Systematised Steps for the Chatbot Development

Systematised Steps for the Chatbot Development

Chatbots are conversational tools that automate repetitive conversation tasks. They use messaging apps to mimic a natural language / dialogues for a conversation with a person.

There are several tools available to build chatbots that can be easily deployed on websites. The best chatbot platform depends on how you intend to use it and what features are required for it.

However, like any software project, chatbot go through a series of standard steps that guide the development of the bot and help to improve after the release. These 6 systematised steps are as follows:

1. Define the objective for the chatbot

  • The first step is to define what we want the chatbot to do.
  • Some of the commonly defined objectives for the bot are:
    • Create leads
    • Drive sales
    • Improve online brand presence
    • Fill out the survey’s
    • Direct Users to the brand’s website

2. Understand the target user and brand personality

  • In this step, we try to understand the psychology of target user on the basis of the chatbot’s objective and the brand for which we are trying to build the bot.
  • This is crucial to make customer experience with the bot always inline with the brand’s communication style.

3. Design the bot storyboard and dialogues architecture

  • Once, we have an understanding of the user and the brand tone, we can then design the user storyboard and dialogues architecture which to describe:
    • How the user interacts with the bot
    • How the bot would respond to the user

4. Select the platform and develop bot

  • Based on the defined bot’s objective, dialogues architecture design, and user audience base platform (where the brand’s audience is active), we then select the best chatbot platform for the brand and start the bot development.

5. Testing and Deployment

  • After the bot is developed, we need to test the bot for every storyboard, dialogues structure, and test cases to ensure bot consistency throughout the user interactions.
  • This is followed by deployment/integration of the bot with brand website, social media handles, and mobile applications.

6. Collect Data and Revisions

  • After the deployment, we continuously collect and analyse user interaction data to drive the improvements in the bot’s flow, interaction dialogues structures and additional features.