You can build a chatbot without advanced coding skills. Sounds easy, right? Building a great chatbot is just part of the process of adding a bot to your website.
There are platforms that can help you build conversational bots without writing a line of code. And by building a chatbot, your business can engage visitors smoothly and address queries in real-time. Quite like those 40% of businesses that have some type of virtual assistant or have implemented chatbots for customer support services.
Similarly, chatbots have become quite an important tool these days because the website is now the main source to deliver online support and generate leads. Using AI-powered bots, you can mitigate customer frustrations like long wait times and improve the user experience.
Table of Contents
- Importance of Adding a Chatbot to Your Website
- Steps to Deploy a Chatbot on Your Site
- How to Choose a Website Chat Software
- Other Places to Add a Bot
- Top Chatbot Software for Websites
- Adding a Bot with TruVISIBILITY's Chat App
- What's Next?
Importance of Adding a Chatbot to Your Website
80% of marketers are using chatbots in some way and more brands are investing in them to improve the customer experience. Since bots are proficient in resolving common queries while reducing the need for human interaction, they are increasingly leveraged across industries in different aspects.
Here are the main ways adding a bot to your website can help drive conversion rates and strengthen the reputation of your brand:
- Automation of common queries – You can automate the common queries with AI chatbots and engage customers by delivering real-time responses around the clock.
- Increased conversion rates – Utilizing an FAQ bot can not only boost your customer satisfaction levels but also your number of customers due to increased conversion rates.
- Better sales assistance – You can deploy sales or appointment booking chatbot template to deliver instant answers to sales-related queries and pre-qualify leads when the sales team is busy or not available.
- Superior customer engagement – Conversational AI chatbots can help your customers start a conversation anytime and resolve their queries quickly, thereby increasing engagement levels exponentially.
- Effective marketing – AI-powered chatbots can be part of your marketing initiatives and help push your customers seamlessly through your sales funnel.
- Easy information collection – Businesses can deploy the best chatbots to collect basic customer information like email or contact numbers to create customer profiles.
- Lower support costs – You can reduce customer service costs up to 30% with smart chatbots on websites and handle thousands of conversations which speeds up the response times.
Steps to Deploy a Chatbot on Your Site
In this guide, let's go over the common steps every chat software will require in order to start making your chatbot live on your website. The Chat app from TruVISIBILITY is a great example of the common stages you'll need to go through to satisfy users with your conversational marketing and customer support.
Beginning with a Chatbot
The “Add Chat Widget” button is located in the upper right side of the page. Click the button to start adding a new chat widget.
Next, you can choose a chat template to easily accomplish your goals, whether you need a lead magnet, FAQs bot, or customer support bot. You can also choose to create a bot from scratch or blank chatbot template. This is also when you will choose to have a bot that can provide live chat support.
After choosing the bot you need, you can go directly to building the bot's conversations. TruVISIBILITY has one of the easiest platform designs that allow you to drag conversations to connected questions or add another widget (like buttons or images) making the building process of the bot faster.
Design the Bot Website Chat Window
You'll likely find that most platforms that allow you to create a chatbot will have a specific design section where you can add specific features to the bot, such as colors of the bot, avatar, and border shape.
Deploy the Chabot on Your Website
The last few steps are vital in correctly deploying your bot so any user visiting your site can interact with it. When going to the channels section, be sure to connect this bot to your website. If you were to create a bot for a different party or channel, such as Facebook Messenger, you can go back and design the bot specifically with that channel in mind.
You will have to connect the chatbot to the site. When you click connect, each chatbot platform will have different steps. TruVISIBILITY has the simplest step by simply copying the code of your website and embedding it to your site. You can also choose your bot to be a popup window, which most chatbots are. It is common on a social channel or messenger app to directly embed the bot.
Settings
Some chatbots will need special care when choosing the settings. This is the very last vital step when deploying chatbots to a website. The most important setting will be the web settings where you can name the chatbot, provide a welcome statement, provide a way to end the chat, etc.
How to Choose a Website Chat Software
There are a few questions you'll need to ask yourself about your business before you start building and adding a chatbot to your website.
- Who is your primary audience?
- What do you need the chatbot to accomplish? Take surveys? Help with customer support? Collect emails for marketing purposes?
- Where do you need to deploy your chatbot? Just your webpages or something else in addition?
- How much can you afford to put towards a chatbot?
Other Places to Add a Bot
You may be focused on adding a chatbot to your website, which is arguably the most important place it should be deployed. Once you decide which type of bot you want (and if you want a more advanced bot you can do on your own if you know how to code a bot), you can play around with different channels and uses for your chatbot.
Social Channel
On your Facebook page, for example, you can deploy a chatbot and build it according to your customer base and past interactions you've seen on your website. When a user comes to your social channel page, you can choose to have your chatbot to pop up and prompt the visitor to take the next step - and that could be signing up with an email address to get a special discount code, get a free item or download, etc.
SMS
You can prompt a user to text a phone number connected to your chatbot. The bot, mind you, should be designed for customers who prefer to text. This means they will not sign anything or have capabilities on a mobile device that they may have with a computer, such as clicking on a button.
You can, however, design the bot to interact with potential customers by having them agree to future SMS messaging by replying to the message with "Y" for yes and "N" for no.
You can also send them links that will direct them to a landing page on your site (if that's your goal) to have them sign up with an email address that way. You can send them links or special codes that prompt them to go to your website to buy from your ecommerce store as well.
Messenger
Facebook Messenger (and other social channels that have a separate messaging app) can have a chatbot integrated seamlessly. Many leads will message a small business from the company's business page in hopes of getting their questions answered.
Not many small and growing businesses have time or resources to continuously check their Facebook messenger for updates or concerns of customers and leads. You can design a chatbot very similar to the one you deploy on your website to Messenger, for example, with buttons, fillable sections for customers to answer the bot's questions, and even have the NLP of your bot work its hardest by detecting the questions and concerns, or intent, of users and responding accordingly.
Yes, you can also redirect customers to go to a link of your page, respond with personal information (for shipping or return confirmations), and most of everything else you can do with a bot deployed on your site. It is trickier to personalize the user's experience with the chatbot if you rely on the users to sign into their account on your site in order to personalize the chatbot conversation for them.
Top Chatbot Software for Websites
Landbot
Landbot is the lesser-known but still powerful chatbot builder to deploy on any website of yours. You do not have to have built a website with Landbot to place their bot on it because Landbot is simply a chatbot platform.
They claim to have a no-code platform for you to create to heart's content. Whether you need or want integrations for your chatbots or want to build a simple customer support bot, it's a great cheap choice to start for free. After a 14-day free trial, expect to pay $39/month, $99/month, or a custom quote for larger businesses.
Learn more about Landbot and how they can help you satisfy your customer base here.
TruVISIBILITY
TruVISIBILITY has its all-in-one suite, which includes the ability to create an email setup, landing page or pages, website, and chatbot that can connect to all of these channels and more (such as Facebook and SMS) on the web.
What is great about the Chat app is that it is an io like none other that offers you the ability to create whatever chat bot you want for free. None of the features or plugins are kept hidden for the premium paying subscribers. Businesses with more than just a growing customer base already know how to create an engaging website and landing page, so the best option for these instances would be the premium (paid) account.
Instead of a flat fee for each month, TruVISIBILITY offers custom pricing for each business's particular needs. Also, if you already have a website, there is an easy way to add a chatbot or landing page to a website you already may have created on Wordpress, for example.
Adding a Bot with TruVISIBILITY's Chat App
Change Chatbot Settings
Adjusting the settings of your chatbot can help you enable a chatbot on your site, upload an avatar image for your bot, name your bot, and more. Learn more about changing your chatbot settings here. Chatbot settings can be done before crafting your chatbot or after it is built.
Choose Channel
Like most chatbots, you'll need to choose where you want your chatbot. Websites often have a live chat solution. For this article, we focus on deploying on a website versus a social channel or SMS. Choose your website by embedding the website or code. Some website chat software will allow you to do this after you build your chatbot, but you are directed to do this before you build your bot using the Chat app.
Create a Website Chat Window
When you create a chatbot, you must think of your goals for the bot. Why is it on your website? Your bot can simply be a website chat solution for most visitors to answer their questions, redirect them to a FAQs page, etc.
Your chatbot can be used for more than just to answer customer questions, such as generate leads. Chatbots can collect user information for marketing purposes later. When designing this type of bot, you'll want buttons or a form. Or you can redirect a potential customer to a landing page for them to fill out a form there. This can be a helpful strategy if your chatbot can do more for users than just giving support or collecting email addresses.
Choose how your website chat window will look. It can look like a block in the corner of your website. You can have rounded edge bot with your specific brand colors in the background and around the edge as well. You can design everything to make your bot look how you want when it pops up for visitors of your site. Or simply go with one of TruVISIBILITY's default templates. The choice is yours!
What's Next?
To deploy bots, you simply need a great chatbot software that can easily provide you with the ability to test your bots (A/B testing). Decide which features of a chatbot will make or break your choice in software. These features could be certain plugins that you think your business needs, whether or not you need possible live conversations with certain users in certain circumstances.
No matter what google claims to the be the "best" chatbot software, it ultimately will come down to your budget, time, and need. Growing businesses likely prefer a free trial or cheap option. TruVISIBILITY promises to let you build a free chatbot and keep it deployed on your site, for free, forever. Check it out below and start building or simply learn more about the other apps offered for email and landing pages.
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