The Definitive Guide on How to Build a Chatbot

All You Need to Know on How to Build a Chatbot and Deploy Conversational AI at Your Organization

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In recent years, conversational AI interfaces, like chatbots or voice bots, have seen an increase in adoption by a myriad of industries to improve customer engagement and personalization.

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Today, operators are leveraging robust platforms that are powered by both human and machine intelligence to provide an exceptional rental experience, unlike the typical harder-to-scale “live chat” solutions. The first step is to prepare your organization for success by assessing what resources you have available in order to solve the desired use case.

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Once a decision is made, how do you evaluate, design, and implement an automated system that scales successfully from design to production? We have assembled a list of quick tips how to build a chatbot to get you started.

69% of consumers prefer chatbots because of their ability to provide quick replies to simple questions

How to Evaluate your Options

• Ensure the team leading this project understands the overall objective. This empowers your team to look for a platform that brings a unified solution to the organization while ensuring success metrics are established.
• Know what kind of software you want and why. Picking a company and platform that will solve your current problems, integrate with your current stack, and scale with you is the ultimate win-win.
• Assess the level of support a chatbot partner provides outside of its solution. Can your team handle the ongoing optimization of your chatbot or does the vendor offer dedicated support and examples on how to build a chatbot so you can focus on serving your customers?
• Ask questions. Get to know who you’re evaluating, connect with them regularly, and ask for references. Bonus points if your questions, comments, and concerns can drive the future state of their product.
  

Questions To Ask A Vendor

1. What does the onboarding process look like?
2. How much time do I need to dedicate to training on the platform?
3. Does your system learn from its mistakes?

How to Prepare Internally

• Treat it like any other traditional software implementation. Deploying an AI assistant typically starts by ensuring technology, operations, and strategic goals are defined. Include appropriate stakeholders from product, marketing, engineering, and business teams to prepare for this implementation.
• Define the steps for moving into production. Implementation and testing can take some work, but it doesnʼt stop there. You need to clearly define what’s in and out of scope for the launch of your AI chatbot to stay on track. At swivl, it is critical to work in conjunction with your team to ensure content is reviewed and adjusted to achieve personalized, branded experiences for your customers.

Questions To Ask A Vendor

1. How easy is it to integrate with my other tools?
2. Do you have a solution for coaching my contact center agents?
3. Do you provide ongoing training and support?

Define and Build Your AI Chatbot

• Start with simple questions. What is your goal? How are you quantitatively measuring its success? What other tools will it interact with? What tone and voice should it take?
• Customer-driven conversations are critical for success. Hypothetical conversations should only make up about 10% of your data set. After the initial launch of material, swivl helps your team train and optimize the initial scope of your conversational AI assistant. The best platforms out there leverage real customer data to improve your bot.
• Carefully consider your fallback answers. Your Intelligent Assistant wonʼt always know the answer and thatʼs okay. Do you reroute to a human? Rephrase the question? Give the customer the option of how they want you to follow up with them? Testing this with your user groups is a great way to get feedback on whatʼs best.

Questions To Ask A Vendor

1. Can I customize the way a customer can reach my organization?
2. How do you handle the after-hours request?
3. Can I experiment with conversational workflows?
4. Can I add tracking to conversational funnels?

Looking for additional resources?

For more information on taking your AI assistant from evaluation to production, check out these resources:

• The Best AI Chatbot Options
• A Guide to Making the Build vs. Buy Decision
• 3 Ways an AI Chatbot Can Help Your Storage Business

If you have questions or are ready to talk to a conversational AI expert, we’re ready to help you take the next step toward launching an AI chatbot. Chat with us here.

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