Chatbot Implementation

📑 Chatbot implementation cheat sheet

Every business wants to be efficient, offer excellent customer experience, and — simply put — be successful. If you've been following our lessons, you know that AI chatbots can help with that. Not to mention that the rapid progress made in artificial intelligence makes chatbots more powerful with every sunrise. 

But to start off well with chatbot automation, you must first prepare. Creating a successful chatbot strategy might seem overwhelming, especially if you have yet to walk that path. The truth is that this task is easier than it seems, provided you use the right tool and follow proven steps. 

If you’ve just started your chatbot adventure or are about to deploy your AI agent, explore this chatbot implementation cheat sheet and learn how to succeed. 

What is a chatbot implementation strategy? 

A chatbot implementation strategy is a plan that outlines all the steps included in creating and launching a conversational agent. Such a plan involves defining the chatbot's goal and applied technology, designing a conversational flow, and integrating it into customer communication channels. 

An effective chatbot implementation strategy helps create AI agents that bring anticipated results and provide a positive user experience.

6 steps of a successful chatbot implementation strategy you can't miss

1. Identify the problem you want to solve 

Before you start the chatbot implementation process, pause and consider the business issues you hope to resolve using a chatbot. To do so, you can create a Miro board and categorize your problems by topic. 

Maybe you can't offer support after hours, have a low website engagement rate or your agents take too long to answer customer questions. By identifying and organizing your issues, you can determine how your artificial intelligence agent can help you address them and what needs to be done to achieve the expected results. 

2. Choose your channel 

Once you decide which problem you want to solve, it's time to select the channel for your AI assistant. This decision should depend not only on the addressed issues but your audience, too.

Your website is undoubtedly an obvious and universal choice, but maybe you should consider other platforms and social media — mainly if you sell to younger users. 

Data shows that over 50% of millennials and Gen Z consumers have discovered a new product on social media in 2022. Adding an AI chatbot to your brand's social media channels can help you to connect with the younger generations and build better relationships with them.

3. Define your chatbot KPIs

It's time to determine how you'll measure your bot's performance. Maybe you want to count the number of leads it generates daily and the support cases it solves. Or, you need to check how it impacts your website engagement. Setting viable goals will help you measure your chatbot service's effectiveness.

Remember that your newly implemented chatbot might not immediately fulfill all of your objectives. On the other hand, you might discover that it helps you achieve different business goals. Keeping an eye on your bot's performance will help you evaluate its overall impact and make proper adjustments. 

4. Design your Story 

You already know what problems you want to solve and have decided what goals you want to achieve by using a chatbot. Now it's time to write your chatbot script. 

While preparing your dream conversation between the user and the bot, consider what can make it unique. Does your chatbot need a personality? Should it be more formal or casual? Answering these questions will help you determine the characteristics your bot needs to display to engage your target audience. 

Moreover, it would be best if you also considered what message formats would be most effective. If your bot aims to attract the user, you can use conversational text replies and catchy images that can help you keep the user engaged. 

However, if you use the bot to help customers solve pressing support issues, it's better to use buttons or quick replies. They let you make the customer journey as brief as possible and help resolve support issues faster. 

5. Train your chatbot

Apart from writing a compelling script, you must ensure your chatbot understands the customer's intent and provides matching and appropriate responses. You can do that by feeding your AI assistant with all the possible topics it's supposed to cover.

Moreover, if you, for instance, want to answer the question "How to set up my account," you should provide your chatbot with all the possible synonyms and variations of that question so that your bot can better understand the context of the user questions. 

6. Run tests 

Last but not least, even if you feel you tied up all the loose ends, you still should test your chatbot thoroughly to ensure it functions as expected and meets your business objectives. If you are new to testing, jump over to our previous lesson explaining how to test the AI chatbot correctly. 

Ways to add a chatbot to your website 

Chat widget 

One of the easiest ways to embed a chatbot on your website is to use a chat widget. The chat widget is a ready-to-use chat window that can work as your bot's interface. You can customize its position on your website and tailor its look and feel to make it consistent with your brand style by:

• choosing the color of the widget,

• setting up the button style,

• selecting the style of the minimized chat window, 

• setting up a greeting,

• adding your bot's avatar and name.

To install the chat widget on your website, copy the widget's code and paste it before the closing </body> tag on every page where you want your bot to function. 

LiveChat 

Live chat is one of customers' most popular and convenient channels to connect with brands. It's also a perfect medium to host your chatbot. 

To add a bot to your website, you can use the native ChatBot and LiveChat integration. By connecting both products, you will get an additional AI agent that can work as the frontline of your customer support — it can answer repetitive questions and transfer chats to human agents only if they require advanced expertise. 

You can also use the bot as an after-hours assistant to serve customers while your team is off. And if the problem goes beyond the chatbot's scope, the customer can create a HelpDesk ticket for your support team within the chat window. 

Adding a chatbot to your live chat support can help you adapt to higher customer expectations. 75% of consumers say that response time is the most crucial factor impacting the customer experience. They also don't care how great your product or company is when they have a problem. All they care about is how fast you respond and solve their issues. Chatbots give you a chance to achieve that instantly. 

Other chatbot channels 

Shopify

Shopify is a robust ecommerce platform that lets you build digital stores and sell products online. Using a Shopify chatbot, you can solve minor customer issues and support potential customers through the buyer's journey. 

The bot can guide customers on your website, help them find products at your store, and let them know their order status whenever needed. 

Using the native ChatBot integration, you can implement a chatbot widget on a Shopify store without coding. 

Facebook Messenger 

Facebook Messenger chatbots can display a personalized welcome message to visitors on chat and answer their questions using pre-defined responses. They can provide your audience with your business information 24/7. 

To add a chatbot to your Facebook Messenger, use the out-of-the-box ChatBot integration.

Slack 

Slack is a messaging platform that helps remote teams stay close. By adding a chatbot to your Slack workspace, you can make your work even easier. 

The Slack bot can automate many workflows — onboard new employees, provide answers to FAQs, add events to your calendar, and send you reminders. 

Following this tutorial, you can easily add a bot to your Slack.

WordPress

WordPress is an open-source content management software that lets you create websites and blogs without coding. Adding a chatbot to a WordPress site gives you a greater chance to attract the visitors' attention and boost your website engagement. 

You can easily add a chatbot service to your site or blog in your WordPress admin panel. The installation is codeless and doesn't require advanced skills.

Let's roll! 

There're many ways to deploy a chatbot to your customer communication channels. The upside is that you can implement your chatbot without coding, thanks to the builders and integrations available at your fingertips. 

So, let’s go — the sooner you give your chatbot strategy a spin, the faster you'll see how it can help to boost your customer engagement, bring higher customer satisfaction, and lower customer service costs.