2. Decide where your chatbot should ‘live’
Most chatbot can be deployed on a host of platforms and services. You can start a bot on Messenger and host it on your Facebook page, build a chatbot for Whatsapp or deploy one on your own website.
When you’ve decided on the channel(s), it’s time to find a service where you can build your bot. Here are some examples of platforms where you can build a chatbot and offer a free-plan.
I used Flow.xo when I was experimenting with building a chatbot for my own personal website.
You can check it out and have a chat here. It’s very basic, but wasn’t that hard to build. So I recommend just playing around with one of the platforms to get a feel of the workflow when building a bot.
3. Develop the ‘personality’ of your chatbot
The personality of your chatbot is a mix of copy, branding and conversational style. Think about what kind of personality works best for your brand.
A bot with an informal style might work well for a brand focused on younger people, but for a B2B brand this would probably not be the best fit.
Also take care when using humour for your bot. A sense of humour is very subjective and you have a real chance of missing the mark and end up hurting your brand.
4. Do it yourself or do you outsource?
Building a good chatbot can be very time consuming. For most chatbots you have to write every piece of script yourself and create the conversational flow. This requires a good sense for copy and writing and also some technical expertise. As you need to know how the chatbot operates and how you create a good question/answering flow.
You have to decide for yourself if you build a chatbot yourself or outsource. When outsourcing the copywriting part, make sure you have a good idea on what you want to achieve with your bot and what kind of personality it is you’re looking for. You don’t want to end up with pages of conversational scripts which end up being worthless.
Here are some more interesting articles if you want to dive in more: