HOW TO EASILY

BUILD A CHATBOT
9 EASY STEPS TO BUILD
YOUR CHATBOT

03 STEP 1 – Decide the type of chatbot

06 STEP 2 – Determine your KPIs

07 STEP 3 – Understand user needs

09 STEP 4 – Give your bot a persona

10 STEP 5 – Plan your bot flow

12 STEP 6 – Design your bot

13 STEP 7 – Preview and Test

14 STEP 8 – Target your bot

15 STEP 9 – Measure and optimise

STEP 1

DECIDE THE TYPE OF CHATBOT

In the first step of building your bot, you • Who are you targeting with the bot? All
need to decide what type of chatbot you your visitors or specific ones?
want to build. • What content/value can you use to catch
visitor’s attention to start interacting
This is determined by your business with the bot?
objectives and your customers needs.

Answering the following questions will help Examples of chatbots

you get started: FAQ bot
Navigation bot
• What challenge is your chatbot solving? Customer feedback bot
• What purpose will your chatbot serve? Newsletter subscription bot
• What is your goal? Are you trying to Lead magnet bot
increase conversions or looking to serve Demo booking bot
your customer better around the clock? Product promotion bot

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 3

STEP 1

DECIDE THE TYPE OF CHATBOT

Typically, there are two main types of bots Chatbot for customer service When building a support chatbot, consider
- ones that help support and serve the following:
Chatbots for customer service allow you to
customers and ones used to generate leads.
provide 24/7 support helping your website
• What are the most important contact
visitors self-serve and find solutions to their
Don’t get us wrong though, bots can serve points where customers need help in
questions.
multiple purposes too! But keeping your their journey?
main objective at the forefront, will help you • How can you tackle these outside of
It can help decrease the amount of incoming
stay on track when you’re building your bot. office hours or when your chat is offline?
customer contacts and save your team's
• How does the bot work with your live
time for more pressing issues.
In the next part, we explain the two types chat solution during office and offline
bots and what you need to consider when hours?
Customer service chatbots can also direct
building each bot: • Is there a high frequency of repetitive
customers to the information they are
questions from customers?
looking for, and help them find additional
services.

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 4

STEP 1

DECIDE THE TYPE OF CHATBOT

Lead Generation Chatbot When building a chatbot for lead

generation, ask yourself the following:
Lead generation chatbots help you
maximize your sales potential and increase
• What problem are you trying to solve: Check out different bot use cases
conversions online.
Increasing lead quantity, quality, or both? for inspiration here
• What are the best pages to get
They can help you get more qualified leads,
customers to reach out to us?
whilst ensuring a great customer
• Which static forms are not performing
experience.
and could be replaced?
• What stages of the marketing funnel do
The data gathered in your bot can also
you want to use the bot for?
further help you understand your target
audience and gain insight into what your
customers are looking for.

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 5

STEP 2

DETERMINE YOUR KPIs

At this point of building your bot, it’s important to determine your key performance
indicators (aka KPIs) to understand what you want to achieve from it.

• How will you know if the chatbot is successful?

• What are you going to measure?
• What results do you want to track?

Your KPIs are directly connected to what the goal of your interaction is. It should be
clear and measurable.

Your bot’s goal is the action you want your user to take. This could be a CTA
button or link click, a form fill, or a completed online purchase. The KPIs you’ve set
are the metrics used to track that goal (more on this in step 9).

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 6

STEP 3

UNDERSTAND USER NEEDS

After defining your objectives, it’s time to align this with

your audience. Create a bot “user persona”
Build your user profile based on your buyer
personas and write a one-sentence summary:
Start by defining who your bot user is. This will help you
formulate the right questions and generate content that • Describe the user profile

meets your website visitor needs. • The purpose of their visit

• The benefits of using your bot
Answering the following questions can help you do this:
Example:
A working professional, comes to her energy provider's
• What kind of person will use your bot?
website on desktop during office hours, to find out how to
• What are the user’s goals the moment they decide to make her first payment. Using the bot, she can find out how

interact with the bot? to do it within minutes, without interrupting her work day.

• What are your potential bot users looking for?

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 7

CHATBOT WORKSHOP

Having trouble getting started? Try this! Organise a workshop online or

in person with your project team. The goal of the workshop is to help you
identify a clear scope for your bot, helping you align what you are building,
for whom and why.

1. Start by individually writing down on post-its your ideas

of who will be using your bot

• Define the user and what they looking for

2. Next, as a team map out your ideas into axis

• The ideas that bring value to the business

• The ideas that bring value to your customers

3. Finally, select the best idea that provides value to both

your business and customers, and decide:

• Where will your bot be shown?

