There is a lot of hype around chatbots at the moment. Every company is looking to get one, at least a simple assistant that will be able to redirect customers to live support. Paying someone to build you a bot can be expensive and building it on your own is extremely challenging, or is it?

In the past, it was necessary to have extensive coding knowledge to build a bot, but today this is no longer the case. Today, we are seeing a lot of different chatbot creator sites like SnatchBot that allow people without any programming skills to build bots.

These chatbot creators can be used for everything between building simple if/then bots and some of the best AI chatbots. Today, we are going to give you a quick guide on how to build one and show you some examples that will help you do this in no time!

Building Your Chatbot

The first thing you need is to build your bot. After registering for a bot-building platform, you can use a bot template to make the process easier. You can choose from customer support, FAQ, survey, booking, branding, and many other bot templates. Here is how this looks on SnatchBot.

Make sure that you understand the templates and which ones you need. Using a template means that the bot will have a predefined structure. Even if you have different needs, it will be easier to edit it than to build one from scratch.

After assigning the language, name, and the right template, the next step is to determine what your bot will do. On this platform, this comes in the form of interactions. You can set the rules to how your bot responds to various interactions and create chained steps the bot will perform when conditions have been met.

Training/Testing Your Chatbot

Training/Testing your bot is quite simple, but it can last a long time and be very repetitive. After adding some commands in your bot, you can use the platform to test how it works. Do this as many times as necessary, until you’ve created a bot that does what you want it to precisely.

As a beginner, the best way to start is by populating the bot’s answers and questions manually. This way, you can learn how the assistant reacts and find ways to chain different responses that will logically go well together. This is also a good process for determining how interactions work and when they become active.

Bear in mind that testing your bot leads back to building it and upgrading it as many times as you see fit. When you are satisfied with the result, you can proceed to the next step.

Deploying Your Chatbot

After you’ve successfully built and tested your bot, you must deploy it on a channel where you want it to be used. Implementing your bot means making it available to end-users. The purpose could be getting general information about the brand, products, or merely acting as a customer support rep.

This was also a nuisance in the past as you had to be tech-savvy to do this. However, these new chatbot creator platforms also have integrated channels through which you can quickly deploy your bot. The process is quite simple. You choose what you want to use and add the URL/account or whatever is necessary depending on the platform.

Track the Performance of Your Bot

All of these chatbot creation platforms offer built-in analytics which is sadly often skipped over. If you want to see how useful your bot is, you need to track its performance. There is no actual need to talk to people about how their experience was. These tools can do that for them.

You will see valuable information about how many successful resolutions there were, how long the conversations were, were there any errors, and so on. This is how you will discover flaws, improve the success rate of your bot and its capabilities. You can do this casually each day as it doesn’t take a long time.

Try it out. We guarantee you’ll have tones of fun doing this! In the end, don’t be afraid to explore all of the functionalities that the platform provides. Who knows maybe you’ll become a chatbot enthusiast yourself.

Summary

No matter if you need a bot for business reasons, you like technology, or want to expand your IT skill set, building a chatbot can be a fantastic experience. What’s even better is the fact that it’s completely free.