since this course covers it also, with topics like:

• Understanding how voice search works.
• Successfully optimize content for voice search.

Now it’s your turn

Voice is a new technology that has been integrated into almost every device in our lives, from computers and televisions to phones and cars. Thanks to the proliferation of smart devices, voice commands have become a critical part of our everyday lives. Voice is not only used in our homes and offices but it can also be used on our phones, cars, and even appliances as well.

This is where having a deep knowledge of this industry comes in handy, especially for companies that are looking to create a voice strategy for their products. You can also create a new career path with a focus on voice application development.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Where & How To Efficiently Learn to Create Alexa Skills The Right Way was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.