Building an AI Chatbot with Zapier

Transcript, lightly edited for readability:

There’s been so much noise around AI lately that it’s been difficult to avoid. But for a lot of small business owners it’s been difficult to work out how AI might support your marketing, integrate it into your workflow or harness its power to provide better customer service.

One way you could do that is by using Zapier’s new Chatbot feature. It’s just been recently released and I’m going to have a quick run through now to show you how it works using my own website, so you can get a feel for whether it’s something you might want to use within your own marketing and customer service workflows.

Get Started

First, sign in to Zapier.com and then choose Chatbots from the main menu. It’s free to get started, but you’ll need to pay if you want access to all the features.

Give your chatbot a sensible name, mine’s called Hello Technology. The first page we’re then met with is where we can add some instructions as to how we want the AI to interact with anyone who might ask it a question.

Instructions

First up we can determine what kind of greeting to give, and then further down the directives define how the chatbot should interact with people when asked questions. Firstly:

Objective: You are an exceptional customer support representative. Your objective is to answer questions and provide resources about [Hello Technology, a design and technology studio based in Whitby, UK]. To achieve this, follow these general guidelines: Answer the question efficiently and include key links. If a question is not clear, ask follow-up questions.

You’ll want to change the bit in square brackets to suit your own business. Next there’s a directive on style:

Style: Your communication style should be friendly and professional. Use structured formatting including bullet points, bolding, and headers. Don’t use emojis.

I told mine not to use emojis.

Finally:

Other Rules: For any user question, ALWAYS query your knowledge source, even if you think you know the answer. Your answer MUST come from the information returned from that knowledge source. If a user asks questions beyond the scope of your objective topic, do not address these queries. Instead, kindly redirect to something you can help them with instead.

We’re going to have the opportunity to add knowledge to this chatbot, to restrict the amount of information from which it can produce answers.

If you’re just using ChatGPT normally it will have access to everything within its memory, but here we’re restricting it so it can only provide answers from the information we provide it with.

Knowledge

When you click Knowledge it will offer you 3 options:

Web pages
Files
Tables

I’m using web pages, I entered my own web address and asked it to crawl for sub pages. The system finds as many pages as it can, then you can choose which to include in your knowledge base. I chose:

I’m using 9/10 available sources. Within the free Zapier account you can add 10 pages, within the pro version you can add up to 20 web page sources. It could be more efficient to use the file upload option and feed it text files, PDFs and so on. The benefit of using the web page option is that when your website content is update the bot’s knowledge will also change and increase. Depending on how frequently your website is updated or how much you want to pay to use Zapier’s service it might be better to use a different type of input.

Next we can tell it what to do if it can’t produce an answer from the information provided. I’m telling my bot to use a custom message, to avoid it going off-piste and coming up with an answer that’s not based on the information we’ve fed it.

Testing

Now we can return to the first page and ask it some questions.

I asked mine:

‘Could you help me with WordPress development’.

It said:

‘Yes. At Hello Technology we offer WordPress development services which can help you build and manage your website effectively.’

It also offered some links to relevant pages.

Summary

I hope you can see it’s quite an effective way of quickly building a chatbot with tailored information, restricted to the information we’ve fed it in the form of web pages. It could be text files, PDFs, Word document, or it could be tables of data stored within Zapier, if you’ve already got data stored in your Zapier account.

There are quite a few more options for changing the logic, tweaking the theme to change colours, logos and fonts to make it feel like your brand.

But once you’ve built your bot you can use the Embed option in the top right corner to get the embed code, which you can then add to your website.

I hope that’s been a helpful introduction and given you a flavour of what it might take to implement some AI into your website and how you might benefit from AI in terms of improving your customer journey.

If you’ve got any further questions feel free to get in touch. I hope that’s been helpful and give you an introduction into using AI within any kind of small business website. You can implement an AI chatbot which provides answers based on restricted information, which could help your customers as they’re browsing your website.