First chatbot? This is how to set it up

How long does it take to build a conversational AI chatbot, and is it complicated? Just a few minutes, and: no, not at all! In the following tutorial, we’ll explain, how easy it is to start building your first chatbot.

“I need to hire IT experts.”

“This will take forever!”

“It will be too complicated.”

These are only some of the most common concerns when companies start thinking about setting up their very first conversational AI chatbot.

With Chatlayer’s intuitive interface and ready-to-use templates, however, it’s very easy to start building your own chatbot. You don’t need technical expertise, and it only takes a few minutes to set it up.

Create a new bot from scratch

It doesn’t matter if you want to use a chatbot to help your customer service team, assist your clients 24/7, or boost sales: you want the process to be smooth and fast, while at the same time ending up with a high-quality bot.

This is exactly how Chatlayer’s conversational AI bot is set up! Chatlayer’s interface is designed to make it as easy as possible for you to launch your first chatbot.

So, how do you get started?

In order to create a new bot, just to the chatbot interface, and hit the “add a new bot” button. Here you can already choose a name for your bot. If you don’t have a name for your bot yet, you can just pick a temporary one, and always change it later.

In the same step, you also pick your bot’s primary language. That is the language your bot building team is using.

As you can see, you can pick more than one language. By selecting extra languages, you choose the languages you want to address your customers in. The Chatlayer bots support more than 125 languages.

Then all you have to do is click “create”, and you have already configured your very first chatbot.

By the way, to make it even easier for you, Chatlayer has already created several ready-to-go bot templates for different industries such as telecommunication, banking, restaurants, or gyms.

Setting up the first conversation

Once your new chatbot is set up, you can start working on creating dialogues for your bot. After all, these dialogues are at the core of your bot, driving the flow of the conversation between your bot and your customers.

The most important dialogue to set up is your bot’s introduction. Customers should know right away that they are talking to a chatbot, and what exactly the bot can do for them, and what not. This avoids confusion, and lets your customers know what they can expect. So, take your time, and think about the best introduction message for your bot.

Once you know how your chatbot will introduce itself to your clients, you can start setting up the intro message. Simply go to “Flows” from the left-hand menu in your interface and select the “general flow” option.

Here, you will see an overview of seven different default options that have already been set up for you by Chatlayer. Choose the introduction dialog and select the pencil icon to edit the message for your specific use case.

Type the introduction message for you bot in the text field, like: “Hello there, my name is Choo Choo, a virtual assistant that will keep you on track.”

If you want, you can add another text field, like “How can I help you?” by selecting the text button. But you can also include media files, buttons or let the users upload files.

Once you are happy with your introduction message, just click “save”.

Congratulations, you have just set up a dialog message for your first chatbot! Now, let’s see how you can build on that, and make sure your bot will be able to understand and reply to your customers.

Make sure your bot understands the customer

After your virtual assistant introduces itself, the customer will start a conversation. The strength of Chatlayer’s NLP-based chatbot is that it is exceptionally good at understanding a customer’s intent.

In other words, it can understand very accurately what the customer wants. All you have to do is set it up for your specific use case. In order to do that, you set up intents and expressions that go along with this intent on the interface.

An intent describes what a customer might want to do, like “ordering food”, “asking for delivery status”, or “buying a train ticket”. Expressions are the different ways people phrase these intents. If someone wants to buy a train ticket, they could say “I want to buy a train ticket” or “How can I buy tickets?”.

You set up intents by going to “NLP” on the left-hand menu, selecting “Intent”, and then giving the intent a name, such as “buying train tickets.” In the next step you can then add different expressions that go with that intent.

Again, you will find that there are also several pre-built intents and that cover the most common use cases, and over 100 expressions for each intent, that you can use to get started right away.

Check out this video to learn in detail how to set up intents for your first chatbot!

Teach your bot how to reply to customers

After your chatbot has introduced itself, the customers have stated what they want, and the chatbot has understood the intent, it’s time to reply to the customer—which is also something you can adjust in the Chatlayer interface when first setting up your bot.

What does this mean? You are basically training your bot to recognize a customer’s intent, which then triggers a specific reply dialogue.

You can set up these replies by going to an intent, such as “buying a train ticket”, switching to the message tab, and then simply adding an answer like “Sure, let me help you with that.”

It’s also possible:

to save customer information, so the customer won’t have to repeat it
connect your company’s CRM systems to the chatbot
set up a transfer from bot to a human agent.

Aside from adding replies, you can also create “input validations”. Input validations are questions your chatbot asks the customers to gather information or data. For example, if the customer wants to buy a train ticket, but hasn’t named the destination, an input validation would be for your chatbot to ask, “Where do you want to go?”

The advantage of an intent validation is that the bot will only ask that question if the customer has not provided the necessary information. Otherwise, the bot will skip the question, and move on to the next reply, which makes the dialogue between human and bot much smoother.

Watch this video to see how you can create responses for your chatbot.

Start building your first chatbot right away

As you can see, it only takes minutes to set up your first chatbot. You can either customize the flow of the dialogue or use Chatlayer’s pre-designed templates for the most common use cases and have everything ready to go even faster.

And: you can set up your chatbot in a matter of minutes on virtually any channel, from WhatsApp to Instagram to your website to RCS, and even on a voice channel.

This show how easy it is to get started with your first conversational AI chatbot.