How to Build a Bot? Here is All You Need to Know About It

Why Is It Crucial to Build a Bot For Your Business?

Bots have been around for quite a while. However, today, innovative headways in artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled them to rise above their standard jobs and capacities. Bots can be developed to help customers, to keep them engaged and to market your products. 

With the rising chatbots trends and its market stats, it is essential for organizations to embrace the new ways of connecting with their customers and to engage them in order to get sky-rocketing revenues. It is anticipated that soon the bots will be totally changing the manner in which businesses communicate with their prospective customers. 

As per Global Market Insights, by the year 2024, the market size of Chatbots is expected to increase to $1.34 Billion – a huge number that is driven by the origin of disruptive innovations like Machine Learning and AI in the chatbot system.

As per Gartner, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one such technology in which businesses are likely to invest more than in any other technology to improve the experience of their customers in the next couple of years. 47% of businesses are expected to use chatbots for customer care and 40% will take the help of virtual assistants. There is no doubt that AI is rebuilding the ways businesses communicate with their clients and bots are the reason behind it. 

You can see the predicted use cases of bots in the image below to get an idea of how it can help your business.

Alongside the above use cases, your business can profit by bots because: 

• They are like a symbol of innovation that excite users
• They can find and reach your potential customers through apps they use
• You can set up a Chatbot that gives customer support 24*7
• They can help you deliver customized ads
• They can assist you with nurturing your leads 
• You can monetize your social media using bots
• Bots help you save time, which you can put into developing new strategies

Now that you know Why it is crucial for your business to build a bot and in which ways it can help you – let’s see various types of bots and which one should you integrate into your business processes to streamline them.

5 Types of Bots That You Can Build For Your Business

Now that you have planned to build a bot for your business – you should focus on building the one that drives the maximum benefits. For this, you have to think carefully about what problems you’re trying to solve and what functionalities you will want to incorporate in your bot. 

Knowing what you need your application to tackle and help with – will decide the kind of bot, virtual assistant you should build. This will affect both – your development plan and as well as your end-client experience. 

The following are the main types of bots businesses build to streamline their operations:

1. Customer Service Bots

Customer service bots are likely the type of business bots with which people are most familiar. They intelligently connect with clients to address questions and tackle their issues. The can give answers to questions frequently asked by your users and can help you with feedbacks and surveys.

2. Marketing Bots

Bots designed and developed for marketing utilize internal and external indicators to furnish advertisers with insights that help build aggressive marketing strategies, screen projects and organize campaigns over print, social and digital platforms. They can help your business in lead generation, remarketing and branding.

3. Sales Bots

Sales Bots use Artificial Intelligence to provide sales team with data insights of targeted clients. Businesses of every shape and size can use these bots to help leads move through their sales funnel. Sales bots can help  businesses in turning their leads into clients more efficiently.

4. Branding Bots

Branding bots are much like customer service bots, however they usually starts the conversation. The Spider-Man Bot is one such model.  To spread the word about the Secret Empire book, Marvel Comics made this business bot for Facebook and Twitter.

5. Supply Chain Bots

This type of bots assist materials flow easily from order to delivery. They are often configured inside different frameworks for consistent connectivity to communicate data rapidly over the inventory network. These incorporate Procurement Bots, Order Processing Bots, Distribution Bots, Shipping Bots, Inventory Bots, and Logistics Bots. 

Bots use chat mediums, for example, SMS text, chat window on website, social media, or instant messaging platforms to react to the messages of users. Selecting the correct sort of bot and platform for your business relies on various components, which may vary from your business size, user base to reasons for which you are developing a bot. 

So, before you start building a Chatbot ensure you know what purpose you need it to serve. The aim of your chatbot will vigorously impact its success. Now that you know what information you require to build a bot – let’s see how you should approach the process of building a bot for your business. 

How To Build a Bot - The Components Required

Developing a bot is really simpler than you might think. But, when you design a bot, remember the 3 center elements of innovation: your bot must be viable, feasible and most importantly desirable.

The three benchmarks will help you provide answers to questions like: Do your users want this? Should your business do it? Is it possible to drive results you want using a bot? Once you find answers to all these questions you can proceed towards building the bot.

But unlike developing mobile applications, bots do not need beautiful UI designs, extended development cycles as per the reviews of app stores and exclusive strategies to attract users into apps. However, they still require the ordinary software modules like backend to be built around them. 

