Feature Guide: ChatBots (Legacy)

Article quick links:

• ChatBots Overview
• Getting Started with ChatBots
• How to Create a ChatBot
• ChatBot Best Practices
• FAQs

ChatBots Overview 

A ChatBot allows you to simulate conversations with prospects and customers to gather information about their needs, and direct them to the correct Team members, or to other relevant resources.  

Terminus offers three categories of ChatBots: 

• Simple Bot: This type of bot is a single list of options presented to the user that allows them to select a predetermined path.
• Terminus Bot: This type of bot offers a more sophisticated, guided "conversation" for your web visitors, and allows you to help them in your pre-qualification process, as well as guide them to the right Routing Group.
• Sophisticated ChatBot: This type of bot uses IBM Watson Assistant to respond to the prospect or customer with a more “humanized” approach, or business-specific set of use cases. This bot is enabled with NLU/NLP (Natural Language Understanding/Natural Language Processing). A Watson Assistant ChatBot allows for a much more interactive, less-guided experience for the visitor.

You may find that you are setting up a variety of ChatBots. Examples of what you might decide to build ChatBots for include:  

• Sales conversations: Using the Bot to drive sales conversations and schedule demos.
• Informational: Disseminate information like marketing content, videos, etc.
• Pre-qualification: Ask the visitor questions to help you understand how viable the lead is, and to help direct your team to the hottest prospects.
• Support: A self-help option with human rollover, for those that need expanded help.
• After-hours Bot: Collect data and take messages that come in after normal business hours.
• Advanced Routing Bot: Configure your chat response selections to ensure that inquiries are sent to the correct group within your organization.  

Getting Started with ChatBots

To create your first bot, you should first determine what use case you are trying to satisfy. You may want to consider:

• If you will be routing chat conversations to Team members
• What “on” and “off” hours look like for your teams
• How stringent the qualification process should be before a visitor reaches a member of your team
• What information needs to be captured before a routing attempt is made, or after the routing is missed
• What information you would like to have to start the conversation off effectively
• Which pages on your site (or which ads, social posts, etc.) you want to leverage to tailor your responses to
• What asset links you might include in your Bot responses (for example, a white paper, or a support article for a frequently asked question)

How to Create a ChatBot

Creating a Terminus Bot

Navigate to the ChatBots page by selecting “Administration” from your user menu.

Once you’re on the ChatBots page, select “Create New ChatBot.”

Select “Terminus Bot” as your Bot type

Here, you’ll notice that we have some pre-configured “Example Bot” templates you can select from. If you do not select one of these templates, you will have the option to build a Bot from scratch. Template options include:

• After Hours Bot
• Lead-Capture Bot
• Qualification Bot 

Once you select your preferred Bot configuration (either a template or starting from scratch), you will be brought to the bot configuration screen.

On the left side of the ChatBot builder, you’ll see Playbook options. A Playbook is a collection of available plays, or actions, the Bot can take based on the responses from the prospect or customer. You can also add your own custom plays. In the example below, you’ll see the Playbook options listed for a pre-configured Qualification Bot template.

For each play, you’ll have several options you can configure:

• First, you’ll input your initial question. Checking the “Prevent User Input” checkbox will require the visitor to select from a series of responses, versus being able to type in a free response.  

• Next, under Visitor Answer Options, you can either adjust or input response options.

• You can then tell the bot what to reply with when that option is selected.
• Then, you will decide what action should be taken. The action can include:
  • Repeating the Current Play
  • Initiating Another Play
  • Sending to a Routing Group
  • Ending the Chat

Terminus Bot Settings:

You can make adjustments to the Terminus Bot by selecting the gear in the top right corner:

In Settings, you can adjust:

• Message Delay: Allows you to delay the response the bot makes to simulate a person typing. Value is denoted in seconds.
• Agent Transfer Fail Type: Assign an action to be taken if no agents are available after the routing has been performed. You can select to display a message, or run another play.  
• Agents Unavailable Message:  The message that shows in the event that no one answers the chat.

Additional Feature Details

• For all bot types, Terminus Chat handles the visitor interface for both links and buttons
• For all bot types, Terminus Chat provides human routing when the conversation needs to be "elevated"

ChatBots Best Practices 

• Include a welcome message. This should warmly greet your visitors, helping them feel valued and recognized
• Include your product or company identity. Reiterate your brand within the chatbot, reinforcing name recognition.
• Easily identify the problem(s) the bot can solve. Visitors use chatbots for quick and easy problem-solving, help them.
• The mechanics of using the bot. Be sure to explain the action the visitor must take: "make a selection" or "type below."
• Have situational awareness. Don't ask more than 2-3 form questions in a bot. While chat is the new form fill, visitors don't like to see form fields at all. Capture as little needed data as possible while providing the visitor with what they came for.
• Your bot can't do everything. If all your questions like "would you like to connect to a human", "would you like to schedule a demo", etc. are met with "no," that's ok. Setup a bot node called "Limbo" that sits and waits for a visitor request to be made.

FAQs

What browsers are Chatbots supported on?

• Chatbots are only accepted on the following browsers: FireFox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari. We do not support Chatbots on Internet Explorer.