Step-by-Step Process to Build a Web App Chatbot with or without Coding Skills

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Is It Magic? No, It's AI. Chatbots Explained

That is how the Cambridge Dictionary defines a chatbot:

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Still, how exactly does it do this?

A chatbot is capable of processing, interpreting, and analyzing the user's words. Then it gives a pre-set answer, or it devises a unique answer using such technologies as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

Not all chatbots are the same. Learning more about how chatbots work and what types of chatbots exist out there will help you make the right choice for your business. So, let's take a deeper dive into this technology.

Types of Chatbots

Chatbots can be divided into 2 broad categories: Rule-based and AI-based. Don't worry. Understanding the difference between them is not complicated.

Rule-Based Chatbots

This type of chatbot is basically a decision tree that uses if/then logic and where all the questions and answers are pre-set. The user is given a choice of options, they press buttons, and each choice takes them down the decision tree. Often, the user has two possible paths: the path where they give their contact information, schedule a meeting or a call with the company representative, and the path to necessary support pages.

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Rule-based chatbots became widespread after, in 2016, Facebook launched its Messenger where businesses could set up their own automated customer support chatbots. Nowadays rule-based chatbots are used for a variety of simple tasks: from connecting customers to a human support assistant or collecting the user's email to booking a table at a restaurant or buying cinema tickets. However, if you need financial advice or a holiday suggestion, then you need a more complicated system that is able to imitate natural conversation flow.

AI-Based Chatbots

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that itself is very diverse and has many sub-divisions.

They include:

Machine Learning
Neural Networks
Evolutionary Computation
Vision, Robotics
Expert Systems
Speech Processing
Natural Language Processing and Planning

Some of them are used to build chatbots so that they could imitate a natural conversation. Even a simple conversation is a complex process that requires 3 steps.

Understanding

First, AI chatbots need to understand what the user is saying and what they want. Here, Natural Language Processing (NLP) comes into play. Or, if to be more precise, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), which is a part of NLP. Let's see what it does:

NLU breaks the sentence into chunks.
It decides whether each word or chunk is a noun, an adjective, a verb, etc. That helps the system understand what function the world has and how words are connected to each other.
The meaning of each word is then identified separately from the context.
NLU choices the meanings that are the most suitable for the context.
It transforms the text into the code that the chatbot is able to understand.

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In their work, NLP and NLU rely on external data, such as language corpus (a collection of thousands of texts that have been produced by humans).

Interestingly, technologies using NLP have become part of our everyday lives quite a while ago. They are all around us: automatic translation tools, predictive typing, Siri, Alexa, and many more.

Choosing the Right Reply

Once the chatbot knows what the customer wants, it uses its algorithms to create the most suitable answer to the query. Besides, integration with the back-end systems (for example, a CRM or Google services) will make the bot capable of actually performing the tasks for your customer instead of just fetching them self-service instructions.

Wait, how does a machine know how to speak English, Russian, Spanish, or any other human language?

Producing the Text

This technology is called Natural Language Generation (Also part of NLP). It is just what NLU does but in reverse order.

NLP and chatbots in general rely on Machine Leaning (another AI technology). This means that the technology is able to work more effectively if more customers use it over a period of time.

Which One Is Better?

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There is no definite answer to this question. They are different and they serve different purposes. It is better to ask "Which system will better cater for the needs of my business?" When you weigh all the pros and cons, make sure you put the need of your business first so that the chatbot does not end up creating trouble instead of resolving it. This table will help you see all their capabilities at once:

	Rule-based chatbot	AI-based chatbot
Cost	Usually are not priced high or free of charge at all.	Usually more expensive than rule-based technology. But, it may become a great investment of time and money as it will collect valuable data about your customers that can be used to grow your business. Moreover, no human resources are needed to keep it updated.
Purpose	Serves a limited number of concrete pre-defined purposes. E.g. collecting the emails of the website visitors.	Can execute various requests of different kinds. Moreover, can engage in a friendly chat with the user.
Time to build and launch	Little or no training is required. The time to build may vary depending on the complexity and the number of scenarios.	Usually, take longer to build and implement. The technology becomes more skilled over time.
Future improvements	all improvements and updates must be done manually	Machine Learning allows the bot to automatically learn from input data
Limitations	Can only include a limited number of questions, whatever goes beyond those pre-defined questions, has to be directed to customer support staff. If the request is worded differently from the pre-set one or has typos/mistakes, the chatbot won't recognize it. The query again will have to be forwarded to customer support, which might cause the customer's frustration.	Cannot use different language means to communicate to the users of different ages or gender. Unlike humans, it does not change the register whether we are communicating with friends or colleagues, children or seniors.
Natural conversation flow	No	Yes
Round the clock service	No. Every time the conversation goes beyond the pre-set scenario, there should be a human behind the machine to handle the query.	Yes
Security	Extremely secure since you control all the information stored in this bot.	There is a certain risk to be hacked, however, chatbot security is a rapidly developing area that is able to prevent risks. Such technologies as End-to-end encryption, Authentication, and authorization, Processes, and protocols are there to help your chatbot become an unassailable fortress.

