A quick guide to Viber chatbots and how to build one

Chatbots are a great way for businesses to reduce the cost of customer service, engagement, and retention. They allow brands to offer around-the-clock support without the overhead of human agents. They also enable a complete in-app experience for customers in the chat apps which they already trust and use every day for personal conversations.

Viber is a popular messaging app with over 1 billion Android downloads worldwide. Savvy brands are recognizing the value of connecting with customers at scale on their preferred communication channels. The stats for 2022 speak for themselves.

In this blog we cover everything you need to know to design and create a Viber chatbot, with step-by-step instructions. We cover:

Viber provides several types of messaging service for businesses – for their B2C messaging requirements this includes Viber Business Messages and Viber Chatbots. These can be used to cover all use cases from marketing promotions and transactional notifications to timely support with live agents, and automated conversations that can be deployed in a variety of operational scenarios.

However, it is important to understand the difference between Viber Business Messages and Viber Chatbots in terms of features, opt-in, and pricing. Here we take a closer look at each solution.

For Viber Business Messages, either the business or the user can initiate the interaction. However, 97% of conversations are business-initiated with the channel being used by brands for promotional, transactional, and conversational messaging. Once end-users have opted in, their phone numbers are available to the business and the tool can be used for 2-way engagement, although this is not mandatory. Opt-in can be obtained offline, or by accepting terms and conditions on the business’ website.

The pricing model is based on a Monthly Minimum Commitment fee (MMC) and traffic related charging, which could be per message or per session (depending on the use case). If the minimum fee is reached organically, businesses will only be charged for delivered messages.

With Viber chatbots all communications must be initiated by customers. Proactive messaging to the customer is allowed once they have started the chat. Unlike Viber Business Messages, only the User ID is visible to the business and not the person’s actual phone number.

Viber chatbots offer some additional options for enriching messages. These include stickers, URLs, image carousels, and custom keyboards that can be used to create response buttons that make it easier for users to interact with the chatbot. Since this communication channel is designed mostly for conversational purposes, 2-way messaging is expected by default.

All conversations initiated by end-users with Viber chatbots are free. The business is only charged for messages that they send outside the 24-hour time window starting from when the last message was received from the end-user.

In addition, a set number of brand or bot-initiated messages per month are free (this was 10,000 messages as of September 2022).

With a number of options for integrating Viber chatbots into your business workflows, you have ultimate flexibility to create chatbots that exactly meet your requirements. Using either the API or simple no-code interface, you can tackle any of the challenges that your business faces.

There are two main types of chatbot, each with its unique strengths and features:

If you would like to try building your own Viber chatbot you can register for a free trial on our website. This gives you full access to our code-free chatbot builder Answers.

Follow these simple steps to create a working Viber chatbot in just a few minutes.

The Build section on the right of the screen has a set of tools that can be used by dragging and dropping them onto the workspace. You can use these to build up the structure and flow of your automated Viber chat.

The tools (called elements) are separated into three categories based on their function – but they all work in exactly the same way: Drag onto the workspace > Configure > Link to conversation flow

You will get the hang of it really quickly once you start using them.

Every good conversation starts with a friendly greeting, right?

Drag and drop an Attribute element onto your workspace. You can then add some welcome text and maybe a question to kick off the engagement. Any answers that the person provides can be saved and used later in the chat, so they don’t have to keep repeating basic information like name, account number, or postcode.

Everyone is different and uses language in a slightly different way so there will always be times when the chatbot can’t quite understand what the person has asked, or maybe they have foreign characters on their keyboard. This is when the Repeat and Fallback options can be used to provide a more seamless experience.

By providing a set of options for users to select from, the chatbot can answer increasingly complex queries with cascading sub-menus.

Our example will only have one set of options, but you can go as deep as you like by following the same process.

Add a Send Text dialogue that asks the person to make a selection from the list that we will configure in the next step.

Next, you need to link the introductory text to the list of options by adding a Go To Dialog element and then a Text element to introduce the menu and specify the list of options it will contain.

It is a really good idea to use the Delay option to provide a bit of time for the person to read the text you are displaying and make a decision on what they would like to do. You’ll find it under Bot Actions.

The next step is to add a User Input element (you can find it under the Bot Receives menu). This will process the response that the person replies with. You can add Synonyms to handle multiple forms of response and make the chat more flexible.

You will then need to create an Action for each of the options that the user might choose. This can be done by configuring a Go To Dialog for each option.

You can be extra creative when creating your actions by including rich media like image carousels and videos for added engagement possibilities.

To do this you just drag the relevant element onto the workspace and link or upload the media you are sharing.

The final step in the creation process is to configure a seamless exit path from the chat.

Once you have confirmed that the person has got what they came for you can sign off the chat or loop them back to the menu of options.

To close and reset the chatbot interaction add a final Close session attribute. This can also optionally delete any saved data – or it can be copied to your customer database to enrich future interactions with the person.

It is always a good idea to make use of the Simulation option to thoroughly test your chatbot before you deploy it. Ask colleagues or friends to try it out too as fresh eyes often find issues or inconsistencies that the creator didn’t see.

When it is time to deploy your chatbot, just click Activate and it will be live!

This is basic example of a rule-based chatbot. Using the same methodology, you can go on to create highly sophisticated Viber chatbots that use natural language processing to understand customer intent to facilitate more conversational chat interactions.