What is a chatbot template and how templates can help your business

Chatbots have become a crucial part of providing excellent customer service. They provide a host of benefits to businesses – from offering instant customer support for improved CSAT and quicker conversions around the clock, to optimizing customer service teams by taking on low-value, high-volume inquiries and letting specialized human agents tackle more demanding tasks.

But even with code-free, drag-and-drop chatbot builders like Answers chatbot building platform, developing a chatbot pose a challenge. Some businesses that could greatly benefit from chatbots may not have the time or resources to allocate to designing entire chatbot interactions.

If only there was a way to develop and deploy chatbots even faster.

Enter chatbot templates.

Chatbot templates are ready made chatbots that are designed to address common business needs. They can be customized to help businesses develop specific and more complex conversation flows with customers.

We designed our chatbot building platform Answers to make it easy for users to design and deploy entire conversational chatbot journeys – but not everyone has the time to start from scratch.

This is why we added chatbot templates, since they help our clients add chatbots to their customer journeys faster than ever before.

In addition to quick deployment, there are a few key benefits to businesses using chatbot templates. These include:

Businesses can serve their customers faster by using templates to quickly launch chatbots and automate certain interactions – while making it all even simpler with templates.

Chatbot templates serve some of the most common needs for businesses of all sizes. And thanks to the customizability of these templates, they can help address both broader as well as more focused business requirements.

Here are some examples of chatbot templates businesses can use to quickly deploy their own chatbots:

A surefire way to quickly boost customer service and customer satisfaction scores, as well as improving KPIs such as time to first resolution, simple customer service FAQ chatbots go a long way for little effort.

Quickly satisfy customer queries about basic business information while simultaneously easing the burden on human agents who can deal with more pressing customer service issues.

Specifically, with customer service chatbots, you can:

Applicable to WhatsApp or Live Chat, our customer service chatbot templates are available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

For more advanced customer service assistance, of course, there are also more advanced templates.

Sometimes businesses are more complex and need to service more advanced customer service needs. For this reason, we’ve developed advanced customer service chatbot templates with more advanced elements. These include coding and connecting via API to external systems such as booking systems that help check for available timeslots.

In addition to standard customer service chatbot templates, using advanced customer service chatbot templates allows businesses to:

This template type is only available in English and for WhatsApp chatbots.

Chatbots can be used earlier in the customer journey, as well, where they’re used to generate and nurture leads.

Lead generation chatbot templates use with People CDP to store information and help you target potential customers with personalized communication relevant to their interests.

Using lead generation chatbot templates, businesses can:

These templates are available over Live Chat in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Appointment booking chatbot templates are specifically designed to automate the process of scheduling appointments and reservations.

When combined with People CDP, using this type of template allows businesses to collect and store customer interest in products and services, as well as let customers choose a preferred time and date.

Once a date has been chosen, appointment booking chatbots using this template will send a reservation confirmation.

This chatbot template is available in English for WhatsApp chatbots.

Retail chatbot templates are designed with retail and ecommerce in mind, to automate common product inquiries and provide information about your company and its services.

Because of this, retail chatbot templates need to cover more than a few functions. These include:

Using retail chatbot templates together with People CDP helps with creating personalized suggested products that will resonate with customers based on several criteria including browsing and purchase histories.

You can learn more about this and more in our blog post about improving CSAT and conversions with People CDP and Answers.

Currently, this functionality is available over WhatsApp and in English.

Using chatbot templates is fast and easy with Infobip’s chatbot building platform, Answers.

Answers allows users to preview and even simulate conversations with chatbot templates. This helps users to identify which parts of the templated conversation require customization.

Once a template has been selected, users can edit to match their specific branding, tone of voice, etc.

Finally, the last step before launching should be to simulate a complete interaction with the chatbot. This way, users can experience the chatbot from the customers’ perspective and ensure that interactions are error-free.

After everything has been thoroughly tested and tweaked, launching the chatbot is as simple as pressing the Activate button.

For more details, consult the Infobip technical documentation, here.

When using chatbot templates for your business, we recommend following some tried and tested best practices.

It’s highly recommended to rename your chatbot. This will make it easier to keep your chatbots organized by purpose or use case down the road.

You don’t want to spend hours editing and perfecting a chatbot only to discover you were working on the wrong one. Ask me how I know.

This is the most important step when using templates. For example, you want to add a welcome message that speaks in your brand’s voice to help create an instant, positive impression on customers. Additionally, when adding menu items, add products and services from your own business’ catalogue.

When making changes, keep in mind existing elements. For example, when adding a new item – if the existing menu items have icons, then take care to add an icon for the new item, as well. The same goes for list elements and creating new branches for user inputs as well as associated dialog.

The came attention to detail should be paid to items that you remove or delete. When removing an element or field within an element, be sure to delete associated items.

An example of this is when you remove a list item with a list element or a dialog element, you should also take care to remove everything associated with them.

If you change the chatbot language, then you need to also modify the content in the dialogs to match the new attributed language.

And again – whenever you make changes, test your chatbot using the simulator function to ensure that it is error-free.

You want to get your customers to start chatting with you instead of calling. For this to happen, you need to promote your chatbot.

Create as many entry points as possible to get customers starting conversations with you.

A good place to start is on social media, where you can add links on your social media profiles.

Next, you should definitely add a widget on your website so customers can easily find your chatbot.

If you have a newsletter, you can use that to raise awareness about your chatbot, and never forget to add QR codes, too.

Chatbot templates are a fast and easy way for businesses of any size to add chatbot capabilities to their operation. The benefits of adding chatbots are well known – including improved customer service, CSAT, cost optimization, faster conversions etc.

By using a customizable template, businesses can quickly launch branded chatbots and reap all the benefits of enhanced customer experiences.