We hope the article will guide you to making the most beneficial choice for your business in regard to chatbots. As for TruVisibility, we strive to make personalized AI-driven chatbots more affordable so that small and middle-size enterprises could benefit from the technological progress and grow their business.

What Is the Chatbot Market Like in 2021?

Continuous advances in technologies, the need to focus on customer engagement through various channels, and the need for 24/7 support availability are the main reason why the AI-based chatbot market is on the rise.

But What Do the Figures Suggest?

According to Mordor Intelligence, the AI-chatbot market was valued at USD 17.17 billion in 2020, and it is projected to reach USD 102.29 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 34.75% over the forecast period, 2021 - 2026.
Mordor Intelligence also projects that every year from 2021 to 2026 the market will grow at the rate of about 34.75%, which is incredibly fast.
Gartner says that more than 50% of businesses will prioritize the development of chatbots over mobile apps by 2021.
Gartner also suggests that 47% of organizations will use chatbots for customer care and 40% will deploy virtual assistants in the next couple of years.

Does COVID-19 Have Anything to Do with This?

Absolutely. Many organizations across the world have switched to remote working due to the lockdown or even have had to reduce the number of employees because of the COVID-19 outbreak. That, however, didn't reduce the amount of customer service queries, and in some cases even led to its increase. Thus, companies are becoming more and more dependent on chatbots.

Key Market Trends for AI-Driven Chatbots

Fast reaction and round-the-clock availability are the most prominent features of chatbots. Thus, Digital Marketing Community says that chatbots will be taking over in a number of areas in customer support:
Chatbots will be more like us. This technology is developing faster than ever. Just recently, Open AI has released its GPT-3 language learning model that can enable any chatbot to engage in a human-like conversation. Taking a step further, there already exists a number of software programs that are able to understand our emotions and react accordingly.
Voice bots are already becoming mainstream. Just look at some of these amazing stats:
- Grocery shopping accounts for more than 20% of voice-based orders in 2020.
- Voice-based shopping is expected to jump to $40 billion in 2022 in market share, which means consumer spending via voice assistants is expected to reach 18% by 2022.
- 55% of teenagers are using voice search on a daily basis.
- The Echo Dot was chosen as the best-selling product on Amazon in the 2018 holiday season.
Chatbots will be used to automate payments. According to Chatbot Magazine, in 2018, 67% of US millennials said they would be very likely to use chatbots for payments. No doubt, a short simple purchasing process right in the messenger will make customers happy.
Chatbots come in handy for internal business use. Besides handling outbound customer operations, they are very helpful when it comes to streamlining the internal workflow. For example, a chatbot can be answering HR-related questions for your employees or employees can ask a chatbot to fetch documents from the company's database instead of locating them manually.
The rise of low-code/no-code programs. An increasing number of platforms, including TruVisibility itself, are proving users with intuitive drag-and-drop tools to create applications without any coding skills required.

How Will Your Business Benefit From a Chatbot?

Now we know that the market for AI-driven chatbots is thriving. But what about individual gains for your business?

AI-driven chatbots make the brand accessible 24/7. Moreover, chatbots can deal with thousands of customers fast and without taking breaks or slowing down. Yes, that sounds like an amazing user experience.
Chatbots are a great tool for data collection. It collects data from your customer to get smarter and handle more complicated queries. But not only that. You can analyze and use these insights into customer behavior to improve your business performance.
A chatbot can increase your revenue. Intercom found out that a chatbot helped companies increase revenue by 67%. As it is always ready to assist your clients, it can provide necessary information or suitable offer just at the right moment. Like this, clients will move down the sales pipeline much faster.
AI-bot will become a great foundation for your conversational marketing strategy. Conversational marketing is a new approach to a marketing strategy that uses artificially intelligent software (like chatbots or voice assistants). Instead of just upfront selling, It leads the buyer through the sales funnel asking and answering questions, which is a lot like a real conversation.
It is cost-effective. A single bot can perform the work of 140 people, dealing with 1,7 million access requests. Juniper's research suggests that by 2022 chatbots will be able to save over $8 billion per year.

2 Paths to Building Your Chatbot for a Great Customer Experience

There are 2 ways you can build a chatbot. Either track you choose, no matter the level of your coding skills, you are guaranteed to have all the tools you need to create a chatbot for great customer experience.

Building a Chatbot from Scratch (Coding Skills Involved)

If you are someone who is rather tech-savvy and who has some experience in coding, you can build a chatbot from the ground up yourself.

Honestly, creating the entire code is an incredibly difficult task if you aren't very skillful in coding. Luckily, there are resources to make the process more approachable.

Sample Chatbot Code

Searching for some code samples from expert developers might be a great starting point for your chatbot.

Code-Based Frameworks to Build Your Bot

These frameworks still require coding, but they give you database tools, analytic features and they infuse AI into your program. Some of these frameworks are:

Microsoft bot framework
Wit.ai
API.ai

Building a Chatbot with Dedicated Software (No Coding Skills Involved)

The best part about creating a chatbot in 2021 is that you are able to do that with absolutely zero coding skills and in very little time, using chatbot-building platforms like TruVisibility. They usually offer a wide range of options: house the chatbot on the website, in a messenger or on a Facebook page.

How do they make it simple and understandable for everyone? Such a platform is a set of visual tools that look like a mind map and that you can drag, drop and play around with.

Such platforms are often created to specifically meet the needs of businesses. If a chatbot is created by a developer who isn't familiar with the nuances of the deployment environment or of the domain, it can lead to frustrating results. Thus, such platforms are beneficial because

They make the creation process agile. If anyone can build it in a relatively short time, business goals will be achieved in the most optimized way.
They take the workload off the IT team. Usually, the IT department is in high demand and requirements. Using a chatbot creation program will let them focus on other tasks.
They require little manpower. You don't need a large team of high-level professionals working on this one task. It can be done by just a couple of people.

9 Steps Towards Your Great Chatbot

Here we use the TruVisibility Chatbot building platform as an example of creating a fully functional chatbot for your website. We will give a general overview of the steps that await you on your chatbot creation journey. For specific questions, issues, and requests, Support Portal, TruVisibility chatbot, and TruVisibility customer support are always there to help you.

1. Set Goals for Your Bot

TruVisibility platform offers a number of chatbot templates whose goal is already defined. For example, Book a Meeting or Customer Support Bot. However, for your bot to fully meet all needs and requests, you want to be very specific about what you want your bot to do. Thinking about the purpose and the desired features of your bot will also help you to choose the best template.

In this tutorial, we will be building a Customer Support website chatbot.

2. Define Your User Portrait

To make interactions with the bot feel more personal, it is useful to identify some typical qualifies and peculiarities of your target audience. What kind of language will be the most suitable for them? More formal or more relaxed? How familiar they are with your company and using chatbots in general? To achieve best experience, try to create your client portrait in as much detail as possible. You can even create a personality card like this one!

3. Pick a Chatbot Type

Now as you know the reason why your chatbot exists, what it does, and who is it for, it is time to choose the type of your chatbot. You can decide to have it on social media, inside a messenger, or place it on your website. Let's try to create a chatbot that is housed on a website.

For this, let's go to Chat Widgets on your TruVisibility Account top menu.

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And pick the preferred channel.

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4. Pick a Template

TruVisibility offers a range of chatbot templates: Lead Generation, FAQ Bot, AI Responder, and more. There is always a Blank Template available if none of the TruVisibility templates meet your request. Each template has a "live demo" function where you can see the bot at work.

So, choose a template that corresponds to your needs and meets your goals. Don't forget to add a descriptive name for your bot!

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5. You Are All Set!

Your chatbot is ready to go. Just copy the code and paste it into every webpage you want your your chatbot to appear.

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6. Now, Let's Optimize the Conversational Blocks

The next step is building your chatbot's unique conversational architecture. The screenshot shows a very simple conversational tree. The spot where customers start interacting with the chatbot is called "Trigger".

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7. Start an Interaction with the Trigger.

In simple words, this is the action that triggers the chatbot on your page. Truvisibility has a large number of trigger options to choose from. You can add as many triggers as you want. To get a more detailed guide on how to work with triggers, visit the TruVisibility support page.

