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For this tutorial in video form, click here

Chat bots are cool, right? We’ve had a goal of building one in Smooth Messenger so that you can create chat bots that will automatically reply to people via WhatsApp or SMS. Let’s take a look at how this one works.

How It Works

When we send “hi” it’ll reply back with a message and an image.

We’ll give it something it doesn’t recognize, before answering its initial question. Finally, it connects us with an English operator. If we type anything after that, we won’t get the chat bot anymore. This is because it has recognized that we need to be talking to a real person after this point.

Setting It Up

In our CRM, there’s a new module called Smooth Autoresponders. In it, we have the programmed responses for the chat bot to give:

Each one has a Trigger. In the top one, it’s an inbound message “hi” or “hello” in response to an outbound message from us. In this case, we don’t really care what’s been sent out previously. All we care is that the customer has either said “hi” or “hello”. If this happens, we’ll send them the message in the far right column. You’ll notice it’s also got a URL to send that emoji image.

The second row is triggered if no other responders match. This sends them a message basically saying “I don’t understand”. The third row is similar, if they respond to the “which language do you speak?” question with something besides 1 or 2.

Below that, we’re connecting them with an operator that speaks the language they’ve selected. The bot does this only when the user has responded to the question about language.

At the bottom, we have an autoresponder where it immediately connects the user to an operator when they say anything like “Operator”, “Human”, or “Real Person”.

Conclusion

It’s not very easy to create SMS chatbots right now but we’re planning to improve the UI so that it’s heaps easier. Watch this space!

For this tutorial in video form, click here