Chat Bot is a  chat Robot that is used instead of live agents to communicate with the customers/end users for solving the queries. A chatbot is an application that simulates human conversation, either aloud or via text message. Instead of having a conversation with a person, like a support agent, a customer can have a conversation with a computer. Whether through typing or talking, a chatbot can connect with a customer. It can influence a customer relationship.

What is Chatbot ?

A ChatBot is a service that is powered by predefined business rules, scripts and artificial intelligence through a conversational interface. With the recent rise of Artificial Intelligence, ChatBots have become a lot smarter and they understand customers more accurately than a bot could ten years ago. More and more businesses are now looking into ChatBot as a practical channel to provide instant service to their customers. Less agent handle time, less customer wait time, a better user experience can be assured by chatbots.

Why use chatbots?

chatbots provide one-to-one service immediately. Reduces the time waste on analysing repeated queries. chatbots can deflect easy cases, agents can devote more time to complex issues that require creativity or teamwork. Bots can instantly welcome customers with a branded greeting in a chat window and direct them to resources they need faster than human resources. Bots are used to save the customer time and money responses to the straightforward questions over and over again.

How does chatbot work?

ChatBot is very smart, but you need to teach it what to do. The Einstein Bot builder is the new point-and-click setup tool that allows us to build dialogs in a bot. It supports different types of tasks that can be configured in a dialog. You can Ask Question to gather information, and Send Response to return the output to the chat window. Apart from providing the greeting, it will respond to the questions asked by the customers on accepting one or more input(s) from the customer/user.

Chatbot is provided with certain contents which are used to train the bot accordingly. Chatbot is made of below contents:

• Dialog: They are a basic ‘unit’ of conversation between your customers and bots. Dialogs are built from a developer-defined list of Messages, Questions, Actions and Rules.
• Messages are the static string interpolated information like “welcome”, “Hello” etc.
• Questions enable you to ask for customer input and store that information for later use.
• Actions are enabled to call apex code with parameters and store the results.
• Rules act as a conditional engine allowing developers to make runtime decisions based on customer data. On condition, the bot will decide the corresponding action that needs to be done.
• Intent: Intents are phrases and words that you provide for each dialog. Whenever a customer types a message, the bot framework predicts the customer’s intent using the Einstein Platform’s Intent service. Based on the prediction, the system selects the dialog most likely matching the customer’s input.
• Entity: Entities define the datatype (i. e. String, Currency, Date etc.) as well as optional selection values. A slot gets assigned to an entity so that the system knows how to handle the slot in-/output. Think of an Entity as a ‘bucket’ of slots.
• Slots: Slots represent a mechanism to store dynamically created data within the context of a dialog. They act like variables. For example, the customer’s response to a question can be stored in a slot, and you pass data from a Slot as a parameter to an Action. Not only can slots be used to store data, but developers can use familiar merge syntax {!slotName} in messages to interpolate slot data.

How to create chatbot?

To create the chatbot we need to setup the prerequisites and can create a bot and can train the chatbot by creating the placeholders as follows.

prerequisites:

For creating the Chatbot we require the following licenses.

-Service Cloud license
-Live Agent license
-Enable Lightning Experience.

once pre-requisites are done, we can start creating the chatbot and create dialogs and entities for chatbot in salesforce.

Let’s Start creating a simple chatbot.

Step 1: On clicking create Bot specify the bot name and greeting message which is displayed to welcome the customer while chatting and the menu has to be created for initiating the chat to know the queries of the customer.

On creating Chatbot successfully, Now its time to train the bot with required data that is used to communicate with the customer. Bot messages are used to communicate and know the customer queries/requirement, On customer response, it will be stored in slots and response that are trained to chatbot as messages, intents are given to the customer.

Step 2: As we have discussed before messages, dialogues and intent are used to train the bot. So we have to create the things that train chatbot to communicate with the customer.

Here we can create a dialogue group so we can create dialogue intents and add to the dialogue group. Here I am creating a dialogue group called Order_List and adding dialogues to that group.

I have created a message where the bot asks the customer -do you want to place an order? which accepts the answer in boolean values either yes or no on customer answers bot responses.

To perform customized actions we have to create ACTION which can include apex code, flow and can send email on dependent conditions. Apex code will be added to the action values and those values displayed in the bot.

Created simple statements for chatbot and used to communicate with a customer. On customer specific questions bots response are feeded in the questions. Here the bot displays the welcoming message as hi welcome and continues with the question do you want to place an order and proceed with customer input values.

On Yes it will display the menu to select the order. End chat dialogues are created, The bot displays goodbye! and asks to click the end chat button to end the chat.

Confused Dialogues displayed to represent that the chatbot is unable to acquire the expected answer from the customer, On this condition chat can be restarted or it can be transferred to the agent on request of the customer. Bot says the customer sorry, I didn’t understand on unexpected answers like for order place if the customer is giving I want some pizza instead of yes or no then this confused message is displayed by the bot to know the customer requirement.

After training the bot the chatbot has to be activated and we can check the chat internally by a preview of the chatbot.

Conclusion:

ChatBot is a replacement of live agent which decreases the wastage of time and increases the customer experience, resolves the frequently asked customer queries and on-demand transfer to the live agent on complex issues which requires more attention. ChatBot can be created and trained according to the client requirement and can add complex scenarios through actions, intents, messages, dialogue intents which are chatbot contents that are used to train the chatbot, it can be trained with customized functionalities and can be published with higher effectiveness on demand of customer as they are booming technologies which providing the best customer support.