TOPICS: Chatbot for Businesses   Chatbot for Website   Chatbot for Lead Generation    Building a chatbot   

Chatbot Development – Most Important Things to Know When Building Your First Chatbot

So you’ve made the decision to start chatbot development for your website. Great! You’re ready to equip your business with an ultra-efficient tool for lead generation, sales, marketing, and customer support. But it’s important to remember that just introducing chatbots to your website won’t automatically get you the results you’re hoping for. Like with every other process that is part of your workflow, chatbot development has some best practices that you need to keep in mind, especially while building your first chatbot. Here’s a quick run-through.

1. Know your customer’s goals.

It goes without saying that your customers’ needs and preferences have a big part to play in shaping your business decisions. Even so, a number of business owners end up neglecting this aspect in their first attempts at chatbot development. It’s easy to implement a fast-made free chatbot with minimum questions and answers. But if it doesn’t give your customers what they want and need, your new chatbot won’t be a value addition to your business.

When you identify and understand your customers’ goals, you’ll be able to predict the most common questions that they tend to ask, come up with answers to those questions, and thereby create conversations aimed at meeting your customers’ end goals.
Certain chatbot development platforms, including VirtualSpirits, offers Artificial-Intelligence self-learning feature to their software that can help your chatbot learn from conversation with real visitors and improve overtime.

With more and more consumers choosing to get support via instant chat rather than a phone call, it’s becoming all the more important for business owners to approach chatbot development with a focus on addressing their customers’ specific goals.

2. Know why you’re choosing to create a chatbot.

Yes, we did start this article out by congratulating you on your decision to create a chatbot for your website. And yes, chatbots almost always make for inexpensive ways to generate leads and offer customer support. But continuing our discussion from the previous point, every business owner must realize that an incorrectly or inadequately developed chat script is never the answer.

Know why you would like to add a chatbot to your website. Is it because each of your competitors has one, too? Do you feel like you’d be left behind if you don’t? If you’re answering “yes” to any of these questions, think again. A chatbot is an asset only if it responds to your customers’ needs and thus helps your business create good impressions. As such, you shouldn’t just create a chatbot for the sake of creating one, or to feel like you’re following the market trend.

Rather, create a chatbot that fills a gap in your business, helps you reach out to a larger group of customers, gets a specific message across to them, invites them to engage more with your business, and so on.

3. Understand that no chatbot starts out as perfect.

Online chatbots are a lot like us humans in that sense! They start out as basic applications with a bunch of missing links and information gaps. But the AI that drives them eventually fills those gaps and helps you optimize them for your business. So don’t worry if the transcripts of your chatbot’s conversations with your website’s visitors don’t seem ideal at first. The more it gets to talk to your visitors, the faster it’ll learn and the better it’ll be able to respond to their questions.

I believe that "A good chatbot is a chatbot that never stop learning!"

4. Don’t waste time building chatbots from scratch.

The sooner you recognize this, the better. Unless your business involves working with AI or software development, it’ll be practically impossible for you to create a chatbot from scratch. At the very least, you’ll end up spending way more time, effort, and money than you would’ve liked to. More often than not, business owners who take chatbot development into their own hands end up with error-ridden applications that require more time and more work before they can be ready to talk to visitors.

Instead, focus on the areas of your business that need your specific skills, and leave chatbot development to the experts. Use a chatbot platform that can build you a great chatbot in quick time. Most of these platforms also offer post-development support, which will help you iron out any issues that your chatbot application faces, and get you en route to achieving your goals.

Follow our blog to discover how businesses around the world are building chatbots for customer service, sales, marketing, and other purposes. Should you wish to create a chatbot for your own business, a member of our team will be happy to assist you.