The ongoing Coronavirus pandemic has brought the world to its knees. All of us are bracing the severe impact of the pandemic on human lives, normalcy, business, and economy. As you may have already heard, we need to start living with the Coronavirus until the cure arrives. We need our economies to begin repairing, businesses to open, and markets to function.
For business, if they are not operating online already, they should start transitioning to online or at least have an online division ready for a safer influx of customers. And more customer influx requires better customer service. Globally, customer requests are increasing day by day. Hence, new-age customer support software becomes the need of the hour.
One critical aspect of modern customer support software is automation and its ability to provide chatbots based integrated services. Chatbots can help your customers seamlessly, 24/7, and reduce the workload on your already overwhelmed customer support team. In this post, we will learn how to build a Coronavirus chatbot, integrate it with a customer support suite, and place it on your websites and mobile apps.
For building a Coronavirus chatbot for your business, you will require a set of tools. First, you will need a bot builder platforms such as Dialogflow or Kompose by Kommunicate. Second, you will need a platform that can help you put the chatbot on your website and apps, and manage the customer conversations. One such platform is Kommunicate. All of these above tools are free to use and come with a free trial.
For this blog, we will use Dialogflow and Kommunicate.
Dialogflow is an easy-to-use tool even for less tech-savvy users. Signups for Dialogflow and create your Agent (that’s what they call a chatbot in Dialogflow). Now, under that Agent, you can build your Intents.
Intents help the bot perceive the user’s input and decide the subsequent action. You can build your conversation workflows using these Intents. You have to input the possible phrases the user might use and their replies.
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The best part is — you can also add rich messaging elements in your chatbot. Again, you need not have the technical knowledge to add rich messages. In the Responses section, click the “+” icon, choose Google Assitant, and a list of rich messages you can add will open. Here’s detailed information about the same. We have prepared a step-by-step video to help you out with it:
We have created a sample chatbot for you, which includes text and rich responses both. You can download the sample here, import it, and customize it according to your needs. For more chatbots samples for various use cases, head here.
Additionally, there are tonnes of advanced customizations you can do. We have laid out a beginner’s guide to building Dialogflow chatbots here; you can refer to it for advanced actions.
Most of the businesses have FAQs and knowledge-base for helping their customers. You would ideally want your chatbot to cover your FAQs as well. Dialogflow has a great feature that lets you connect your knowledge-base and FAQs automatically. Dialogflow can source the FAQs from your chatbot and answer customer questions if the intent matches. Learn more about how to connect your FAQ page with your chatbot here.
For a better context, we have connected CDC’s FAQ page in our sample Coronavirus chatbot.
The tough part is over. Since bots can be as smart as you can make them, put a considerable amount of time to build one — covering all your use cases. Now let’s put the chatbot on your website and add it to your customer support suite. We will be using Kommunicate for the same.
First, signup for Kommunicate and locate the Bot integration section. Now find the Dialogflow section and click on Integrate Bot. Follow the directions written there to connect your newly created Dialogflow chatbot. Here’s a video to help you out as well. Please give your bot a name and profile image and choose whether to enable chatbot to human handoff or not. Done — your Coronovirus chatbot is now connected to Kommunicate.
The chatbot is placed on your website using Kommunicate’s plugin. For integrating the plugin to your website, navigate to the Install section in the Komminciate Dashboard. Just copy the code there and add it to your site. Here’s a video to help you out with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciPxuWnBbJI&t
We discussed the integrated customer support suite in the previous sections. Let’s talk about how important it is for the overall customer experience. What happens when a user asks a question that chatbot doesn’t understand? You would not like to keep the user dangling in that broken experience.
This is where chatbot to human handoff pays off. A seamless handoff enables the chatbot to escalate the issue to a human agent. Your chatbot must be able to notify your team. In turn, your team should be able to assess and reply to that user. Kommunicate lets you do all of that and more. The transition is smooth and automatic.
Times are a-changing, and so should the practices with it. Automation and chatbots in customer support are must-haves for modern and remote customer support teams. In this post, we learned how to make a Coronavirus chatbot and deploy it on your website. It’s time to leverage conversation AI in your business practices.
Feel free to download, import, and use the sample we provided to expedite your automation process. I sincerely hope that we all come out of this situation far more equipped than we went into at the start of it.
