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Ksenia Novikova
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Company's messengers receive hundreds of the same questions a day: delivery and payment terms, order status and the rules of filing paperwork. While answering them, an operator may miss important customer requests. Therefore, to facilitate the work of operators and provide quick responses to customers, companies launch chatbots. In this article we will talk about chatbots, what they are and how to create one on Whatsapp or Telegram.

Chatbots: what they are
and how they help businesses

What a chatbot is
Best talking robots
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Chatbots are special programs that help establish contact with clients quickly. They are inserted into messengers, social networks and websites, so that people can receive automatic answers to their questions and companies don't lose potential customers.

For example, a client wants to know if there are any bank offices nearby. They go to the chatbot, enter the request, and the bot automatically sends information and coordinates of the place.

Chatbot of a bank on Telegram can tell about exchange rates, sales offices, the bank's news and accept an application for a service.

Chatbots are convenient because they have no weekends or off hours, unlike live operators, and a client gets an answer within a minute. That's why creating a chatbot is perfect for solving such routine tasks as informing a person about the status of an order or telling them about the terms of delivering goods to a pickup point.
Cases of using chatbots
A chatbot is a convenient virtual assistant who can send a notification of an appointment, remind a person about a special promotion, offer a bonus or a birthday discount, track an order. Let's review popular chatbot cases and then see how to make a chatbot in popular messengers such as Telegram and Whatsapp.
You can sign up for a webinar in the veterinarian's chatbot on Telegram and then get notifications when it starts.
Chatbot helps to establish first contact: if a person signs up, starts a conversation with a bot, they trust this company. So later you can send them personalized offers, news and promotions. For example:
Chatbots can send service messages

Chatbots can sign you up for an event
With a bot, you can sign up people for webinars, meetings, services and remind them before start. Then you can automatically send offers, information from the meeting or discount promo codes to order.
After the first communication, a client can periodically be offered discounts, gifts that stimulate sales.
For example, with catch-up messages you can get a customer interested or make an extra sale.
The bot can use database to track the status of the customer's order, tell how many points there are on the bonus account and notify about the appearance of a product.
Chatbot of an electronics store helps the user to make an order and answers popular questions that may appear in the process of purchase.
Telegram and Whatsapp chatbots help make a purchase, order a product or, for example, issue a refund.
Chatbots accompany orders
A bot can accompany an order from start to finish: help make a purchase, provide a payment link, notify when the order is sent and delivered to a pickup point.
Chatbots help establish the sales chain and make customer service more caring.

Chatbots relieve sales staff of unnecessary routine work and help customers get information on the status of their order quickly.
Chatbots inform about products
The bot can inform customers about services, send information about new products and provide links to a website with detailed information.
The bot will find necessary information on the site and give the client a link to it. If a question is complicated, it will call an operator.

Chatbots collect feedback
The bot informs about services.
With the help of bots you can get feedback from customers: whether the dress fits, whether they like the haircut and the pizza was delivered quickly.
After a haircut, a client automatically gets a message asking for feedback.
With the bot you can get feedback from clients which then handles an operator. For example, if a client liked a haircut and left a positive review, it can be published in social networks. And if something wasn't satisfactory, you can clarify the problem and, for example, offer a discount.
How to create a chatbot
Any chatbot has the same scheme: a person enters a chat room, presses the start button or writes a message to wake up the bot and then the chatbot is launched. After that, a client either asks a free-form question or selects a suitable command from the menu buttons, then the bot perceives keywords in the message and sends a ready answer.

The bot can combine both functions: answering the user's free questions and responding to menu buttons. If it cannot find an answer to a question, it redirects the request to an operator.

In Telegram bot, the bot can combine both functions: a user can choose an answer from the offered ones or write their own question.
Before you create a chatbot, you need to consider the logic of the bot and scripts of a client-robot interaction. To do this, you have to go all the way from customer's interest to purchase and collect questions and problems that arise in the process.
For example, there is an online clothing store. Customers often ask about delivery terms: whether the store delivers all over the country, where there are pickup points, how much it costs. People also ask operators about clothing sizes and the status of their order.
Because the company delivers goods all over the country, and the office works according to a certain time, customers from different time zones don't get a reply for a long time and leave without a purchase.

In order to respond more quickly to similar requests, the company launches a chatbot: it tells you about delivery, helps you decide on the size and sends out automatic notifications on the status of the order.

If there is a problem that the bot can't solve, an operator gets involved. Thus, the company has reduced the workload of employees, accelerated interaction with customers and reduced the percentage of cancellations due to long waits for an answer.

Therefore, to have a link to Whatsapp on your site, you need to think through every customer action in detail and prepare a script for the robot to be able to talk. To do so, you should divide a script into blocks in accordance with goals set by the marketing department such as to collect feedback, send service messages about the order status, advertising mailings or reference information and prepare responses to them.

How to create a chatbot
There are several ways to create a chatbot:
Use builder services. You can create a bot in bot builders the same way as websites and landing pages are designed. For instance, in Chat2Desk, ManyBot. In this case, the functionality of the chatbot will be limited because of the capabilities of the service in which it is built.

Create a bot with the help of another bot. This option is available on Telegram: with the help of a special BotFather bot, a user can make their own bot according to the instructions.

Get a professional developer. A developer helps create a complex bot that can, for example, compose a complex route for a client or calculate the cost of cargo depending on the delivery city and weight. The developer will support the bot's maintenance and update its functions when new features appear in social networks or messengers.



How to create a Whatsapp chatbot
In order to launch a chatbot on Whatsapp, you need to connect Whatsapp Business API. You can find information about it in this article. Only with it you can manage the bot, write scripts and edit them. These tasks can be performed by a developer programmer who will configure certain functions.

And you can also use designers, such as Chat2Desk, which already have solutions for business problems: just put together logical chains and set triggers, clients' actions, which the bot will respond to and run the appropriate script behavior.

How to create a Telegram chatbot
Now let's look at how to create a bot in popular messengers - WhatsApp and Telegram.

In Telegram, you can invite a programmer to create a chatbot or you can create a bot using special services or with the help of a built-in Telegram bot. To do this, go to BotFather and select bot creation in the menu.
Telegram bot BotFather helps users to create their own bot but you have to configure it through external services.

Once the bot is created, you'll need to connect it to one of the script builder platforms and write scripts which it will use to talk with clients.