Chatbots have recently become quite popular. They are being used by businesses to provide complete proactive assistance to their customers. They have grown and improved to capitalize on social media and messenger platforms. Most people haven’t openly identified the true potential of chatbots so; this article is designed to act as a style guide to build chatbots on Engati Platform.
The number of businesses using ai chatbots has grown exponentially. Chatbots docked to Facebook’s Messenger have increased from 30,000 in 2016 to over 100,000 today. Every major company has announced its own chatbot, and 60% of the youth population uses them daily.
These statistics prove that chatbots are the new generation of tech. No more waiting for the right time to incorporate them into your business. The time is now. By the year 2020, nearly 80% of businesses will have their own chatbot.
Billions of people are already using chatbots, so it’s time your business did too.
The Complete Idea
Ever felt lost and directionless while in a huge mall?
A chatbot addresses this problem by providing a hyper-local map with the relative location of whatever brand/store, restaurant, restroom/elevator, or mall-amenity the user wants to know. Using chatbots adds up another tip for store, cafe, or restaurant management. Apart from providing a catalog of services and stores the mall can offer, the bot also serves as a medium for Business to Consumer(B2C) Marketing for the brands/stores in the mall to broadcast their latest offers/sales. The bot also provides a functionality to contact the mall help desk when desired.
Note - This bot is targeted for Phoenix Market City, Pune as a proof of concept. It only includes a set percentage of all stores currently in the mall.
Industry & User Segment
The bot is targeted at Malls/Supermarkets/Shopping Complexes.
This bot aims to provide assistance to all people visiting the mall regardless of age. Since it provides an ability to explore a huge area quickly, it will be of great use for tourists and first-time visitors who have no idea about the location of stores within the mall.
How does Engati work?
This is very simple - Engati offers two major functionalities to help create the bot- Paths & FAQs.
Paths can be defined as different waterfalls or flows which the bot can take. They define what the bot is going to reply to a user in case of a specific intent.
For Eg- For a Restaurant Bot, you may have paths like - View Menu, Order, Cancel Order, View Discounts, Track Order, etc.
FAQs define the many ways a bot could interact with the user. This functionality allows you to define various utterances/phrases for the defined paths.
For Eg- For a Restaurant Bot, to view the menu, you can have FAQs like - “Show me the menu,” “What cuisines do you serve?,” “Can I see the menu?” etc
Note - Apart from the mentioned functionalities, Engati also offers a lot of other smart chatbot features which we are going to find out about as we proceed.
Building the Idea
We started by charting out the various major features/information and functionalities the bot could offer to the user-Given below is a brief list of functionalities of the bot-
Defining Paths
We started out by covering basic features of the bot, but the platform’s rich features allowed us to create up to 20 paths covering almost all features we thought of comprehensively. We created the complete paths. After which, we came across two cool features of the platform-
Defining FAQs
Now, this was a fun part. We had to define and train the bot with utterances/FAQs which will be used to trigger any of the paths we defined above.This is how we did that -
The picture above shows some classified sample utterances for trigger paths.
Integrating Complete Back-End with Engati
Create an engati.json file
{ "data": {
"type": "carousel",
"templates": [{
"title": "20% Off",
"image_url": "https://viditgupta.me/botimage/footwear/woodlandlogo.png",
"buttons": [{
"payload": "https://viditgupta.me/botimage/footwear/woodlandmap.png",
"title": "View Location",
"type": "web_url"
}]
},
{
"title": "Free Installation with Bravia",
"image_url": "https://viditgupta.me/botimage/electronics/sonylogo.png",
"buttons": [{
"payload": "https://viditgupta.me/botimage/electronics/sonymap.png",
"title": "View Location",
"type": "web_url"
}]
}
]
}
}
Start JSON Server
$ npm start
Now if you go to http://localhost:3000/data, you’ll get
{ "id": 1, "title": "json-server", "author": "typicode" }
Plural routes
GET /data
POST /data
PUT /data
Note - Find the barebone API at https://github.com/Ayushverma8/Engati-API-Starter
Configuring Channels
Once we were done building the bot, we decided to integrate and test it out on platforms like - Facebook Messenger and our own website.
Configuring Facebook Messenger as a channel took just 5-10 minutes to complete. The bot was live in no time.
Earlier, for adding the bot to our website, we just had to add a few scripts in the HTML code and it was up and running!
Analytics
What’s the point of creating a business bot if you can’t increase your conversion rate or retain customers?
Engati’s platform offers just the right tools to keep track of things like Button Actions, Most Frequent Messages, Messages Received vs Sent, Average Messages and Actions per user.
Here are the main takeaways-
More about Engati
Engati is a no-code chatbot platform. Therefore, you can integrate all your work apps on one single platform. In fact, it lets you choose your own language from over 20 international languages. Moreover, it is easy to use and customize. For instance, if you want to make a change as per market requirements, our in-house developers will help you with it for a nominal charge.
Further, the Engati platform supports Live chat. Also, as a user, you can take over a conversation from the bot with a customer at any time. In fact, you can upload the FAQs of your business such that the interaction is seamless. Therefore, come on board!
Billions of people are already using chatbots, so it’s time your business did too. Register with Engati and build your free chatbot now!
