What is a Chatbot Development Process: All you Need to Know About

Chatbot development is a complex process. But it can become a piece of cake with a proper plan and execution. In chatbot designing, the thing is to break down the process into clear steps. Every business today is investing in chatbots to streamline its customer support operations. A chatbot is a dedicated software designed to communicate with humans naturally. The majority of chatbots unite with different messaging applications to form a link with the end-users. However, some chatbots also operate as standalone apps. Here are the steps to build a chatbot.

1.Set your Goals for Chatbot:- The first step is to set the goals for your chatbot based on your business needs and your customers’ demands. When you know what your chatbot should do, getting on to the other steps gets easy. A chatbot is a good idea if:-

Your team performs a lot of repetitive tasks

You receive a lot of questions on the same issue

If you want to cut customer service costs

You have multilingual customers

You have multichannel customer support

You want to upgrade your marketing efforts


2.Choose a Communication Channel:- Chatbots can integrate with different types of texting platforms. So you can choose a suitable communication channel depending on your business requirements, ease of customers to reach you, and the provision of relevant API by your desired chatbot. You can easily integrate the chatbot with Facebook, Messanger, and Skype.


3.Decide Apps for Integration:- A chatbot architecture should include a knowledge base to fetch appropriate replies. You can develop a knowledge base or you can integrate any existing app or service that contains all the information required by the customers.


4.Data Collection:- Your objective to create a chatbot is to ensure smooth communication with your customers and resolving their issues. Therefore, it is crucial to design the chatbot in a way so that it can answer any query. For this, keep accumulating all the conversations and integrate the stored chats with the bot. It will eventually help the program identify the context of different incoming questions.


5.Choose Development Platform:- There are a number of development platforms are available that can create a smart chatbot in a short time. They use NLP and allow developing chatbots according to your business needs. Chatbot maker tools include,

Chatfuel

Flow XO

Octaine.ai

Botsify

QnA Maker

Bottr

In addition to that if you want to have a customized chatbot, but you are unable to build one on your own, you can outsource them to the chatbot development services. They will provide ready-made bots that seamlessly integrate with your respective platform in a few minutes.


6.Dialogue Flow Implementation:- In the final step, implement the complete dialogue flow by creating classifiers. This will draft a structure to let the chatbot program reveal an incoming query, analyze the context, fetch a response, and generate an adequate reply according to the conversational architecture. 

7.Testing and Deployment:- Testing and deployment are the last phases of the chatbot designing process. These both processes go hand in hand because you can only test the chatbot in real-time as you deploy it for real users. You need to evaluate if the chatbot is capable enough to meet your customers’ requirements. Monitor the entire conversations, collect data, analyze the data, and keep updating the bot for better conversations.