How to Make A 'Slackbot' for Free Without Coding Chatbots have revolutionized customer service. They have equally huge potential for your internal slack group.
By Murray Newlands Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The chatbot revolution has taken the world by storm. Many businesses are incorporating them into a multitude of their processes to increase sales, cut costs, gather data, create long-lasting relationships with their customers, as well as increase productivity and boost company morale. It is now possible to make a slackbot for free without coding. Slack groups become much more productive with bots.
What are chatbots and how do they work?
Chatbots come in two forms; some chatbots are powered by specific command lines implemented by the person coding or programming them. On the other hand, you can also create a chatbot that is powered by artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP).
The latter are much better equipped to deal with a large variety of requests. In addition, they learn from every interaction they have, allowing them to become more intelligent over time, thus better serving the people using them. AI and NLP-powered chatbots mimic human conversations, which means they offer a much more personable and engaging user experience.
Related: Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools to Build Chatbots for Your Business
Where are chatbots implemented?
When Facebook announced that it would be allowing businesses to deliver automated e-commerce guidance and customer services through chatbots on the Facebook Messenger platform, everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Now, social media platforms worldwide are offering their own chatbot capabilities, some of which include Kik, Telegram, and of course, the well-known office messaging application, Slack.
The whole point of Slack is to reduce the number of emails sent within an office while improving team morale and culture. It's also a great way to improve productivity; therefore, it makes sense that chatbots are becoming the next logical evolution for the communications platform. Read below for a guide on how to create an effective Slackbot.
Related: How to Create a Facebook Messenger Chatbot For Free Without Coding
Top 5 tips for building a slackbot.
The idea behind creating a Slackbot isn't so different than creating one on any other platform. The key difference is that Slack is normally used for internal-facing communications. More often than not, Slack is used for team and project management. With that in mind, I've created a list of tips you should follow when designing your Slackbot:
1. Identify your chatbot's key purpose.
As with any tool you implement into your business, it's important to identify your chatbot's main purpose in order for it to truly add value to your business processes. A Slackbot can serve a variety of functions, some of which include:
- Acting as a personal assistant (e.g., sending reminders, booking meetings, etc.)
- Answering frequently asked company questions
- Giving information to employees regarding products and services
- Undertaking basic programming tasks
- Monitoring personal inboxes to cut down time on email
When establishing your chatbot's purpose, you need to ask yourself, "What am I trying to achieve within my business?". Some reasons you may want to implement a chatbot include:
- Increasing your team's productivity
- Boosting team morale
- Cutting costs
- Giving time back to specific teams so they can focus on more important, revenue-generating activities
Related: Enterprise Chatbots and the Conversational Commerce Revolutionizing Business
2. Understand your the needs of your team.
In order to achieve the above, you must understand the dynamics of your organization. You could launch an initial chatbot that gathers feedback from teams. In it, you could ask them what they enjoy the most about working for your company and what they believe needs improving.
You could also make questionnaires specific to each department within your business. Understanding how your employees feel is crucial to achieving your overall business goals; therefore, do your research in order to equip them with the right tools and skills so that they can do their job to the best of their abilities.
3. Carefully select its functionalities.
If you launch a Slackbot with the mentality that it will be able to help each of your team members regardless of their request or question, you're setting yourself up for failure. Once you've established where a chatbot will add the most value to your organization, create it with limited, simple, and effective functionalities.
As your chatbot communicates, it will learn, allowing you to build on it by slowly launching new features that your teams can use. By launching a chatbot that does everything, you're not only leaving room for mistakes but also overwhelming your teams with a tool that they may not understand.
Related: Enterprise Chatbots Platforms and the Future of Work
4. Keep it simple.
Aside from not revealing all its features at once, you should keep your chatbot as simple as possible. Don't train it to use long, complicated words. Instead, keep it intelligent with short and smart sentences that add value to each conversation. If your chatbot uses complicated communications, your teams will most likely stop using it.
5. Learn from every interaction.
One of the most impressive and important features that chatbots offer is their ability to gather and analyze data. Every single interaction your chatbot has with a team member is recorded and can, therefore, become a stepping stone towards you achieving your business goals.
Through the data that your chatbot gathers, you can:
- Learn more about company morale
- Find out what your team members like about your company
- Find out what needs improving
- Monitor project progress
Related: Make Chats With Chatbots Work
Create a slackbot for free with no coding knowledge.
There's a common misconception surrounding chatbots that the only way to create one is if you have mounds of programming and coding knowledge. Another one is that you have to invest a small fortune in order to create one. Luckily, thanks to chatbot-building platforms like ChattyPeople, you can create AI-powered chatbots for free without any coding knowledge whatsoever.
ChattyPeople is fully integrable with both Facebook Messenger and Slack, and enables you to build text and voice-activated chatbots for your business. Whether you're a small business or large enterprise, the platform offers extensive custom solutions designed to meet your company objectives. Lastly, you can create, test, deploy, and monitor your chatbot all from one powerful, visual dashboard.
Related: The How-To: Using Chatbots As A Tool For Customer Service
Finally…
Contrary to popular belief, chatbots can be used for far more than simply automating your customer care services. In addition to personalizing your marketing efforts and increasing your sales, chatbot can be used internally, allowing you to better understand and communicate with your teams. By implementing a Slackbot with the tips outlined above, you'll improve company morale and create a frictionless working experience for your employees.
