The Making of a ChatBot: Albert’s Story

We created a chatbot…

…and since then, we’ve been asked a ton of questions about it.

This blog is going to answer 99% of them, and hopefully, give you the tools and ideas to create your own.

But let’s not get too bogged down in Q & A’s or bullet-points, because ALBERT is a member of Einstein’s team and behind every great CHATBOT, there lies a great STORY.

BTW: There are many different ChatBot software companies, but we use ManyChat’s. So, some of the elements we’ll talk about in this post, may relate to their services.

Chapter 1: In the Beginning…

Like every great story, our tale begins with adversity.

Einstein was being crushed by…

…time!

(That’s right, not all villains need to have crazy scars, and cackle after every deed of wrongdoing.)

You see, Einstein didn’t always host a selfless, audience-serving blog. In fact, Einstein Marketer had already been running as a marketing agency for some time…

…and were actually turning business anyway!

And it was then, when we were bagging referral after referral, that we decided to start our blog.

And soon after the blog’s debut, we started to receive (loads of) messages on Facebook.

Chapter 2: Who? When?

The messages were so varied in terms of time, query, location and aim, that it almost became a case of…

…who was going to reply? And when were they going to do it?

We battled through the messages for as long as we possibly could (about a month), taking it in turns to hold conversations with our audience…

…but we knew it couldn’t go on forever.

So, what were we going to do? Hire a full-time team member to deal with Facebook messages?

We considered it, but unfortunately a human can’t be available 24/7, they can’t talk to infinite numbers of people at one time and they’d need training before we could even get them started.

The answer was clear, we needed a CHATBOT.

ALBERT would become that MACHINE.

Chapter 3: Grave Digging

ALBERT is no monster, but like Dr Frankenstein, we had to assemble his parts before giving him life.

This meant discovering ALBERT’S REASON FOR BEING.

In other words, what’s the meaning of his life?

We already knew we needed a CHATBOT to speak to our diverse audience 24 hours a day, but, how should ALBERT do it? And why should he do it that way?

Our first consideration was our target audience, what are their desires? What are they aiming to achieve by hitting the SEND MESSAGE button? How would they want to be spoken to?

We used our customer avatar to compile a guideline.

But, we had more data to take advantage of…

…all the messages that’d been sent to us already!

Here’s a few:

As you can see, we had lots of different questions coming our way…

…that meant, bags of research into our customer’s desires and loads more ideas!

Chapter 4: A Neat Flow

Our research allowed us to narrow our audiences’ objectives into three areas:

-Service enquiries

-Find out more about Einstein Marketer

-Speak/engage/be entertained.

These objectives, alongside our collected data, gave us the framework for a CHATBOT FLOW.

EINSTEIN MOMENT –A CHATBOT flow is the menus, responses and conversational routes a user can take when talking to a CHATBOT.

From each objective we were able to splinter options into smaller pieces, creating a complete roadmap of menu’s, responses and options…

…that, rather than directing audience members, gave them as much CONTROL as possible.

But, just building a FLOW wasn’t enough…

Chapter 5: Not a Tin Man

ALBERT had meaning, and a FLOW to back it up, but he was still no more than a machine…

…and who’d want to talk to a simple yes/no ROBOT?

That’s why we gave ALBERT a personality.

His characteristics not only increased the time people spent on our Facebook Messenger, it also made him feel like an extension of our team.

We gave him jokes, a past and continue to use his personality as an ambassador for Einstein Marketer.

The ADDED VALUE of creating a welcoming and responsive CHATBOT is a gift to anybody who interacts with ALBERT and has driven users to refer others just for a chat!

Chapter 6: Responsive

It all sounds like plain sailing so far, doesn’t it?

It wasn’t. We had our fair share of hiccups along the way.

Sometimes ALBERT stopped talking, leaving users confused and annoyed.

Our audience are EVERYTHING to us. We couldn’t have them feeling like that.

So, we investigated the problem, and discovered one glaring problem…

…Albert worked perfectly when users reacted to prompts (menu’s and auto-response buttons), but when they tried to speak to him, the flow STOPPED working.

So, we went back to our research, and created a ton of different KEYWORD RESPONSES for him…

…in other words, whenever specific words are typed in messenger, ALBERT replies with SPECIFIC MESSAGES.

This has further improved his user experience, and made him a more valuable member of our team.

And, that’s where we’re up to.

Of course, we’re still improving ALBERT all the time, but these 6 CHAPTERS are the story of his inception…

…and by using the tips, tactics and (navigated) problems in this blog, you should be able to create an awesome CHATBOT for your business too.

Chapter 7: SECRET PASSWORD

If you thought the story was over, think again.

Remember when we told you about KEYWORDS?

Because we know our audience are amazing, super-intelligent people, we’ve created a SECRET PASSWORD that’ll take you to a hidden section of ALBERT…

…I can’t tell you much more…

…but it’s well worth checking out!

And don’t worry, we aren’t asking for anything from you in return! This is just a special little gift for our loyal blog readers.

Simply write ‘CHAPTER 7’ into Facebook Messenger, and you’ll find something super exclusive.

(Don’t worry about capital letters, just write chapter 7 in lower case to trigger ALBERT’S response)

ENJOY

href=”http://m.me/einsteinmarketer”>CLICK HERE TO TALK TO ALBERT!

What do you think about CHATBOTS? Have you created your own and you’d like to share it with our audience? Leave a comment or send us a message and we’ll reply as soon as our social media manager has turned up after being 3 hours late the first day after a bank holiday weekend.

Originally published at www.einsteinmarketer.com on May 17, 2018.