Chatbot Development: Step-By-Step Guide in 2024

Businesses continually need to evolve and adopt newer trends to stand ahead of the competition. One of the current advancements they implement in areas like customer support, marketing, and sales are chatbots.

With the introduction of tools for chatbot development, we do not need technical or coding knowledge for making chatbots. 

This blog provides you with a complete guide to the best practices for chatbot development and introduces you to the best tool for building your chatbot. 

Click here to know What is a Chatbot?

What is Chatbot Development?

A chatbot is an AI-based software that simulates human conversations. They understand user intent, process their requests, and give relevant responses instantaneously.

They can be designed to interact via text as well as voice and can be deployed across apps, websites, and messaging channels like Whatsapp, Twitter, or Facebook Messenger. 

Chatbots can work by pattern matching, Natural language understanding (NLU), or Natural language processing (NLP). 

• Pattern matching: These chatbots use pattern matches to cluster the text to find a related pattern, and thereby generate an apt response for the user’s query. 
• Natural language understanding: These chatbots convert query text into structured data to understand the entities, context, and expectations. 
• Natural language processing: These chatbots convert query text into structured data for entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and dependency parsing. 

Chatbot development is a complex process. But an online tool like NotifyVisitors Bot Builder can greatly simplify it for the layman user.

However, you need to plan well, break the entire process into clear steps and execute those one by one. The next section provides comprehensive instructions in this regard. 

Step-By-Step Procedure for Chatbot Development

Here is a complete guide that gives you step-by-step instructions for developing your chatbot. 

1. Consider if your business would benefit from using a chatbot

Launching a chatbot would be good for your company if-

• You seek to stay ahead of the competition.
• Your team carries out many repetitive tasks routinely
• You get a lot of queries on the same topic 
• You want to lower customer service expenses
• Your customers seek your business outside your working hours and you want to provide them with round-the-clock support
• You’ll want to upgrade your marketing efforts 
• You want to automate generating and qualifying leads 
• You want to provide multi-channel customer support 
• You’ve multilingual customers

Apart from these, you also need to know the Return on Investment (ROI) on your chatbot. Only if implementing a chatbot would be beneficial for your business, you should launch one. 

2. Define the goals for your chatbot

Once you are quite sure that a chatbot is a right fit for your business, you need to plan your chatbot development. Ask yourself  two simple yet important questions:

• “How can chatbot solve my business issues?”
• “What role would the chatbot be performing?”

Based on the answer to these questions, you should define the goals of your chatbot. Its reply should be something like- “In 6 months time, the chatbot should have fully replaced 80% of all consumer service requests”. 

Also, decide the metrics which you’ll use to evaluate the ultimate success. Make sure it is measurable with analyzable actual numbers. 

3. Decide the niches where you can launch the chatbot 

For determining the areas where you can make use of chatbots, you need to evaluate and enlist those routine and time-consuming processes of your business.

Often, the apt areas for installing chatbots are repetitive client-facing processes. For instance, sales, technical support, customer service, sales processes, human resource and recruitment, where a recruitment chatbot can streamline the hiring process and enhance candidate engagement.

By automating these areas with chatbots, you will be having these digital assistants working on your behalf 24/7, responding instantaneously and tirelessly to customers. This will save you time, and make your assistance efficient and error-free.

Once you choose the niches, define the major customer intents for reaching out to your customer service. Then come up with sections with the most popular customer queries on the same topic.

For instance, you look at your customer request data and find that most of the interactions are about product shipping. You can group queries related to this under a single section “Shipping info”. Likewise, define other major sections. 

4. Select channels and languages

Now you need to ask the following questions to yourself –

–On which communication channels do you use chatbot automation? Website, Facebook, WhatsApp, or all of them? 

– In which languages do you want your chatbot to converse? 

You should answer these questions after considering the following: 

– Would it be cost-effective to develop a chatbot for the volume of customers this channel brings and the language they speak? 

– Whether or not the volume of customers from this channel / speaking this language is increasing? 

– Will this channel support you in a long-term plan? 

Also analyze each of the different marketing channels for request volume, strategic importance, ease of automation, and impact of this process automation. 

And based on your conclusions, make a list of the channels and languages for which you would like your chatbot to be automated. 

5. List the integrations

Your business would benefit by integrating your chatbot with other apps that you use. This will ensure a smooth and seamless flow of business processes. 

You could consider integrating your cloud storage tools (e.g., OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.), payment systems (e.g., Stripe, PayPal, etc.), ERP systems (e.g, Salesforce, SAP, Guidewire, Genesys, UI Path, etc.), CRM systems (e.g., Salesforce, Zoho, Hubspot, etc.), calendar (Calendly, Google Calendar, etc.), messaging apps (e.g., Slack, Facebook messenger, Chat Widget, etc.), maps (Apple Maps, Google Maps, etc.), etc. with your chatbot. 

While considering integrating your business line apps with your chatbot, analyze each integration for metrics such as time, ease, impact, importance, etc.

You can take the help of a chatbot development firm in this regard. For, you need technical expertise to evaluate these. 

