How to Build a Bot? A Step by Step Approach

A chatbot is a software that simulates human conversation to solve customer queries and allows companies to communicate with their audiences instantaneously.

Chatbots can be used to help automate repetitive conversational tasks like collecting information, resolve customer issues, create unique marketing experiences, provide answers to FAQs and connect to human agents if needed.

Eocean Digital Connect lets you build smart, functional bots across many communication channels without writing a line of code. Sounds pretty cool right?

This article will guide you through the steps required to build a conversational bot. However, it is strongly advised to read the article about Action Blocks to get a better understanding of bot builder before creating your first bot.

Let’s begin!

Build a bot  

In our example, we will create a bot with two menu options.

1. Collect user contact details to register them for a product launch wait list
2. Enable users to chat with human agents.

1. Create bot profile

• Click on Chatbot builder in left navigation pane to access the builder dashboard and then click Build from scratch to access the builder canvas.

Name your bot

Provide a unique name to your bot to  identify it later.

Describe your bot

Provide a brief description about the intended purpose of your bot

Choose your channel

Select the channel on which you would like to deploy your bot. Digital Connect currently allows you to deploy your bot on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Google’s Business Messages.

You can always edit and deploy a bot to another channel at any time. 

2. Create Bot Menu using the Message Block 

Bot Menu is  made up of different options connected to each other to trigger a bot flow. it’s like a mini-website built into your website chat widget.  Depending on what the user clicks on, the bot then prompts another set of options for the user to choose from and so on.

• Click on Add Trigger within the builder canvas to open the Message block tray
  
  

Trigger Name

Provide your trigger a name to identify your trigger.

Initiate Conversation with

In Initiate Conversation with section, provide keyword(s) such as Hi, Hello etc. that will trigger a bot flow when a user sends that keyword to your bot.

Bot Response

In a Bot Response section, add a message that your bot will send back to the user such as a greeting or a welcome message in response to the user input . It can be a text, media or a template message.

Bot Menu

In Bot Menu section, you can navigate users  down a desired flow when user selects a menu option. In this case, we will add two menu options for users to choose from.

1.     Register on waitlist

2.     Chat with an agent

•  Click on the Update Trigger to save the bot flow.  

Awesome! Your bot flow will now appear on the builder canvas. You can  zoom in by clicking on the buttons on bottom left side of the canvas to edit the flow .

Now that you have created the bot flow, your bot needs to collect user input if the user selects the option to Register on waitlist. For this use case, we will use the Form Block to create step by step conversational form to collect user data.

3. Create a conversational form using the Form Block

• Go to the Builder canvas and click on Settings.

• Navigate to Form Builder > Create Form to start creating a new form

Form Name

Provide a name for your form.

Form Description

Provide a description about the intended purpose of the form.

Form Fields

Add customer form fields one at a time and provide field name and field type (validate as text, email, number, regular expression) for each field.

On Form Submit

You can provide a trusted email address to receive form data upon form submission.

You can also view the submitted user responses inside the bot builder settings section 

• Once you have created a form, you can select the newly created form from the drop-down list within the Form block and provide a Welcome Message to introduce your users to the form and a Confirmation Message to thank them for submitting the form responses.
•  Click on Add Trigger  to save the bot flow
  

You can see that as you add triggers, the bot flow will be updated on the builder canvas.

4. Bot to Human handover

We will now create a bot flow for Chat with an agent, our second option within our bot menu.

• Create the trigger for Bot to Human Handover with trigger name, keywords and Bot response as you added for the message block in the previous section.
• Click the Bot to Human Handover check box to allow the user to route the bot conversation to a human agent.
•  Click on Add Trigger to update the bot flow.
  
  
  
  
  

   Your updated bot flow will now be visible on the builder canvas.

  
  

Once, you have completed  the flow for your bot, its time to test your bot.

5. Test your bot flow

You can test your bot flow in real time using the Test your bot feature. This feature enables you to see if your bot behaves the way its intended to and fix any issues and errors bot before publishing it.

• Click on Test your bot to activate the preview window and simulate the bot conversation
  

6. Publish your bot

Finally, its time to publish the bot on your channel to let your bot engage with your users.

• Click on Publish and a modal will appear. Click Yes to publish the bot on your channel.

7. Analyze the results and Improve

Navigate over to Insights dashboard and see your bot conversations grow.