Unleashing the Power of AI Chatbots: A Guide to Building Smart Conversational Assistants for Your Business
The year 2019, what a time to be alive! Warehouse Robots, Drone Deliveries, and Artificial Intelligence-Fuelled Smart Chatbot.
It paints, It draws, It talks… It’s Alive!! Microsoft’s Xiaoice chatbot is now designing images and patterns on fabrics for international fashion and garment producers.
‘Can machines think’?- asked Alan Turing in 1950. And the product was Eliza, the first chatbot.
Come 2014, apparently, computer AI passes the Turing test in the ‘world’s first’. Alan Turing Would be turning in his grave after reading this news.
Fast-forward to 2019, we have the grandkids- Siri, Alexa, Zo and many more.
Chatbot technology has come a long way from the yesteryears when one of the first chatbots came into existence.
Today, chatbots are becoming ever smart. They also have names, voices, personalities, and their own distinct characteristics.
With constant advancements, chatbots are turning into indispensable assets rather than privileges for businesses and users alike.
Almost 80% of respondents participating in a study said they already used or planned to use chatbots by 2020, read Business Insider news report.
In fact, most of us have already interacted with some sort of chatbot or smart bot at some level in our life
- (i) But were you able to distinguish that you are not interacting with a human but a smart bot?
- (ii) And how satisfied were you with the service provided by the chatbot?
The technological advancements aim to bridge the gap towards such questions.
If you are planning to implement a chatbot in your business, take a moment and weigh in on the possibilities before making the decision.
This blog article will try bringing forward a few basic fundamentals that will help you to decide the type of contextual conversational chatbot you require for your business.
8 Fundamentals Questions to Tackle Before Building a Chatbot
Before you start digging into the ‘How and When’ of your Chabot program, you need to figure out the ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘why’.
- Why do you need a chatbot?
- What purpose it would serve for your business?
- Who is the target audience it would interact with?
- What kind of chatbot are you looking to build?
1. Type Of Chatbot
The quest to conjure a virtual problem-solving smart chatbot for your business starts with identifying and mastering the few fundamental elements necessary to build a chatbot.
Creating a chatbot for your business can be an exciting prospect.
However, It is very easy to get sidetracked or overwhelmed and go overboard. Ask yourself about what type of chatbot you are looking for.
Would a simple scripted bot do for you or do you really need the presence of a Generative AI based smart chatbot for your business?
Would you like a chatbot that provides the answers to the customer’s product-related queries, just like WooCommerce ChatBot Using OpenAI (ChatGPT) LLM?
2. Pros and Cons
Gather the scope of the chatbot technology for your business and in your industry.
Weigh the pros and cons of deploying chatbots in your business from a both structural and financial point of view.
Find out the real need to implement the technology and also if the path laid ahead to reach it really outweighs the odds.
3. Identify your audience
If you don’t understand your customers/audiences you cannot think from their perspective.
You can only increase the customer satisfaction index by dwelling in their minds. Who is your target audience?
Is your chatbot meant for professionals, casual visitors or patients?
The type of audience you wish to serve has its own set of complexities and queries. Keeping your customers should be your first priority to draw attached strings with each other.
4. Look for the need and Identify The Purpose
If you do not have a purpose you don’t what you are aiming for. It is crucial to identify the purpose which the smart chatbot would be serving for your company.
The purpose would eventually define the techniques and technologies you would need to build yourself a virtual smart bot.
Understanding the need to deploy a chatbot in your business and exploring the purpose it is meant to serve can help you reap the most from the technology.
5. Create a Personality Not Just a Robot – Choosing a distinct personality
Customers want to be felt like their concerns are being listened to, even if they know they are interacting with a chatbot.
Build your chatbot from a humane perspective. Give it a personality. Choose a Name and Gender.
Imbue it with certain traits that define your target audience such as wit, emotions and other characteristics to ensure customer engagement.
Incorporate small perks to fine-tune its personalities such as greetings that change according to the name or geographical area of the interacting customer.
6. Managing Conversational flows – Give it Vocabulary
Your smart Chabot won’t appear so smart if it lags behind the fundamental understanding of managing the flow of Conversations.
Even a simple phrase can be interpreted in so many ways in human language.
But How will the chatbot decide which is correct?
An AI-based smart should be able to understand the intent of the speaker and keep up with the conversation.
How will you enable your chatbot to find the intent of the customer?
Incorporate relevant interactions such as alternative questions or selecting choices for the customers that can help the chatbot to identify the correct query entered by the customer.
Design elements to help the chatbot to identify the intent of the customer.
Equally important is the fact that the chatbot should be able to follow the course of the conversation to decide.
If chat is being handled as per the user’s intent or if it needs to be transferred to a human agent.
7. Employing the Right Technology
Technology would become the cradle, crib, and school for your chatbot.
It fits at the core of your chatbot project. The technologies you employ would determine the type of conversations that your chatbot is able to handle.
Technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) help your chatbot to understand and process human languages bringing them closer to understanding the intent of the query maker.
Others such as machine learning allow it to learn from experience and previous responses making the chatbot more efficient with time.
Then, Generative AI (GenAI) technology helps you provide descriptive content, for example using Magento 2 ChatGPT, the online store owners can automatically create product descriptions.
Identifying the complexity of the potential customer queries and mapping them with various scenarios can help you create a roadmap for the chatbot to fetch the correct answer for the given query.
8. Testing Before Deploying
This one goes without saying. Since AI-Based Chatbots learn from experience, a rigorous testing environment is necessary to provide a learning curve for the chatbot.
The more queries and real-life situations it is fed with, the more it adapts towards the customers’ behavioural patterns.
Monitor the performance of your chatbot during testing and make necessary changes to further enhance it.
Before you start building the code to put life into your chatbot, you need to ensconce yourself into a definitive position to take action.
Get your focus caps and start with the essential questions about the whole program. Gather a thorough knowledge of every aspect of your endeavour.
2019 and Beyond for Chatbots…The Question and The Verdict
The primary driver for the adaption of any technology is its accessibility.
As mobile and internet penetration increases around the world, so will the accessibility to new technologies even in remote areas around the world.
The year 2018 saw big announcements in the AI and Chatbot sector. Moreover, investments in cognitive and AI technologies are expected to grow to $52.2 billion in 2021.
With the added advantage of being available in the palm of a hand, the chatbot technology would eventually become a virtual helping hand in the daily life of people.
The advancements themselves are potent for great growth in the coming years.
However, there are already so many firms that claim to build AI-based chatbots for clients. But half of these are just semantically the same as scripted bots.
If this trend continues, one can easily see the bell curve reach its tipping point in the next few years. There may come a point of market saturation like the video game crash of the 80s.
Alternatively, if proper principles are defined beforehand regarding the usage and implementations of this technology, we can witness qualitative leaps in the sector with the evolving AI Field.
Implement AI Based Chatbots in Your Business with Webkul
Van Baker, research vice-president at Gartner, predicts – “By 2020, over 50% of medium to large enterprises will have deployed product chatbots.”
Read the Gartner news report.
Chatbots will soon become essential to set a new benchmark for the customer experience index.
Taking a step towards implementing chatbot technology in your business can help you prepare for the next generation of digital customers.
We have years of experience with various chatbot frameworks like OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Bot, Google BARD, Dialog, TensorFlow, and RASA to help you create the perfect chatbot for your business.
You can send your requirements to sales@webkul.com, also if you have any queries or suggestions, please post them in the comments below.