Creating More Human-Like Chatbots: A Step-by-Step Guide

Chatbots, also known as talkbots, bots, or interactive agents, have been around for years. However, their uptake has been slow. Initially, many businesses wanted to jump on this trend. But, coding knowledge was a must to build a chatbot, which not many businesses have.

Today, businesses are building their own conversational agents using drag-and-drop bot editors. In other words, you no longer require coding skills to build chatbots for a CRM call center. Growing companies want to adopt these new trends because of their numerous benefits.

They want to make their customers happy by answering their questions promptly, offering them better user experiences, and making their website engaging, interactive, and credible.

Statistics indicate that a single chatbot can handle almost 91% of customer queries from the beginning to the end. These chatbot interactions contribute to an average cost savings of $0.50-70 per interaction.

So then, you can feel confident with the process of incorporating chatbots. Here are the eight steps you can follow to make your chatbot.

What is a Human-Like Chatbot?

Brands create chatbots to communicate using a conversational human voice. Developers achieve the human-like voice by personalizing greetings, using informal language, and inviting rhetoric. Inviting rhetoric aims to stimulate a feeling of mutual understanding by asking your customers for feedback when engaging with them.

Creating a human-like chatbot for your business requires time and effort. But, things are now simplified with the CRM in call center solution. The custom chatbot development is a perfect solution for your business. With the call center CRM, customers get instant and consistent answers to their queries. 

This responsiveness delivers a better customer experience, increases customer engagement, and improves customer satisfaction. It all translates to higher sales and revenues, together with increased brand loyalty. Once you have the CRM call center solutions, you can easily track the customer experience from start to end.

7 Steps for Creating a Human-Like Chatbot from Scratch

1. Select the Right Chatbot Type for Your Business

There are many chatbot types in the market. They can be pattern-based (more primitive) or learning-based AI (more advanced and sophisticated). The first step is to identify the right chatbot type for your business.

Each company should pick its chatbot based on its goals. These conversational agents take different approaches when interacting with customers. Here is what you need to get started:

• Develop a chatbot strategy
• Define your objectives
• Specify the desired outcomes you want users to achieve
• Define how the bot will help users achieve positive results

Businesses create a chatbot for customer support and sales, and integrate it with call center CRM software. They use them to substitute human sales representatives or customer support, answer users’ inquiries, provide consultations, and gather data.

So then, your business should define the chatbot type it wants to develop based on customers’ demands and business goals.

1. Choose an Appropriate Communication Channel

Communication channel refers to the medium your chatbot will use. These channels should complement your brand experience because bots reflect your brand identity. You can use various media to showcase different aspects of your services.

Chatbots are generally flexible, and can integrate with multiple platforms. Aside from a multi-channel strategy, you can host a bot on your site, or have a standalone mobile app. 

You can use the insight you acquired in the conceptualization phase to determine the following:

• Communication type, i.e., text or voice-based
• Your target audience
• How your business will promote your chatbot to help users discover it
• The connection you intend to create between the bot and customers
• When the bot conversation switches to a human interaction

1. Select the Technology to Automate Human Conversations

Chatbot services are usually powered by rules. Their interface automates their workflows. Over the years, bot development tools and platforms have developed the chatbot ecosystem to support interactions with humans.

This ecosystem consists of third-party chatbots, deployment channels, native bots and platforms, APIs, NLP, etc. enabling chatbot development.

1. Create a Smooth Chatbot Conversation Flow

Customer service optimization is the primary objective of developing chatbots. As a result, you should create a conversational agent that supports an effortless progression of questions and responses, while interacting with humans.

The first step towards achieving a quality conversation is to create a chatbot persona. When writing a script, ensure you have named your bot and given it a tone of voice. Integrating a talking and performing bot with your call center CRM software will improve brand perception. It’s also likely to ease your customer support agents’ workload.

The following tips will help you design the conversation:

• List the necessary parts of a chatbot-human conversation
• Define the ideal customer experience you desire to create
• Continuously add offshoot flows to the main flow map
• Create a bot persona and tone of voice
• Design a complete conversations diagram beginning with greetings and the conclusion of the conversation
• Write conversation scenarios with the bot’s purpose in mind
• Train and test your chatbot

1. Train Your Chatbot

Train the chatbot using the available data, but not guessed conversation scenarios. When well-trained, a bot can perform many tasks just like humans. 

You can use the data collected on call center CRM through emails, chats, social media platforms, etc. The data provides the information your customers are looking for, and appropriate responses.

1. Test Your Conversation Flow

It’s important to test the bot and confirm whether it’s doing what you designed it for. But, you must test your conversational AI in the right way to have a successful chatbot launch.

Start by testing it manually by launching it in messenger, and send different queries to see how it responds. Next, monitor the following:

• Tone of voice
• Navigational scenarios
• Intent matching
• User request fulfillment, etc. 

Finally, test the usability and user feedback acquisition. Based on the bot’s behavior, you can start to test it with a few customers, and continue scaling up.  

1. Deploy the Chatbot

Release the talkbot once you’re satisfied with the previous steps. Constantly maintain your bot to maximize its quality. You will discover infinite opportunities to improve the customer experience once you get the desired chatbot voice. 

Further, continue to advance your interactive agent as your business grows in order to reach your goals.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Why do Businesses Use Chatbots?

Businesses invest in chatbots because of the following reasons:

• Offer better customer experience round-the-clock
• Gain insight into customers’ needs and wants
• Optimized back-end operations
• Chatbot implementation saves resources

1. What are the Different Chatbots Available in the Market?

Chatbots exist in the following categories:

• Pattern-based or learning-based AI chatbots
• Open-domain or closed-domain chatbots
• Open-source or closed platforms chatbots
• Chat-based or task-based chatbots
• Retrieval-based, rule-based, or generative models
• Intrapersonal, interpersonal, or inter-agent chatbots

Bottom Line

Chatbots enable businesses to serve customers best, and reach a wider audience. These AI-powered conversational agents have minimized human interventions in CRM call centers. In addition to replacing efficient human support, talk bots are excellent information-gathering tools.

Fortunately, the quality of the bot interactions has improved dramatically, thanks to technologies like AI and ML. 

We have given you a step-by-step guide to creating more human-like chatbots. The above seven steps will guide you best to custom-make your bot.