How to build a customer support chatbot in the cloud

Inside the Cookbook

ConvoKraft bots
How to build it in Catalyst
- Creation
- Actions
- Handlers
Integration
Plug and play the bot

What would life be like without smartphones? It would be fairly simple, but it would also be much harder to communicate, plan our daily tasks, stay informed, and access the outside world.
Smartphones are so useful that they even assist us with healthcare, education, entertainment, and other things. Now, picture a world without technological advancements, such as chatbots.
Chatbots give us access to the most cutting-edge technology available today; they handle consumer satisfaction, adhere to data collection, and perform front-line healthcare duties.
Let’s consider how chatbots appear from a developer’s perspective.Do you enjoy creating chatbots?
What if you could build a bot in just four steps without the traditional way? That is what we are going to explore now.

ConvoKraft bots

These are programmed conversational assistants capable of understanding message intent, processing it, and responding to the user.
Through action-driven architecture, we can make them greet the user, answer their questions, or conduct any other action in your application.
Once the configurations are complete, you may train them to improve their default NLU skill, test them in the Catalyst console, and embed the bots in your Catalyst application before releasing to production.

How to build it?

Imagine this situation:

Ms. Brianna has a task to design a telecom chatbot for a client. This bot should be able to conduct specified tasks like helping users with information on their account balance or recharge/change a user's subscription plan.

Let’s see how to achieve this using Catalyst's action-driven component, ConvoKraft, in four simple steps.

Creation

Create a Catalyst account and start by creating a new project.Navigate to ConvoKraft, start by clicking Create Bot. ConvoKraft allows you to develop business logic for your bot using one of three platforms.

Catalyst integration functions: Catalyst serverless integration functions are custom-built coding structures hosted in Catalyst servers.
Deluge: Deluge is Zoho’s native online scripting language, which is hosted in Zoho’s cloud environment. Refer here to learn more about Deluge.
Webhooks: Webhooks are call-back functions that can be used to access your custom server endpoints when specific actions are invoked by the bot. You can also choose to secure your webhook URLs, if required.

Actions

Actions are the tasks that tell ConvoKraft how this particular bot has to function. For the example, the bot has to check balances and help with recharges.

You can provide sample invocations and pass parameters like plan types and customer IDs for actions like "Recharge my plan" and "Check my balance."

Handlers

Catalyst provides these three handlers to make your work even easier. You can simply enable them and let them handle the responses with default settings. If you want to customize the behavior, you can use Deluge to tailor them according to your needs.

1.Welcome Message Handler

This handler is invoked when the bot is opened by the user for a new chat session. It can be used to display a welcoming message.

2. Fallback Handler

This handler is triggered when a user message doesn’t match any of the bot’s configured actions.

3. Failure Handler

This handler is invoked when there are functional issues with the bot’s business logic.

Integration

This is the final stage of bot creation.

How do you configure business logic with these actions? The billion-dollar question. Let’s address this with Catalyst integration functions.
Catalyst allows developers to write functions in popular languages like Java, Node.js, and more.
Through these functions you can enable tasks such as API integration, scheduling, and handling customizations for your bot, making this step extremely useful.
Once configured, you can test and train the bot to improve its NLU (Natural Language Understanding) capabilities and deploy it seamlessly.

Plug and play the bot

You can find this in the Client tab; embed this to add your bot into your web application:

<script src="https://console.catalyst.zoho.in/convokraft/assets/js/convokraft-chat-sdk.js"></script>
<style>
    div.anchor_convokraft_toBottom {
        width: 330px;
        height: 450px;
        position: fixed;
        bottom: 0;
        right: 0;
    }
</style>
<div class="anchor_convokraft_toBottom">
    <convokraft-chat-bot bot-name="helperbot_1" project-id="your-project-id" org-id="your-ord-id">
    </convokraft-chat-bot>
</div>

With just four steps, we were able to create a conversational chatbot. To explore more, check out this link:Help Doc