How to Make a Chatbot for a Website

Customers now expect companies to provide immediate responses online, whenever they want to contact you. A website chatbot, or live chat solution, helps you connect and support customers in real-time.

In this article, we’ll review how to make a chatbot for a website.

3 Reasons why you should make a website chatbot

1. Most consumers prefer communicating with brands via messaging

A recent study found that 72% of people are likely to purchase from companies that communicate via chat messaging. The same study also found that two-thirds of consumers would shift to a brand that provided text messaging as a communication option.

For that reason, website chatbots a critical for customer service, sales, and marketing teams. Allowing customers to contact you via live chat allows you to share information, links, and even documents immediately with your customers.

2. A website chatbot frees up human agents for more complex cases

When you add live chat to a website, you’ll automate a large percentage of your common tickets from customers. This frees up your live chat agents to handle more complex cases.

Your chatbot can hand these types of conversations over to a human agent. It will then pick up again after the interaction to follow up with the customer and make sure their issue has been fully resolved. This method significantly increases customer satisfaction.

3. A website chatbot helps you serve customers when they’re most likely to buy

Adding a chatbot to your website helps you interact with customers when it matters most. For example, if customers are shopping online, they have high intent to buy.

Answering a question about shipping might mean the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart. So, making a chatbot available to handle those types of questions can significantly impact revenue.

Takeaway: The demand for website chatbots and live chat solutions is growing. It’s changing the way businesses communicate with customers.

How to make a chatbot for a website

1. Decide how complex your chatbot needs to be

There are many different ways to make a chatbot for a website, ranging from simple to complex. Each requires different skillsets and resources.

You can make a chatbot with:

Drag and drop platforms (no-code)
Code-based chatbot frameworks (low-code to high-code)
Custom chatbot development (high-code)

Let's review the pros and cons of each.

A) Drag-and-drop chatbot platforms

Drag-and-drop chatbot platforms are user-friendly and easy to use. There's usually no coding involved, so even those who have no technical expertise can build a bot.

No-code chatbot platforms are good for:

Small to medium-sized businesses
Marketing teams that need flexibility and autonomy
Simple use cases
Serving customers in 1 language
Text-based support

Drag-and-drop chatbot platforms are not a good fit for businesses that need to integrate with CRMs and ERP software. Also, they tend to be limited to text-based interactions.

Takeaway: Drag-and-drop chatbots are a good fit for marketers and business professionals (with no coding experience) that want to make a chatbot for a website by themselves.

B) Code-based chatbot frameworks

Code-based chatbot frameworks are a good choice for larger businesses that are planning a long-term conversational strategy. They serve as a foundation, giving freedom and flexibility to developers–without having to start from scratch.

Code-based chatbot frameworks are best for:

More flexibility
Large and enterprise businesses
More complex use cases
Serving customers in multiple languages
Media-rich interactions
Integration with CRMs and ERP tools
Companies that want to use AI (now or in the future)
Aggregation of channels (live chat, WhatsApp, Facebook)

For example, Hubtype’s framework gives developers powerful tools to make a chatbot for a website. They can create a completely custom chatbot or use a pre-made template to speed up the process.

For that reason, our framework could be a low-code or high-code option, depending on how much customization you require.

Takeaway: Code-based chatbot frameworks give brands a great starting point, while also giving them the flexibility they need to build custom solutions. They are best for larger businesses that have access to developer resources.

C) Custom chatbot development

Completely custom chatbot development is only a fit if you have very specific needs that can’t be achieved with a code-based framework. For the vast majority of businesses, it won’t make sense to make a website chatbot completely from scratch.

Only consider completely custom chatbot development if you have/need:

Extremely complex use cases
Need for a high level of specialized interactivity
A significant amount of time and resources

Takeaway: Custom software development gives you complete control of your chatbot’s architecture, security, and integrability. It’s best for businesses that need highly-specialized solutions, and have a significant amount of time, budget, and resources to dedicate to the project.

2. Define the purpose of your website chatbot

When you make a chatbot for your website, you’ll want to be specific about how you plan to help customers. Customer support automation, improving customer experience, and lead generation are common chatbot use cases.

Just make sure the purpose of your chatbot is aligned with your business’ goals. Identify key metrics your chatbot will help improve. For example, by adding a website chatbot, you might expect the total number of customer support phone calls to decrease.

3. Start with the low-hanging fruit

Most of our clients make a chatbot to handle frequently asked questions (FAQs). FAQs are a great place to start when you make a chatbot for a website.

Our clients typically find that 80% of their inquiries are predictable, common issues. By automating those inquiries, they free up their human resources for more complex questions.

4. Create a process for what can't be automated

The remaining 20% of FAQs usually represent more challenging or complex support tickets. We recommend creating a process for a seamless handover to a human agent.

As you gather more data, you can start to identify more FAQs and hone the abilities of your chatbot. Think about what you can do to automate the low-value tasks to free up your human agents for higher-value, more rewarding conversations.

5. Define the conversational flow chart

If we tried to reduce website chatbots down to their basic components, they would essentially be decision tree diagrams (flowcharts) fitted with a conversational user interface.

So, create a diagram to help you map out your conversations. This will help you plan out each scenario, and help you understand what your chatbot will need to do.

6. Choose tone and personality

Make a website chatbot with Hubtype

Save time with frameworks and templates
Integrate with the tools you use every day
Easily connect to third-party apps
Build highly-engaging conversational flows
Serving customers in 1 language
Text-based support

Book a demo to learn more about how you can make a chatbot for a website with Hubtype.

Finally, a successful chatbot needs a personality. According to chatbot best practices, giving your chatbot a voice makes it more engaging.

Focus on your target audience. How can you create a chatbot that relates to your customers?

Giving a tone and personality to your chatbot is an essential phase of the process. But, don't go overboard. Creating a chatbot that is too “friendly” runs the risk of being annoying.

Companies like Levi's®, Michael Kors, EPSON, Guess, Bankia, and Allianz choose Hubtype to help them build conversational interfaces.

Using Hubtype's our conversational platform you'll be able to: create, deploy, and manage a company-wide chatting strategy through conversational apps.