How to build a chatbot

Your website visitors are the ultimate chatty Cathys.

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If you’re a stat nerd, here you go: 73% of consumers expect to interact with a chatbot on your website.

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You can meet the demand, or you can kick the can. 

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But if you decide to go for it, keep reading. I’ll show you how I built a chatbot for my website in an hour using Zapier. 

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The best part? It collects leads or subscribers automatically. 

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Let’s chat.

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The golden use case

Your chatbot will break the ice and make asking for contact info warm. 

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Look, people come to your site with questions. You can spend hours designing your website so that they’re naturally led to answers or if you’re like me with limited resources you can create a chatbot.

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The chatbot helps the visitor. And in turn, it might be easier to get their contact info.

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Because your chatbot is trained up on your website or business or whatever, it can answer questions quickly.

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My bet is that when people engage in a conversation, even if it’s with an AI chatbot, they’ll be more likely to subscribe.

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How to create your own Zapier chatbot: directive and knowledge

Head to this FAQ chatbot template I built and use it as your starting point.

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You’ll do four things:

1. Customize directive
2. Add knowledge sources (the most important)
3. Customize branding
4. Add logic to get subscribers

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The directive is already included and ready for you to customize. With new ChatGPT models, the directive doesn’t even need to be that extensive. 

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Give it a role, some rules to consider, and how you want it to use the knowledge you give it. 

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Now, add some knowledge. Knowledge is the most important part and also the easiest to add.

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Very soon, you’ll be able to simply add public website URLs!

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But you may want to add things like a list of all your blog posts in one doc or any other unique resources you’ve created. 

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I’ve added my website, a running list of AI use cases I add to, the Zapier template library, and a collection of my posts.

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Adding branding and logic

Branding is so simple. Adjust the colors, avatar, embed logo, and embed icon and you’re done.

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The logic is where things get fun. 

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My chatbot shows suggested messages a user can click, collects leads, and then runs a Zap when a user finishes a conversation.

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To collect leads (or subscribers), I have the chatbot ask for contact info if the words “subscribe” or “newsletter” are used. I’ve also added a tiny bit to the initial directive that tells the chatbot its secondary purpose is to get subscribers and to ask for information when appropriate. 

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Then, when the conversation ends, I run a Zap that takes the transcript, summarizes it, and provides insights into potential ways to improve the experience.

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I’m using Claude with this prompt:

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“You will receive a transcript for a chatbot conversation. Please summarize into 3 bullet points. Then provide any interesting insights from the conversation that are worth mentioning that might help me better train the chatbot that's being used.”

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Reasons why you haven't build a chatbot

It takes less than an hour to get something like this going. Things that might hold you back:

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• Does it hallucinate answers?
• Can I trust it?
• Do visitors trust it?

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Valid concerns. Here are two things I suggest.

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If the chatbot can’t find answers, tell it to say it doesn’t know. Find this setting in the Instructions tab.

Lastly, scope it down. Instead of on your homepage, try adding your chatbot to another page, first. Then, look through all the transcript summaries. See if anything stands out. 

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Give your visitors something to interact with and collect subscribers all at the same time. Build a Zapier chatbot.

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To recap:

• Your visitors likely want a chatbot
• Chatbots warm up the conversation making contact info easier to get
• It takes one hour to build an AI chatbot in Zapier

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That’s all for this week!

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Happy Building,

Bryce