Comm100's Chatbot is an automated virtual agent designed to answer your customers' questions. It acts like your human live chat agent, helping your customers get answers to their questions and accomplish their goals.

This article walks through the steps to begin using Comm100's Chatbot:

• Create a Chatbot
• Create Chatbot Intents 
• Configure Event Messages, Smart Triggers, and Canned Quick Replies
• Set Up Chatbot for Live Chat, Social, and SMS Channels
• Train the Chatbot Using Learning
• Configure Advanced Settings

After your sales agent or account manager has activated the Chatbot, you can create your first Comm100 chatbot. Here is how you get started:

1. Log in to your Comm100 Control Panel.
2. From the left navigation menu, go to Bot > Chatbot.
3. Expand the drop-down list and click Manage on the Manage Chatbots area.
    The Chatbots drawer appears.
4. Click New Chatbot or New Third-party Chatbot based on your situation.
5. Give your chatbot a name. Choose the answer type, engine, language, channel and payment status for the chatbot accordingly.
   
   Note: 

   • Choose the Channel for which you want to use the chatbot. The channel cannot be changed after the chatbot is created.
   • Your subscription defines the number of paid chatbots. You can create up to three Trial chatbots apart from paid chatbots. Trial chatbots do not incur extra charges.
6. Click Save.

To learn more about creating a chatbot, see this article.

Intents and Entities are important for building an effective chatbot. Intents are the purposes or goals contained in the messages sent by customers, such as booking a flight, paying a bill, or finding a news article. Entities are pieces of information that provide more context to an intent. They might be times, dates, locations, people, or other pieces of information specific to the caller. 

For example, in the message "I want to book a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago next Friday", "book a flight" is the intent, and locations (Los Angeles, Chicago) and date (next Friday) are the entities.

Creating a proper intent and entity pool helps your chatbot understand customers' questions more easily. A good place to start is to add your most frequently asked questions and answers to create an initial intent bank. You can mark words as entities when adding intent questions.

To create an intent, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, navigate to Bot > Chatbot > Custom Answers > Intents.
2. Click New Intent.
3. Enter an intent name that can summarize the content.
4. From the drop-down list, select a Category to group the intent. 
5. In the Questions section, enter the possible questions expressing the intention.
    You can define as many questions as you want. 
6. (Optional) Mark keywords in intent questions as entities. To learn more about entities, see this article.
7. In the Answers section, set up an answer to the questions. You can use the available Chatbot Actions and build answer flows. To learn more about chatbot actions, see this article.
8. Click Save.

Configure Event Messages

The Event messages are pre-defined messages sent by your Chatbot to the visitor in different scenarios. The chatbot has system default messages for different scenarios, and you can customize the messages for the following events:

• When a visitor starts a chat;
• When a visitor's question is not recognized;
• When a visitor rates an answer as not helpful;
• When the chatbot provides a possible answer.

To customize an event message, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, navigate to Bot > Chatbot > Event Messages.
   
2. Click the event message that you want to customize. 
3. On the Edit Message page, edit the message.
4. Click Save. 

To learn more about Event Messages, see this article.

Create Smart Triggers

Smart Triggers allow you to perform automated actions when certain events occur, or conditions are met while the chatbot is chatting. For example, you can instruct the chatbot to forward the chat to a live agent if the visitor is a VIP. 

To create a new Smart Trigger, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, navigate to Bot > Chatbot > Smart Triggers. 
2. Click New Smart Trigger. 
3. On the New Smart Trigger page, give the trigger a name.
4. Turn on the Enable toggle key. 
5. Set up the conditions of the smart trigger.
    You can also use Chatbot-specific conditions such as Bot Found no Response, Visitors Rate an Answer as Not Helpful.
   
6. Choose the actions to perform when the conditions are met. Multiple actions are allowed.
   • Send notifications: Notifies the selected agent or department automatically.
   • Monitor or transfer chat: Enables the selected agent or department to automatically monitor the ongoing chats and intervene, or transfers the chat to the selected agent or department. 
   • Change ticket assignee: Changes the ticket assignee to another agent or department.
   • Add to visitor segment: Adds the visitor into the existing visitor segments (such as VIP customer segment, frequent visitor segment, and so forth). You are presented with a drop-down list of existing visitor segments to choose from.
7. Click Save.

To learn more about smart triggers, see this article. 

Create Canned Quick Replies

Canned quick replies are pre-defined answer options displayed as clickable buttons in the chat window. Each quick reply option leads to an intent or connects the visitor to an online agent. Canned quick replies can be reused in the chatbot's answers, saving you from creating the same quick replies for different intents.

To create a quick reply, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, navigate to Bot > Chatbot > Canned Quick Replies. 
2. Click New Canned Quick Reply. 
3. On the New Canned Quick Reply page, enter the name for the quick reply.
4. Add the quick reply options. 
   • Trigger an intent: When a visitor chooses this option, the chatbot provides the answer of that intent.
   • Contact an agent: This option transfers the visitor to a human agent. The button text varies when agents are online or offline.
     
5. Click Save.

To learn more about using quick replies, see this article.

By default, a new chatbot isn't attached to any Live Chat campaign or Ticketing & Messaging channel. After creating a chatbot, you need to enable the bot for your Live Chat campaign or Ticketing & Messaging account. 

Set Up the Chatbot for Live Chat

To get the Chatbot working in the Live Chat channel, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, navigate to Live Chat > Campaign > Chatbot. If you have multiple campaigns, you should choose the right one from the Campaign drop-down list.
2. Turn on the Enable toggle key. 
3. From the Bot for Campaign drop-down list, select the chatbot you want to use for that campaign. 
4. Define when to allocate chats to the chatbot. You can choose to allocate when agents are online, offline, or both, and set the percentage of the chat requests distributed to the chatbot.
   
5. Click Save.

Set Up the Chatbot for Social and SMS Channels

To get the Chatbot working in a social or SMS channel, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, navigate to Ticketing & Messaging > Channels, and choose the channel menu for which you want to use the bot. 
2. Go to the Chatbot Configuration tab. 
3. Turn on the Enable toggle key and click the Edit icon in the Operations column.
4. On the Edit Bot Configuration page, select a bot for the social channel account.
5. Set a percentage of routing tickets to Bot when the agents are online and offline.
   
6. Click Save.

To learn more about setting up the chatbot for different channels, see this article.

If you need any further assistance to help you get started with our self-learning for the Chatbot, chat with our live chat agents now!

When the chatbot is asked a question that it doesn't have a High Confidence Answer to, or a visitor rates its answer as Not helpful, the question is automatically added to its Learning list. This helps you enrich and optimize your Intent base. You can add visitor-asked-questions to your question base either by adding a new intent or by adding it as a similar question of an existing intent. 

To configure the Chatbot learning, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, navigate to Bot > Chatbot > Learning. 
2. (Optional) On the Learning page, filter questions using duration and keywords.
3. In the questions list area, hover over the Operations column, and choose an action:
   • Add the question to a new Intent.
   • Add similar questions to an existing Intent.
   • Add to top score intent.
   • Delete the question.

To learn more about training your chatbot using Learning, see this article.

Go to Bot > Chatbot > Manage chatbots area. The Advanced menu extends the options for you to change chatbot sensitivity and use sentiment analysis. 

Change chatbot sensitivity

Sensitivity determines how your chatbot handles chat requests based on its confidence in delivering the correct answers. The sensitivity score range is from 0 to 100 and can be manually adjusted. By default, the High Confidence Answer score threshold is set to 40, and the No Answer Score is set to 10. Changing the threshold score directly impacts the responses provided by the chatbot. 

To learn more about chatbot Sensitivity, see this article.

Use sentiment analysis

Sentiment Analysis makes your chatbot more powerful in understanding visitors’ emotions, helping you to understand your visitors' needs and how your chatbot performs.

Sentiment Analysis works by analyzing each visitor message and defining a sentiment score ranging from -10 to 10. Based on the score, the chatbot assigns the message a sentiment type. The sentiment types include Very positive, Positive, Neutral, Negative, Very negative. You can change the sentiment score threshold according to your needs.

To learn more about Sentiment Analysis, see this article.