• How would you realistically measure success?

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 8

STEP 4

GIVE YOUR BOT A PERSONA

Now, it's time to bring your bot to life by determining the tone of voice and defining your
chatbot terminology. While doing this, try to develop the persona of your bot. It might help
to think of your bot as a real person thats representing your brand.

It’s important to keep a balance between your brand and what your audience wants.

While the tone of voice should follow your brand guidelines to build trust among your
audience, the terminology should match the words your audience typically uses.

Think about the following:

• What kind of language will the bot use?

• Will your bot use emojis and/or images?
• Is your bot polite and professional or more relaxed and witty?

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 9

STEP 5

PLAN YOUR BOT FLOW

Start to visualise your bot flow and how each view of your bot will look. Your flow will
become the foundation for building your bot interactions.

1. Create a diagram of your bot conversation

You could do this on a piece of paper, in Powerpoint or within giosg. It should look like a
decision tree and contain all the views your bot will have.

2. Plan what elements each view will contain

You bot could include buttons, links, images, videos, text answers, text boxes/ typing
fields, multiple choice fields, or dropdown menus.

3. Think about the design & branding of the interaction

What ideas come to mind that suit your company image and the purpose of this chatbot?

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 10

STEP 5

BOT FLOW EXAMPLE

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 11

STEP 6

14
DESIGN YOUR BOT

Finally, it’s time to put your plans into action

and start designing your bot!

You can decide to go with a ready-to-use

bot template or start designing your bot
from scratch.

Here’s what you’ll need to do:

1. Create or modify your views

2. Modify colours and fonts
3. Set up your button and element actions
4. Set up your goals

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 12

STEP 7

PREVIEW AND TEST

Before your bot is live, you’ll want to test it

out in preview mode.

In preview mode you can:

• Check what your bot looks like on your

desired page.
• Make sure your flow works and the
views are in the correct order.
• Ensure all the actions you’ve set up work
as they should.
• See what your bot will look like on
different screens and/or devices.

If something’s not right, go back to design

mode and make your corrections!

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 13

STEP 8

TARGET YOUR BOT

In the planning stage, you already Here are just a few targeting options: Targeting best practice
considered where you want your bot to be
placed and who to show it to. It’s time to put • Which page the visitor is on Struggling to come up with ideas? Try
your targeting plans into action. • Where they came from: previous page, these simple targeting rules:
campaign URL, traffic source
There’s a wide set of automatic triggers that • The geographical location of the visitor • Visitor's country, if you have
can be used to target your bot, from the • What device they are using - desktop, multiple language versions
visitor’s page, to their purchase history and mobile or tablet • Visitor's device, if you’ve designed
so on. • The number of times they have been on your bot specifically for desktop
your website use only.
You can decide to target your bot according • Visitor's current URL, to make sure
to multiple criteria or just one. the bot is in the right place on your
website.

The amount of targeting rules will

depend on your bot package.

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 14

STEP 9

MEASURE AND OPTIMISE

Remember in the second step, when you This will help you see at what points of the Not only is it important to track quantitative
decided your KPIs? Now that your bot is live bot journey users drop off and identify results, it’s also worth gathering feedback
and in use, it’s time to start measuring it’s potential bottlenecks in your bot. from your users:
performance. This will help you optimise
your content and consistently improve Goal completion: What is the success rate • What your users think about your bot?
results. of a given action performed through your • Are they satisfied with the service it
bot? How many users complete your provides?
Here are a few bot metrics that you could specific goal? • Are they taking full advantage of the
track: tool?
Effectiveness: How many users were able
Chatbot activity: How frequently is it being get the help they needed through your bot,
used? without having to contact your customer
service?
Bounce rate: What is the rate of users that
bounce without taking the desired actions?

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 15

STEP 9

MEASURE AND OPTIMISE

Setting up A/B testing can also help you

further optimise your bot results and determine
which targeting is the most effective.

Testing can show you which leads respond to

your chatbot messaging, on which page and at
what moment of time, allowing you to
consistently update and improve your bot.

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 16

READY TO BUILD YOUR FIRST BOT?

There you have it - nine easy steps to building a chatbot!

With a tool like giosg Interaction Designer creating your first bot
couldn't get simpler. So why not get started with our free trial?

You can start from our chatbot templates or from scratch to

realise your own vision.

Start your free trial

HOW TO EASILY BUILD A CHATBOT 17

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