Shifting the focus to one of the previously mentioned uses, chatbots can be very beneficial to building your website. It’s a tad complicated to incorporate it, but once you’ve done it, you’ll definitely be happy with what you’ve done.
Choosing a Chatbot – Recently, a lot of new chatbots have been popping up left and right. Find one that you think works best with your website. Such as Dialogflow or IBM Watson Assistant.
Design the Conversation Flow – Essentially, define the purpose of your chatbot, as well as the questions it’ll have to answer, the information it can provide, and the actions it can perform.
Train the Chatbot – This is arguably the most important part of the process. Without training, your chatbot will be about as useful as the ironically named Cleverbots of old. You can train your chatbot by using relevant data from your website or by talking to it directly to prepare it for the questions it may be asked.
Integration – This part is easy. The instructions for integrating the chatbot into your website should be listed on the chatbot’s page itself. It usually involves adding a script or embedding a chat widget into the code.
Test and Iterate – Test the chatbot thoroughly to make sure it works as intended. Remember to make adjustments to it as time goes on based on customer input and data analysis to better satisfy your users.
Remember that developing a chatbot requires constant maintenance and updates. Chances are, it’s not going to be all that useful at first. After a few iterations though, it should be able to completely satisfy all your users needs.
It’s also worth noting that, on occasion, chatbots can go a little off the rails and generate inaccurate information or nonsensical answers. This is mostly unavoidable, but you can monitor and review its performance to make sure it actually aligns with your business goals.