Chatbots are not just at the center stage of technology discourse, but also handling key business operations like customer service, thereby enabling businesses to gain an edge on the competition by serving customers promptly and efficiently, and not to forget cost-efficiently. Considering to create a chatbot for your business and delight customers? Don?t know where to start with? Well, here is a comprehensive guide on chatbot development.
Define the objectives of chatbot development
How do you want to serve your customers? Or what exactly do you want the chatbot to do for your customers? Take for example KLM Messenger chatbot. It helps passengers booking air tickets with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines to receive their booking confirmation, check-in notification, boarding pass and flight status updates via Messenger. Likewise, you must be nurturing an idea to help your customers. Make a list of the services that customers would be able to avail from your chatbot.
Work hand-in-gloves with your chatbot developers
If you are technically sound, you can design and develop your chatbot. However, if that?s not the case, hire a skilled chatbot developer to work on your project. Hiring alone would not be sufficient; rather you have to work with your chatbot expert as none other than you know what your business does and what your customers expect.
Your role is pivotal in designing the conversational flow of the chatbot. Dig your CRM (customer relationship management) software to understand what kind of information/services do the customers want, and how you or your customer service representatives deliver that.
Use the right chatbot development resources
Chatbots are categorized majorly as rule-based chatbot and AI-based chatbot. The former can serve simple purposes as such a chatbot responds to users based on the miss-and-match principle. The query of the user is made to match with the available database, and if it matches right, then the chatbot comes with a response. Otherwise, it simply says - invalid entry or input and urges users to rephrase their query.
However, the latter type of chatbots can handle complex queries as they are made up with NLP (Natural Language Processing)-based framework that can decode the context of the query. API.AI, Amazon Lex, Microsoft LUIS, IBM Watson Conversation, Wit.ai, are a few of the NLP-based chatbot development frameworks. As chatbots build with NLP support can interpret and decode intents of the users. Hence, they are often called as AI (Artificial Intelligence) chatbot.
How to make your chatbot easily accessible?
The messaging giants like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Line, and WeChat), also referred to as Big 4, have collectively over 3 billion monthly active users. Fortunately, all of these messaging platforms are offering the desired APIs to help chatbot developers to integrate their talking bot with them. Hence, integrating your chatbot with any or all of these is a good concept to make your chatbot easily accessible to your customers.
How much does it cost to build a customer service chatbot?
The chatbot development cost may vary based on the type of chatbot you want to build and its capabilities or features. Creating rule-based chatbot is simple as it involves less coding and sometimes no coding at all. However, if you want something as cited above, take refuge of NLP and AI. Creating AI chatbot demands multi-level designing, programming, and testing and, hence, it?s highly recommended to find the right chatbot development company. To have the idea of the chatbot development cost read our blog.