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8. Think About the Possible Conversation with a Site Visitor

As you can see, the trigger leads us to further dialog. To see the full conversation tree, click the "Edit Script" button.

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Don't get scared away by what you see. In order to approach this conversation flow, we recommend mapping out the conversation lines you want your bot to include. Try to be as detailed as you can. Then it will be much easier for you to design it in the web app.

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9. Press the Publish Button

Once you are done, you can do a live preview of your bot and deploy it on your website by pressing "Publish".

3 Tips on Chatbot Creation

Now you know more about chatbots, and this knowledge will help you decide wisely and carefully when it comes to building the chatbot for your company. Nevertheless, here are a couple of more tips that will make your chatbot-building experience even more successful.

Make sure the chatbot sounds authentic. It is much more pleasant for a user to type their query in a natural way rather than rewriting it over and over again hoping that the bot will understand. AI algorithms can help you make sure that the conversation will go without a hitch.
Grasp AI, NLP, and software development concepts. Even though we’ve talked about platforms that do not call for any coding skills, having a basic idea about the ideas behind chatbots will ensure that you understand their abilities and limitations. This will pave the way for the best-fitting chatbot for your particular case.
Be ready for limitations. Plan wisely when it comes to managing money and finances to build a chatbot. They may vary a great deal depending on the complexity of the chatbot: a simple lead generation bot that sends a customer an ebook or a coupon after collecting their name and e-mail address will take a couple of hours and not a lot of financial resources, while with a more complicated chatbot it could take way longer.

Chatbot Software Platforms Analysis: Pros and Cons

The market is crowded with platforms that help you build your chatbot without any coding skills, so it might be hard to navigate among all of these brand names. We picked a couple of popular brands and looked at their strengths and weaknesses.

Chatbot

Advantages	Disadvantages
Supports a wide variety of languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian	If a user has a complicated query, the system will not respond to it. The chatbot works best for simple straightforward cases
Intuitive interface with each step of chatbot building explained	This web app doesn’t have machine learning mechanics, so when it comes across a phrase it doesn't understand, it just tells a user directly to rephrase it
Their ChatBot Academy offers lessons on how to create a chatbot using its features to the fullest
It automatically measures your chatbot performance using real-time analytics

Price: The company offers a 14-day free trial. Then they have different subscription offers corresponding to the size of your business starting from 42$/month for 1 active chatbot.

Chatfuel

Advantages	Disadvantages
It has integrations with Live chat, Zapier, Integromat, Google Sheets, and Webhooks.	The chatbot is not capable of grabbing the intention of the user’s phrase, it only recognizes the necessary keywords. This often leads to misunderstanding and customer frustration.
There is a feature that divides users into segments and sends different messages to different segments.	It is available for a limited number of platforms: Facebook, Instagram and web pages.
They offer discounts for non-profit organizations	The user’s interface is not immediately intuitive and at times might appear clumsy and chunky.
The website offers a chatbot analysis tool to measure your performance
They offer tutorials and there is a large Facebook community of users who are ready to help you with using this platform.

Price: 0$ if your chatbot has up to 50 users. For 15$/month you will get unlimited bot users. For the prices of Premium and Agency plans prices, you would have to contact the company.

Landbot

Advantages	Disadvantages
It offers an option to further customize the bot using code.	The possibility to connect the chatbot to Google sheets is available only at an extra price.
The company offers very detailed and clear online documentation on how to use the chatbot builder.	The number of channels is limited to WhatsApp, Facebook
The chatbot integrates with a number of services such as Google Analytics, Slack, Zapier, etc.	The analytics tool sometimes gets slow
	Some features, for instance, changing the date format, are available only through code. This contradicts the whole idea of a no-code platform.

Price: The free trial is available. There is a free offer, but you are limited to 100 chats/month. Other plans range between 30$ and a custom negotiable price. There is 20% off if you pay per year rather than per month.

Conclusion: Key Takeaway

We hope that this article gives you a comprehensive insight into the world of chatbots so that you could make an informed decision. You now know how to create chatbot applications using no-code platforms like TruVisibility or you can even try using sample chatbot code if you had coding experience before. Now, the world is your oyster!

If there could be one major takeaway from the article it would be the following: your business-specific needs should become the first thing you consider while choosing, designing, deploying, and testing your chatbot. The chatbot should become a helping hand for your employees and customers, and never a nuisance.