Creating a Chatbot From Scratch Vs. Using a Chatbot Template

So you've decided to improve your small business with a chatbot. Good decision! Chatbots can increase sales by up to 67% according to recent statistics. But is it worth creating a bot from scratch, or can you use a bot based on a ready-made template? Let's take a look at both options in this article.

Table of Contents

Creating a Chatbot from Scratch

Using a Chatbot Template

Building a Chatbot

Creating a chatbot with TruVISIBILITY’s Chat

Conclusion

Creating a Chatbot from Scratch

One of the main advantages of creating a chatbot from scratch is that you'll have complete control over the design, features, and functionality of your bot. It will be your exclusive thing that you'll know like the back of your hand.

There are two ways to create a chatbot from scratch — either code it or build it with help of one of the no-code platforms. The first way is terribly difficult. Yes, you more likely won't depend on a third-party platform, but either super-cool coders with knowledge or Python, Node.js and other stuff or business owners who are ready to invest a tidy sum in development can go through it. The second way is much easier and within the power of almost everyone. Therefore, we will not talk about coding here and will focus on creating a bot using no-code tools.

It is noteworthy that using no-code platforms you will be able to assemble not just simple rule-based chatbots, such as a FAQ bot or a bot with Quick Response buttons, but also AI-powered chatbots able to understand your customers’ intents and simulate human conversation. Well, if this is the case, then why on Earth bother coding a chatbot from scratch at all?

Plus, keep in mind that just developing a chatbot is not enough. You’ll need to deploy it on your channels, integrate with other applications and have an easy way to tweak without your developers’s help (we assume you’re not a developer yourself and don’t have skills to deal with code).

In short, there’s just no reason to deal with coding a chatbot, unless your needs are really extraordinary and your budget is limitless. Just use no-code platforms with visual builders.

Using a Chatbot Template

If you want to save time and money, use ready-made templates. They will help you get your chatbot up and running quickly and with minimal effort. Templates represent, so to speak, the framework of a chatbot, its structure, its pre-made workflow. All you have to do is to customize them to fit your specific needs — edit the content, fine-tune the answers, and perfect tone-of-voice.

For example, if you are creating a simple FAQ bot, then you will have to load it with questions that your customers ask and proper answers. In this case, the structure of the bot will not have to be touched.

Building a Chatbot

Whether you're building a chatbot from scratch or using a template, there are a few general steps you need to go through. We've covered them in detail in the article 5 Steps to Build a Chatbot for Your Small Business, so here we'll talk about them briefly.

Defining the purpose of your chatbot. At this stage, you need to decide why you need a chatbot at all: for boosting engagement and sales, segmenting traffic, customer interactions, providing data for analysis, lead qualification, or something else. Meanwhile, it is not enough just to decide for what tasks you need a bot. You'll have to study what problems your customers are concerned about and how a chatbot can help them. You need to have an idea of what a conversation flow can be.

Creating a chatbot's persona. The ideal chatbot should have a personality that resonates with your customers. You'll have to work not only with his communication style, but also with such trifles as a name, and an avatar. Here you'll also have to decide on the functionality of your bot.

Designing a chatbot's conversational flow. This is perhaps the most difficult stage in the development of a chatbot. Simply put, you have to work out the likely dialogues and actions, from the welcome message to the visuals like the Quick Response buttons. We talked in detail about the creation of a conversational flow in the article How to Design an Engaging Chatbot Conversation.

Testing a chatbot. Before you release your chatbot into the wild, you need to check if everything works as expected. To do this, you have to conduct several tests, such as question/answer testing, usability testing, and so-called guerilla testing that involves real-life action.

Deploying a chatbot. The last stage. Actually, placing the bot on your channels — website, messenger, etc.

As we said above, if you decide to use a template to create a bot, in most cases it is enough just to adapt its content to suit you. If you are making a chatbot from scratch, then you'll have to thoroughly understand three concepts: trigger, script, and intent.

Trigger — an element of the chatbot structure that specifies when to run the workflow. Simply put, the trigger determines under what conditions the chatbot will initiate the chat with a client. It all starts with a trigger. And the trigger runs the script.

Script — a set of commands, the so-called steps, that the bot must execute. The steps can be very different. For example, send a text message to a chat with a client, send an email, or redirect the client's message to AI core. And here comes the next big thing — intents.

Intent — a set of utterances (words, phrases, and sentences) that can indicate the intent of the client, and the chatbot's response. The more intents your chatbot has under the hood, the smarter it is.

So, when you use a template, you probably won't really need to deal with triggers, scripts, and especially intents. Everything is already set up for you. However, creating a chatbot from scratch involves the development of those three components.

Creating a chatbot with TruVISIBILITY’s Chat

Our TruVISIBILITY Suite platform includes Chat — an application that allows you to create chatbots of any complexity without a single line of code — both from scratch and using templates. Develop rule-based and AI-powered hybrid chatbots in a simple and convenient visual editor. Our ready-made templates library includes chatbots for lead generation, customer support, and conversational marketing. In short, TruVISIBILITY Suite offers you everything you need to create a chatbot.

Besides Chat, our platform includes other marketing software such as Messaging for making email marketing, Sites for building landing pages, and multiple page websites. Being a part of one platform, all the TruVISIBILITY apps are naturally integrated with each other, so you won't need to waste your time on software integration issues. However, you can use third-party applications together with TruVISIBILITY software using API.

By registering with a freemium account, you get unlimited access to fully functional software free of cost. As your business grows, you only pay for what you use without any contract. Freemium TruVISIBILITY account allows you to:

• Create a chatbot that can conduct up to 100 conversations per month
• Launch email blasts, start drip campaign, etc with 1000 free emails sent monthly
• Send 1000 SMS texts per month
• Build 1 website including a blog
• 1 GB of storage usage
• 1 SSL certificate
• Unlimited API usage

The pricing is very simple, it's based on usage over the free monthly allotment. Thus it is extremely affordable for the small to medium business. You can adjust the number of conversations your chatbots can have, the number of emails and SMS that can be sent per month, the number of websites you can deploy, and the capacity of your cloud storage. Simple and flexible!

Conclusion

Chatbots are not just a fashion trend, but an effective marketing and customer service tool that will easily take your business to the next level. Though chatbots as a carrier of artificial intelligence radiate a mysterious aura, it's not rocket science to build one. If you want an exclusive bot designed specifically for your needs with powerful artificial intelligence capable of detecting any user intent, then do it from scratch using a no-code bot builder, such as TruVISIBILITY's Chat. For a quick solution make use of ready-made templates, developed by TruVISIBILITY's expert team.

Creating a chatbot is simple and easy! Sign up for a freemium TruVISIBILITY account and get your chatbot today!