The Beginner's Guide to Chatbots

Chatbots are taking the internet by storm, have you heard of them?

They are hailed as the next best thing. It is said that they will take over social media, they will make phone and email completely obsolete… well I don’t know if anyone said that, but we are all thinking it!

What is this Chatbot thing? Why should you use one? How do you go about building one?

We are going to answer all of these questions for you, right now.

What are ChatBots?

A chatbot is a series of rules and sometimes artificial intelligence that is programmed to interact with a real person via chat.

It’s like talking to Siri, but on Facebook, and each business or public figure has their own bot that is programmed to chat about their product or service.

Below is Northdstrom’s bot that helps customers pick out products by price range, gives gifts ideas and more.

Source: Chatbot Magazine.

What can ChatBots do?

Just imagine, you used to have to call a restaurant and wait on hold to get your their hours of operations. Then when they get a website you could simply go online and check their hours. But you still had to find them first.

Now you can use AI to find the best restaurant around you, and learn everything you need just from chatting it up with their chatbot.

Chatobook is one company that builds chatbots specifically for restaurants, to meet all of their customer needs.

This is the next evolution of customer service.

Restaurants are not the only ones that do this of course. Any person or business can create a chatbot very easily.

Here are all the things you could do with a chatbot:

• Answer questions
• Tell people about yourself better and easier
• Capture leads and convert into customers
• Offer product ideas
• Send out your blog posts
• Help people to cure cancer

ChatBots are replacing Email Signups

One of the coolest things I’ve seen is landing pages that instead of the usual email sign up that you would expect, have an invitation to a chat!

Source: joshfechter.com

When I clicked the button that says “Give Me Tactics via Messenger” I thought I’m going to chat with the brand that Josh is building.

I was pleasantly surprised that it brought me to a personal chat with him on Facebook. Brilliant!

Josh is clearly leveraging his site to encourage people to start conversations with him, and that is how he is building his brand and influencer success.

How do I Create a ChatBot?

There are numerous ways to create a Chatbot, and don’t worry they don’t require any coding!

If you are a coder you could always make your own from scratch of course, but for the rest of us regular people here are some good places to start:

ChatFuel

ChatFuel is an excellent place to start making a chatbot. It does not require any coding, and it is absolutely free. WHAT? Yep, you heard me, it’s free.

Here is how you go about creating your own chatbot using ChatFuel (no coding required).

Click on the start now button and it will ask you to connect to your Facebook account.

After you connect to your account, choose a Facebook page that you would like to connect this to. Just for this example, I chose an old motivational page I created called “You Are Powerful”.

Once you connect your page you will see the ChatFuel interface. It’s really to set up the actual bot.

Write a message prompt that will appear when the user clicks the chat button

Then create buttons that they could choose from, like Main Menu, Get Inspired, Ask a Question, in order to interact with you.

Then the last stage is just testing it. Click on the test button on the top right corner of the page.

It will bring you to Facebook messenger and you will see your chatbot in action. Looks pretty slick doesn’t it?

This is how you create a Chatbot.

We hope you enjoyed our tutorial, if there is a topic that you would like us to write about please leave us a comment.