6. Choose the right chatbot builder

While choosing a chatbot builder for your business, you need to ensure that it has the necessities required for smooth interaction.

Here is a checklist

• Advanced Natural Language Processing: This will help your bot understand user intent and respond aptly to their queries.

• Multilingual Support: If your business has international customers, you would want your chatbot to support more than one language. 

• Easy Channel Integration: The bot builder should facilitate easy integration with your marketing mediums.

• Easy Backend Integration: Your chatbot builder should help you build a bot that easily integrates into the CRM and ERP software that you are currently using.

• Enterprise-Grade Security: Your bot should ensure the highest level of security (encryption) for your enterprise conversations to safeguard your business against cyber-crimes.

• Sentiment Analysis: Having a chatbot with sentiment analysis will help you analyze how users are reacting and hence improve the experience.

• Hybrid Chatbot: Your chatbot should be able to seamlessly hand over situations that it can’t handle to human staff. This will reduce wait times in resolving customer frustration.

• Intuitive Dashboard: Your chatbot’s built-in dashboard should be intuitive to help track conversations, analyze the level of success, measure ROI, and comprehend the usefulness of the chatbot.

• Contextual Understanding: When your user asks a follow-up query, the bot understands the context without asking the previously provided info once more.

• Accessibility: The bot builder you choose should have a window that is accessibility compliant. 

7. Building your conversational UI

A user can use different words and sequencing to ask the same question. So, your chatbot should be sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the query and aptly respond to the user.

For the conversation to be successful, it needs to have a story and flow. So, build a content model for the conversation. This will enable your chatbot to give scalable answers. 

Since content models are context-independent, you can duplicate the same structure and model for other products. This depends on words, their meaning, and the comprehension of human language.

You would need to work closely with your chatbot development company to build your conversational UI. You also need to discuss with them and set clear KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), deliverables, and milestones. 

Also, discuss the part you will play in the entire chatbot development process. However, your important involvement would be focusing on your bot’s use cases.

Ensure that your chatbot’s conversational flow focuses on offering a helpful dialogue rather than concentrating on solving your business problems.

Create a logical dialogue flow based on the type of questions that your chatbot is likely to encounter. Define the information for each response in a detailed manner.  Design each dialogue flow to contain the exact response representations on each question.

The detailed answer designs should occur outside of the original flow design so that you can have variants of the same answers to a question. This technique is referred to as Random Prompting.

8. Add integrations and connect essential tools

Now integrate the chatbot with your current platforms and tools including CRM, ERP, payment, calendar, etc. Often, small tools have native integrations.

That is, you can link these without coding. But huge tools and platforms do not link with one another. For these, you’ll need a 3rd-party integration tool or a custom integration.

The systems that you look to link should have an open API (application programming interface). Often but not always systems have it.  So, ensure that the tools that you want to integrate you’re your chatbot have it. 

When you opt for 3rd-party integration tools, you’ll find several over the net. However, if you have a large volume of data points, it would be better to build an in-house integration to ensure cost-effectiveness.

NotifyVisitors Bot Builder

NotifyVisitors Bot Builder is one of the best chatbot building software available today. Businesses can build, train, and launch their customized conversational chatbot using it.

Its Artificial Intelligence empowers you to create a chatbot with its user-friendly dashboard and match user conversational flow easily. 

You don’t need to have coding and programming knowledge to build your chatbot when you have NotifyVisitors Bot Builder at your disposal. Here are some of its features-

• Pre-built chatbots: NotifyVisitors Bot Builder has several pre-built templates with different intent, conversation flows, and entities to choose from.

• Memory management: Its AI stores vital information from previous conversations for later use. This facilitates human-like conversation.

• Webhook: This facilitates adding connections to your API and link to external services.

• Rich media: You can incorporate cards, images, buttons, carousels, emojis, and quick replies in your chatbot interaction for a better user experience. 

• Machine Learning: Since the bot learns from each conversation, its interaction gets better with each conversation.

• Easy to make: NotifyVisitors Bot Builder lets you build your chatbot easily within a few minutes. 

Some of the top names using NotifyVisitors Bot Builder are Apollo Munich Health Insurance, Axis Bank, and Religare Health Insurance. 

Wrapping up

Employing AI-based conversational chatbots to automate repetitive routine tasks related to customer support, marketing, and sales is one of the advanced digital marketing trends.

This can simplify your tasks and free up time for teams to concentrate on core business activities. Chatbot development is a complicated process. However, if done properly, it can be a piece of cake.

Our blog has provided you with a set of step-by-step instructions to develop your chatbot. It has also introduced you to NotifyVisitors Bot Builder, one of the best chatbot building tools in the market.

Do follow our steps one at a time and make use of our chatbot builder to build your chatbot within minutes.

Also Read:

• What is Chatbot Marketing? A Complete Guide with The Benefits
• Types of Chatbots: To Scale Up Your Business
• Chatbots: 13 Business Benefits Beyond Customer Service
• 51 Best Statistics for Chatbots in 2023