What is a chatbot?

A chatbot is an automated software that can interact with people through messaging platforms. Despite being a computer program, a chatbot can mimic written or spoken human speech to simulate human conversations and human interactions.

Why are chatbots important?

Today, customers expect to get answers quickly and easily. If you don’t provide the fastest and most convenient way for your customers to get what they want, they will switch to your competitors at once (which in this digital era, they have many options to choose from). Chatbots can enhance customer online experiences and provide speedy responses. They offer automated assistance whenever your customers need it - at any time of day. Not only handle high-volume customer inquiries, but they can also increase your website conversion rates and generate more qualified leads.

Compared to building and maintaining a large team of conversational agents, chatbots cost little to nothing. Having chatbots as your digital assistants helps lowering service costs for your business without impacting customer satisfaction.

How do chatbots work?

When given a message, chatbots will run a series of algorithms to interpret and identify what the user said and determine a response accordingly. In simple terms, chatbots process the words given to them and provide a pre-set answer. A well-built chatbot can handle many directions of a conversation and maintain a smooth interaction.

There is a variety of ways you can build a chatbot. Depending on the needs and purposes of the business, chatbots can be designed to support customer service, collect information, or sell products.

Chatbots are built based on rules. These rules include what data needs to be processed and how, what conditions need to be checked, and what types of responses follow.

Chatbots can act based on click actions or by handling a particular keyword or group of keywords. For example, you could make your chatbot respond if the customer clicks the button “Make a reservation” but also if they type something similar to “I want to make a reservation” or “I want to book a table”.

Our tutorials for building chatbots are written into the following lessons:

• Lesson 1: Create and configure an automation template for the website
• Lesson 2: Create a scenario and entry block
• Lesson 3: Explore message types in a block
• Lesson 4: Navigate to the next block or next scenario
• Lesson 5: Process user response and navigate to the next block or next scenario
• Lesson 6: Advanced automation actions in a conversation
• Lesson 7: Trigger a scenario when visitors access a URL
• Lesson 8: Trigger a scenario when visitors click on an HTML element
• Lesson 9: Synchronize Website UTM with Contact UTM for tracking & segmentation
• Lesson 10: Best practices to build a chatbot

If you have troubles building your chatbots that are not mentioned in the articles above, please reach out to us via chat or contact us at support@boostcrm.io.