Not only Backend, there are various components that are combined to build up a bot that has the power to revolutionize the customer experience offered by your business. As an Entrepreneur, who is searching for a Chatbot Development Company that has expertise in completing such projects successfully, you must look at their approaches before you trust them on building your own Chatbot.

Here is a list of all the required components for building a bot and how you can build them one after the other: 

1. BackEnd

A bot needs a robust backend to manage the messages that it receives from multiple channels and to parse them with NLP services, for example, Facebook’s Wit.ai, Watson Conversation, Api.ai, or LUIS. The backend empowers integrations, enforces business logics with existing frameworks, makes the bot intelligent and lead the engaging conversation with the user.

2. Channels

After your backend is set up, you will have to make the endpoints for the reconciliation with each particular channel. While each and every channel integration is not the same, they most follow a similar strategy for endpoint set up in the backend for sending and getting messages which depend on the access token approval. 

3. Conversational Intelligence

This is the most complicated phase of Chatbot Development Process and it can be stretched to months depending upon the expertise of your Chatbot Development Company. Training Bots to give natural, intelligent and meaningful replies depending on NLP entities and intents is a perpetual journey. Remember, you have to create a bot which is as intelligent as a human, which is not easy. So, time will go in improving it.

Additionally, every conversation must be custom fitted to a particular algorithm and feature minimal navigation, so that it becomes simple for a user to start again. While you can utilize simple if-else trees, some cutting edge deep learning algorithms is the thing that is appreciated most these days. 

4. Natural Language Processing

Next part of bot development is the integration with Natural Languages Processing (NLP). However, before you do it, you must figure out whether your Bot really needs NLP. If you require your bot to be smart, filled of Artificial Intelligence and almost human – NLP is a must.  

However, if you are building a bot that just lets you browse a product catalog and tell you any other details, you do not need to build a complex NLP solution for it. It is easily accomplished with buttons, good menu and quick replies. 

However, if you are planning to build an intelligent bot to facilitate real conversations, you certainly need NLP! Fortunately, you don’t need to write your own NLP code. NLP enables bots to execute natural conversations with a human, and is accessible as APIs from Microsoft, Google, IBM and Facebook. 

Integrating an NLP service with the assistance of one of the above APIs is simple. But, preparing the NLP plans and entities requires considerable time and out-of-the-box coding skills. You will be required to outline entities to specific objects that are available in your current framework, for example, products, apps, identifiers and so on. 

Also, to authenticate the user input received you must put some business logic verification standards to verify the received information. It can go from simple approval, for example, a contact number must be all numbers and an email address must be in a particular format. For better approval, you can call a web service to validate a pin code or city name against an open database. This will require numerous iterations of coding. 

5. Integration

Because the prime goal of your chatbot is execution of procedures like purchasing products, booking appointments, ordering items and so on, you will have to integrate the chatbot in an existing mobile application. Integration here will include factors like business logic rules and validations, the ingenuity of information which would be required as a part of the business procedure. 

6. Bot Control Panel

Once your bot is out in the market and your clients are on top of it, you may require a backend to track chatbot discussion history, clients, error logs, and so on. You can also add a basic analytics metrics to figure your bot’s performance.

Now that we are well aware of the components required to build a bot – we know the answer to frequently asked question by user on Google that is “How to Build a Bot”. It’s now time to see what time and amount of money you will require to develop a Bot and to integrate it in your existing app – something you will find in the next section of our blog.

How Much Time and Cost It Requires To Build a Bot?

Since now we have seen all – the market trends based on bots, benefits that they bring to the table, types of bots that are now popular in the business world, and the components that are required to create them, it is now time to look at how much cost and time a Bot Development Company Would require to deliver it to you.

Let’s talk about time first, if you are planning to build an intelligent bot that uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) services with a  Bot Development Company that works for 8 hours a day, it will take around 3-4 months to get it all done. The estimated time includes designing, development and integration of the bot in your application. 

Now, the approximate cost to build a bot depend on the hourly price of your developers. However, it is hard to predict the exact amount in dollars that you will require to spend in building you bot, our rough estimate says that it will cost you somewhere around $30,000 to $40,000.

Still unclear or have queries? We are here to help you!