The ultimate purpose of having a business website is to allow easy interaction between customers and brands. Customers go through your website to get an idea about your products and services. If any doubt occurs, they expect an immediate solution from the platform. And no doubt, customers have a lot of questions before making any decision.
But the questions are repetitive and the same most of the time. It takes plenty of your time and attention to respond to those concerns. That is when an automation solution can be of the best help. Including a chatbot on your website, a chatbot will allow customers to connect with your brand via an automated chat system. And when we think about website platforms, WordPress is one of the most globally used for website development. It will help them with the required information or FAQs. Hence, the human staff can shift their focus to something productive. The blog talks about why you need a chatbot for a WordPress website and how you can create one.
Benefits of Chatbot for WordPress Websites
Apart from answering FAQs and performing simple, repetitive tasks, a chatbot has the potential to do a lot more. Let’s check out more.
1. Engage more visitors
Chatbot replies to customer queries right away. And the ability to do so keeps the visitors hooked. It prevents customers from going to the other brands. Besides, the chatbot doesn’t only wait for users’ queries but also initiates the chat by sending customized greetings relevant to your customer’s interest.
It uses various multimedia like images, GIFs, and videos while chatting to keep customers interested and engaged.
2. Improve conversions with personalization
Customers often get overwhelmed when there are lots of product options available. They fail to find what they are looking for. In situations like that, chatbots for WordPress can be of great help. Chatbots assist customers in finding the right product in a short time by asking what they are looking for. For instance, product name, size, brand, color, etc.
Along with that, the chatbot presents various attractive offers to grab users’ attention and motivate them to purchase.
Once they decide to buy the product, the chatbot assists the customer until the end of the journey. It authorizes their payment in the chart window and then further helps customers keep track of the payment. This method boosts the conversion rate at a large scale.
3. Easy implementation
It’s very easy to add a chatbot to your site via WordPress plugins.
You can effortlessly build, edit, and manage a chatbot directly from your dashboard. The fun part is, you’ll not need to do any coding for that.
4. Cost saving
While you might have needed large human staff to deal with a significant portion of customer inquiries and support requests, a chatbot can reduce that need. It can scale with the increasing volume of inquiries and support requests. It saves you the cost of hiring additional staff.
Moreover, chatbots are hosted on cloud-based platforms, which eliminates the need to invest in expensive hardware or infrastructure to carry on.
5. Improve efficiency
Chatbots automate repetitive tasks, which prevents waste of time, resources, and effort. It provides instant responses to the customers round the clock, has multi-tasking capabilities, and can scale along with the growing need and demand, which improves efficiency to a great extent.
How to create and add a chatbot to a WordPress site?
1. Choosing the right platform
Before you add a chatbot to your WordPress site, you should be mindful of the platform you’re selecting. The platform should be compatible with your WordPress website and function correctly. It should integrate smoothly with your website for the best user experience.
So look for a platform that offers WordPress plugins that can be smoothly installed and configured. Be specific about what your use case is, and what functionality you want the chatbot to fulfill. Go for a platform that allows customization. So that you can tailor the chatbot to your needs. It should be able to adapt to changes quickly.
2. Install the chatbot plugin
Installing a chatbot on your WordPress website isn’t difficult at all. Here are simple steps on how you can do it.
- Open your WordPress dashboard and go to the plugins.
- Select the Add New button.
- In the search bar, search the chatbot name using a keyword, and the list will be generated.
- From the list, find the chatbot plugin, and click on Install Now to continue.
- Once you install the plugin, click on the Active button.
- Now you’ll again be taken back to the Plugins section in your WordPress. Below the plugin, click on the Settings button.
- Click on Connect account in the settings.
- Now sign in to your account if you have one; otherwise, click on the Sign-up button and create a new one.
- Sign in with your email and password.
- Now select the bot you’ll be using on your website.
- Now complete the installation by clicking on Add to your site.
- Now you’re good to go. Your chatbot for WordPress is ready to interact with your visitors. You can also make possible changes in the settings later on.
3. Designing chatbot conversational flow
The more natural and relevant your chatbot sounds, the better your users will engage. So, it’s crucial to pay expert attention while designing chatbot conversational flow.
First, create a conversational outline that your chatbot will follow. It should include greetings for new users or users who have returned after a long time, Add a question for keeping the conversation going, Give useful information, check details and information for clarity, apologize for requests that are new and can’t be solved, and conclude the conversation on a good note.
4. Incorporate AI
If you want your chatbot to be more sophisticated and connect better with users naturally. You should incorporate AI-powered chatbots. These chatbots use NLP, which helps machines read and understand human language. In short, it enhances human-machine communication.
And that is possible through NLU, which is a branch of NLP. It makes sure that the machine understands the actual meaning of the text. It converts the user’s input data into the computer’s algorithm.
And then the other branch of NLP, which is NLG, does the exact opposite of NLU. It converts machine-generated responses into natural language responses that a human reader can understand.
Therefore AI engines should be reliable for accurate intent identification.
Related: NLP vs NLU s NLG
5. Testing & Deployment
Testing your chatbot gives you an idea of how it is performing. You should test whether the chatbot can understand user input and generate relevant responses, be capable of handling large requests at a time, or it can protect user data and prevent unauthorized access.
Likewise, be confident about where you’ll integrate the chatbot. It can be CRM or ERP. And keep the chatbot updated for smooth functioning.
Conclusion
Adding a bot to a WordPress website has a positive impact on the lives of both visitors and site owners. The automation saves your valuable time without compromising quality.
However, the bot also has some challenges that require your attention. Like timely set-up and maintenance, lack of emotion, etc. So be mindful while choosing your chatbot provider. Make sure they offer all the functions necessary for your business and put them on the right page of your website, and give it your brand personality.