Back to: Building AI Agents Without Coding: A Beginner’s Course
Project: Build a simple customer service chatbot for a local small business (imagine a Sydney café or shop) that can answer frequently asked questions (hours, location, menu/prices) and help with basic requests (like booking a table or callback).
A chatbot can engage customers on a smartphone, providing instant answers to FAQs and helping small businesses offer 24/7 support.
Steps to build your chatbot:
- Plan the conversation: List the common questions customers ask. For a café, this might include: “What are your opening hours?”, “Where are you located?”, “Do you have vegan options?”, and so on. Write down simple, correct answers for each. Also plan a greeting message (“Hello! How can I help you today?”) and a polite sign-off or handover (“I’m a virtual assistant – ask me anything, or I can get a human staff member if needed.”).
- Choose a no-code chatbot builder: For this project, Voiceflow is a great choice due to its visual design. (Alternatively, tools like Dialogflow or Landbot could work similarly.) In Voiceflow, create a new chatbot project. You’ll be presented with a canvas to design the conversation flow.
- Design the flow in Voiceflow:
- Start with a Welcome Message block that greets the user. (E.g. “Hi! I’m the virtual assistant for Sydney Cafe. I can help with our hours, location, menu, and more.”)
- Use Choice blocks to present options or listen for certain keywords. For example, a Choice block could listen for words like “hours” or “time” and, if detected, route the conversation to an Hours response.
- Add Text blocks for the bot’s responses. For each FAQ, create a text response. (E.g. for hours: “We’re open 7am to 3pm on weekdays, and 8am to 4pm on weekends.”)
- Ensure there’s a path for unrecognized questions. If the user asks something the bot can’t answer, have a fallback message: “Sorry, I’m not sure about that. I can have a staff member contact you – can I get your email or phone number?” This way even unanswered queries lead to capturing a lead or handing off to a human.
- Use delays and conversational tone to make it feel natural (Voiceflow allows adding short pauses or typing indicators to mimic a human-like interaction).
- Test the chatbot: Voiceflow provides a test chat interface. Try asking your bot the questions you planned and see if it responds correctly. Adjust the keywords or phrasing in Choice blocks if the bot misses something. Ensure it doesn’t get stuck in any loop.
- Deploy or share: Voiceflow can publish your chatbot to various channels. For a simple web demo, you might get a shareable link or an embed code to put on a website. For instance, you could embed the chatbot on the café’s website so that visitors see a “Chat with us” bubble.
- Iterate: Ask a friend to try the chatbot and give feedback. You might discover new frequently asked questions to add. Continuously updating the bot will make it more useful.
Australian context – why this matters: Small businesses in Australia are increasingly adopting chatbots to improve customer service. A Sydney-based online retailer implemented an AI chatbot and saw a 40% reduction in customer service costs along with a significant boost in customer satisfaction. By building a chatbot like this, you’re learning skills that can directly help local businesses. Even a simple FAQ bot means customers can get answers after hours, and business owners free up time from answering repetitive inquiries.