by Launch a 24/7 Customer Service Powerhouse: Your Guide to Building an AI Chatbot
Today’s customers demand instant gratification. They want answers now, not later. While you can’t be available around the clock, your brand can be. An AI chatbot is your secret weapon, providing instant support, generating leads, and freeing up your human team to focus on complex tasks.
As partners of Gikko, we’ve seen how they leverage Infobip’s powerful, no-code platform to make building and deploying these bots seamless. You don’t need to be a coding wizard; you just need to follow these simple steps.
Step 1: Define Your Bot’s Core Purpose
Before you begin building, get clear on what you want your AI assistant to achieve.
- For Support: Will it answer common questions, provide order updates, or offer troubleshooting?
- For Sales: Can it collect lead information, qualify prospects, or book appointments?
- For Information: Will it act as a virtual assistant, providing quick answers on store hours, product details, or company policies?
Start with a single, clear objective. This focus will make the development process far more efficient.
Step 2: Choose the Right Channels
Your bot should live wherever your customers are. Gikko’s platform, powered by Infobip, makes it easy to deploy your bot across multiple channels.
- WhatsApp: Perfect for engaging, real-time conversations with rich media.
- Website: Ideal for capturing visitors as they browse your site.
- SMS: A dependable choice for a wide audience, especially in regions with varying internet access.
- Other Channels: Deploy your bot on social media platforms like Facebook Messenger to meet customers where they live.
Once you’ve made your choice, the no-code, drag-and-drop interface of Infobip Answers makes building your bot a visual and intuitive process.
Step 3: Fill Your Bot with Intelligence
A bot is only as useful as the information it holds. You need to train it with a robust knowledge base.
- FAQs: Start with a list of common questions and provide clear answers.
- Documents: Upload product manuals, service guides, or internal documents to give your bot a deep well of information to pull from.
- Web Content: Direct the bot to key pages on your website to ensure it provides accurate and up-to-date information.
The bot’s AI engine uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand what users are asking, even if they use different words or slang. The more you feed it, the smarter it becomes.
Step 4: Design a Natural Conversation Flow
This is where you bring your bot to life. A well-designed conversation feels human-friendly and guides the user to a solution without friction.
- Start with a Welcome: Greet users and immediately set expectations for how the bot can help them.
- Add Options: Provide menus or buttons that make it easy for users to navigate conversations.
- Create Logic: Design conversation paths that branch based on user responses or specific keywords.
- Plan for Fallbacks: If the bot doesn’t understand a query, program it to ask for clarification or offer to connect with a human agent.
This seamless handoff to a human is critical for handling complex or sensitive issues, ensuring a positive customer experience.
Step 5: Test and Refine
Before you go live, put your bot to the test. Get your team to run through common scenarios.
- Ask a variety of questions to see how the bot handles different phrasing.
- Analyse the analytics to see where users are getting stuck or dropping off.
- Review unanswered questions to identify gaps in your knowledge base.
The best bots are constantly learning. Keep tweaking and adding new information based on real-world interactions.
Step 6: Deploy and Go Live
Once you’re confident in your bot’s abilities, it’s time to launch. Your new AI assistant can be live on your website, your WhatsApp Business account, or anywhere else your customers need it, instantly providing value 24/7.
A Gikko-powered chatbot is more than a simple tool, it’s a strategic asset. It helps you scale your support without adding staff, delight customers with instant responses, and build loyalty by providing a consistently great experience. All without a single line of code.
