Isn’t it just about time to build a chatbot, don’t you think?
Building a chatbot is becoming easier and easier every day, but one of the biggest obstacles when building a chatbot (and well, anything else) is not knowing exactly where to start or what to do. No matter how easy building a one is, it’ll always feel difficult if you don’t have a guide about what to do.
We know how frustrating that is, which is why we’re equipping you with the list of things you need to do in order to successfully build a chatbot:
1. Determine Your Bot’s Purpose
Before starting building your bot, you have to settle on why you’re building it. Is the bot meant to improve customer service? Is it meant to drive sales? Do you want it to market for yourself?
There’re so many reasons why you might need a chatbot, and deciding on a purpose for your it is the first and most important step you need.
2. Decide Your Bot’s Type (e.g. Rule-based / AI-based)
Next, you need to decide on the type of your chatbot. There’re three main types of bots: Ones that use buttons to interact, ones that respond according to specific keywords, and ones that use natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to interact with the user.
Deciding the type is crucial for you to be able to decide on the rest of things concerning your chatbot.
3. Choose Which Channel You’ll Build Your Chatbot On
There’re a lot of channels for your chatbot to be present on, such as: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Your website (webchat), Twitter, Slack, Telegram, …. and the list goes & goes until even Google Assistant and Alexa.
Deciding in advance what channel your bot will be on will help you with a lot of later details, as features may differ from a channel to another, especially that the channels are usually the first thing bot builders ask about.
4. Decide on Which Platform You’ll Build Your Chatbot
After you choose which channel(s) you’ll build your chatbot on, it’s time to get to building it. And the first step to do that is to decide which bot-builder platform you’re going to use.
Choosing the platform mainly depends on your requirements, the platform features, the channels the platform support, and the newness of the technology it uses.
5. Determine Your Bot’s Persona
You have a personality that defines you, and so should your chatbot. Determining who your bot is makes all the difference in how it interacts with the audience. Defining your bot’s persona should come from what is your business and who your customers are.
Below is the Brand Personality Framework, it should help you with deciding on your brand and bot’s personality.
The bot’s persona includes also its name, style, voice, and tones.
- Choosing Your Bot’s Name
Based on your bot’s persona, you need to come up with a name that fits your persona. Your name could be choosing a human name for your bot, choosing a robotic name for your bot, making it the company’s name, making the name the purpose of the bot, or using a clever name for a bot that uses, for example, acronyms or such.
The table below will help you with which name type to choose.
| Name Type |
Example | Suitability | Perks |
| Human Name |
IBM’s Ross | Formal, serious business |
Human touch, more focus on the service |
| Robotic Name |
Jolt.ai | Tech companies | Clarifying more that this is a bot |
| Company Name | Micheal Kors | Sales, customer support purposes | Easier to find, brand consistency |
| The Bot’s Purpose | Hangouts Assistant | Bot has specific purpose(s) | Clarity & focusing on the purpose |
| Clever Name |
MOB: Mother of All Bots |
Food, travel, fitness, listings, or beauty industries | Fun kick, Stands out, Easier to understand |
Your bot’s personality and purpose make all the difference when choosing the name, which is why you need to do these first 🔂
- Coming up with Your Bot’s Tone (Style, Voice, Tones, …)
Now that you have a general image of how your chatbot is, you need to start getting into details to make it work. And that is starting by imagining how your bot interacts with its users as in their voice, the tones it uses, and their speech style.
Is your bot going to have a friendly voice with fun tones? Is your bot dead-serious with super formal tones? Is your bot going to use a Shakespearean style in his speech, or a super casual one? (Shakespearean would be really cool by the way!)
When choosing your bot’s tone, bear in mind the four dimensions below.
This article can help you understand more what is a bot persona.
6. Choose The Types of Flows and Interactions with Users
As you’re supposed to be starting to build your chatbot now, you have to decide what flows you want your bot to go by with your users. This will also depend essentially on the bot’s purpose, the type of it, and the bot-builder possibilities itself.
7. Publish Your Chatbot!
Life is just a “ready, set, go!” at the common, right? Well, this is your go moment. Publish your bot, but don’t announce it just yet because you still need to…
8. Test, Test, and… *wait for it* … Test!
Before you announce your chatbot to the public, you still need to test it for performance, responsiveness, and accuracy, to make sure there’re as little errors as possible. When done with that, it’s now time to start promoting it.
9. Promoting Your Chatbot
Go public and go crazy now, you’ve earned it! Start promoting and advertising your new software masterpiece.
So to wrap it up, here’s a checklist with all the steps you need to go through to build a successful chatbot:
