How to Make Your Own Chatbot Smarter Than Your Competitors

Planning to make your own chatbot? Here is our guide on how to build one. Here I am going to highlight chatbots’ features and limitations and provide a bunch of tips for building great chatbot apps that will make your business stand out.

In this article

1. Understanding Chatbots and Their Limitations
2. Create a Chatbot That’s Better Than Humans
3. Bring Your Chatbot Directly to Customers
4. Use The Right Bot Builder Platform
5. Use Your Chatbot To Save Money
6. Frequently Asked Questions on Chatbot Technology

A significant share of consumers admit they appreciate the help of chatbots in finding product information before making a purchase, according to a Statista report. That said, using chatbots holds a lot of benefits to businesses. Let’s explore how to make your own chatbot and what you should take into consideration when building one.

Understanding Chatbots and Their Limitations

A chatbot should be a conversational bot or an agent that can interact with a human being and deliver them the information they need. Some chatbots are purely informational (think of it as if Google was a person) and others focus on customer service (think Sephora’s quiz-like customer service Kik).

To make a really killer chatbot, you’ve got to understand a couple of things about what problems chatbots usually come across.

• Chatbots frequently don’t understand users’ requests
• Chatbots have very little-to-no memory
• Chatbots often don’t understand follow-up questions
• Chatbots cannot make decisions on their own
• Chatbots get repetitive with their templated responses
• Chatbots require lots of manual code

Of course, there are ways to get around this. Once you know what can go wrong, you can focus on how to make sure that doesn’t happen.

An intelligent chatbot platform should be able to hold chatbot conversations. They should understand natural language and human intent in speech. They should be able to understand the topic that’s being discussed within the full context of a conversation, and they should be able to respond appropriately in natural human language.

Machine learning, specifcally natural language processing, is what helps chatbots tackle these challenges. To get over the hurdles, you may have to start with handcrafting some code in order to train your model.

Create a Chatbot That’s Better Than Humans

Sorry. Humans are great and all, but there are just some things that machines are better at — primarily numbers, calculations, pulling up really quick information, and you know, not making people wait an hour and a half on hold. Also, the labor is pretty cheap since robots don’t really need to make minimum wage.

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If you’re wondering how to build the best chatbot you can, one of the most important things is carving out a place where it makes more sense to use technology than a human. An example of this is customer service.

People don’t want to wait on hold to speak to a human. They want their problems to be solved immediately. Consider creating a chatbot that addresses customers immediately or transfers them to a human who can help once their capabilities are exhausted.

DoNotPay is a great example of a chatbot that made a company nearly a million dollars while saving customers even more.

No one wants to go through the trouble of finding a lawyer to fight a simple ticket, but if you could just do it online, your tune would quickly change. Cue DoNotPay, the world’s first robotic lawyer. It used its capabilities to overturn 160,000 tickets in London and NYC and saved customers over $3 million.

Bring Your Chatbot Directly to Customers

People don’t go out of their way to use chatbots, but they definitely appreciate them when they’re already integrated into what they’re doing. This is something to keep in mind while creating a chatbot for your company. Figure out a way to integrate it seamlessly into customers’ lives.

Taco Bell is one of the best examples of creating a chatbot that’s already integrated into a customer’s daily routine. The Taco giants created a chatbot that allowed customers to make orders through Slack.

Slack’s key user base is young, tech-savvy professionals — the same people Taco Bell was trying to reach. Taco Bell’s bot allowed users to order in a snap without having to go out of their way to get that sweet, sweet Cheesy Gordita Crunch. Most of them were already logged into Slack for work.

Whether you create a chatbot directly in your company’s app or via a third-party service, you need to go where your customers already are.

Use The Right Bot Builder Platform

If you’re looking to create intelligent chatbots for your business, there are various chatbot builders and chatbot frameworks that you can use. If you’re having trouble finding a developer to make your chatbot, DevTeam.Space can help you connect, but first, you’ll have to choose the chatbot building platform. Some popular chatbot development platforms include:

• Kik
• Facebook Messenger
• Twitter
• Telegram Bots
• ChattyPeople
• MeoKay

To pick a platform, think about what your customers already use. Last year, Twitter announced that it’s offering brands customer service chatbots to use in direct messages. Unfortunately, if your users aren’t on Twitter, that’s not really going to help. If your customers primarily use Facebook, consider creating a Facebook Messenger bot.

Beauty brand Sephora managed to create a massively successful Facebook AI chatbot because they chose the right platform. Their customers love Facebook. Sephora Virtual Artist allows users to upload a selfie and try on different lip colors — something they can’t do if they just talk to a human on the phone.

The Facebook chatbot and the brand’s app have received over four million visits because it not only fits seamlessly into users’ lives, but it provides something they couldn’t get anywhere else.

Because of the success of Sephora Virtual Artist, the company launched a new Facebook bot called Sephora Reservation Assist, which helps users book appointments without ever having to wait on hold.

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Use Your Chatbot To Save Money

Chatbots can automate tasks you’re paying someone to do. This frees up resources you can use on something else. Think of how much you pay someone to schedule appointments? What if that could be automated, and instead, that person could be out looking for new customers.

Before you build an AI Chatbot app, you need to look at your business and figure out where you can automate things. You don’t want to overextend your bots or you’ll end up with some angry customers, so make your guidelines rather narrow.

A few “Pro” tips on how to triumph your chatbot competitors

Consider the following tips when creating chatbots powered by artificial intelligence:

1. Carefully consider the kind of chatbot you want to offer

Do you plan to offer an all-in-one live chat software? You will then need to cater to a very broad user base. While that can be an advantage, you might also dilute your focus.

Alternatively, you might want to target specific use cases,. e.g.:

• Customer support chatbots including omnichannel support;
• CRM chatbots;
• Chatbots for the marketing of webinars;
• FAQ chatbots;
• SMS-based chatbots.

2. Exercise care while planning the pricing of your chatbot

The price of your chatbot should reflect the value it offers. I acknowledge that using the value-based pricing strategy can be hard, and many SaaS companies strive hard to get it right. This pricing strategy can offer the best rewards though.

As our guide to SaaS pricing describes, you need to conduct plenty of research to implement value-based pricing. You might need deeper conversations with customers too.

Are you putting a premium on superior customer experience? In that case, you probably plan to offer powerful differentiators. E.g., you might offer conversational bots powered by AI to enrich customer communication. You should arrive at appropriate pricing plans.

3. Study the leading AI chatbots to get design ideas

You can get excellent design ideas if you study the leading AI chatbots. Review the following:

• Netomi;
• atSpoke;
• WP-chatbot;
• Microsoft Bot Framework;
• Zendesk Answer Bot;
• x.ai;
• CSML.dev;
• Alexa for business;
• Drift;
• Salesforce Einstein;
• Intercom.

Depending on your use case, you might need to review specific chatbots. An example is the Amazon chatbot offered by AWS. It helps AWS users to monitor, operate, and troubleshoot AWS workloads.

4. Review popular chatbot alternatives and chatbot platforms like Landbot

You can review AI platforms to create AI chatbots. This can give you valuable clues for offering differentiators in your chatbot.

Several companies offer chatbot building platforms. Small businesses can take advantage of these platforms to create chatbots quickly.

Take an example of a small eCommerce company. It needs to provide real-time customer support, however, most of the customer queries are relatively simple. E.g., the “FAQs” page on the company website might answer many of the questions.

The company wants a chatbot to resolve such queries. It doesn’t have enough software developers for this effort. It needs a no-code or low-code platform to create chatbots intuitively.

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Chatbot builder platforms offer useful templates and APIs that can help in such cases. You can create a chatbot for your website visitors, furthermore, these platforms support platforms like Android and iOS.

Some of these chatbot builder platforms help you to build WhatsApp chatbots too. You can configure a workflow using these platforms, furthermore, some of them can help you to build a multilingual chatbot.

Review the following chatbot platforms:

• Landbot;
• Swifty;
• Tidio;
• ManyChat;
• TARS;
• SmartLoop;
• Botsify;
• Chatfuel;
• Drift;
• Freshchat;
• Pandorabots;
• Ada;
• FlowXo;
• LivePerson;
• HubSpot;
• Userlike.
  

5. Focus on the “training” datasets and information security

The effectiveness of chatbots depends significantly on the quality of the “training” datasets. Acquire or produce high-quality “training” datasets.

You also need to prevent malicious actors from tampering with these datasets. Furthermore, be mindful of the fact that chatbots might process sensitive data belonging to users. You don’t want hackers to get access to that. Invest in a robust information security solution.

Planning to Make Your Own Chatbot?

Chatbots can really help automate tasks that save your business money and offer a richer experience to customers — especially if it’s something that isn‘t suited towards a human’s capabilities.

Focus on developing a useful chatbot in a platform your customers already use, and you’ll find increased brand loyalty and a growing clientele. Just make sure — above all — that no one can teach it to be racists. Learn from Microsoft’s mistakes.

If you want to get started with creating your own chatbot, contact DevTeam.Space. One of our account managers will get back to you to answer any questions that you might have.

Frequently Asked Questions on Chatbot Technology