Lesson 1: Design and Plan a Bot

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

We’re really excited that you’ve made it to the first lesson to build a chatbot for "Monoco Fashion Shop" by yourself from scratch. Let's take a look at our "Monoco Fashion Shop":

Are you ready to build a chatbot like above? 😉

In this lesson, before building a chatbot for Monoco Shop like this, you will learn how to clone a chatbot from an exciting template to have an overview of Monoco Shop chatbot and plan a bot for this fashion shop through brainstorming chatbot ideas as well as sketching a flowchart to demonstrate your bot flow.

Clone a bot from template

Before planning your chatbot, follow these step-by-step instructions to install a template Mini-Course for “Monoco Fashion Store” to have an overview of Monoco Shop chatbot:

1. Log into BotStar App. In the landing page, click on Create a New Bot button

On the bot templates page, browse to the template called "Mini-Course Chatbot"

2. Preview the bot by clicking on Preview, then click on the Clone This Template button

3. The app will require you to enter some information before creating your bot. Enter bot name and set other fields as the picture below:

You can also customize the Bot Attributes. This feature helps you repeat text (such as brand name, contact number or address, etc.). Bot Attributes can be used at any place where you want to replace a text with.

4. Click on Create Bot to complete cloning this template.

5. Good job! Now you have a fashion bot for Monoco Shop

6. Add content by clicking on any block in Flow Editor and edit the text, try out the buttons, change the images, etc.

7. Click on Preview button in the upper right-hand corner to test your chatbot

8. Your resulting chatbot might look like this

Plan your chatbot

Define chatbot framework

After cloning a bot from our template to see the conversation flow, you will learn how to plan a chatbot for “Monoco Fashion Store” like above from scratch.

Follow these main steps to visualize your ideas to build your chatbot to ensure chatbot solutions meet your expectation. Here's the brainstorming of chatbot framework after answering the key questions to build a chatbot for Monoco Shop:

Step 1: Define the concept by asking "Why are you building this thing?"

This is an extremely important first step of the process and you will need to define your concept well. To help you define your chatbot concept for Monoco Shop, answer these questions:

  • What should my chatbot do?
  • Does my chatbot solve an issue? If so, what is it?
  • Who will use my chatbot?

These questions should help you when you have no idea to start building your Monoco Fashion bot.

Step 2: Define the tone of voice, or "How is it going to interact?"

The tone of voice of your chatbot is its personality. Please make sure that the tone of voice suits Monoco Shop, your audience, and the fashion products you sell.

To help you definite your chatbot’s tone of voice, answer these questions:

  • Is my chatbot formal or informal?
  • Which age group is my chatbot targeting?
  • Is my chatbot friendly, serious or fun?

Step 3: Define the conversational flow, or "How can you build a chatbot flow?"

Figuring out the conversational flow of your chatbot is necessary to build your chatbot. You can observe the existing chat logs of Monoco Shop and take advantage of them to design the conversation flow.

To define your bot flow, ask yourself these questions:

  • How can I take advantage of the existing chat logs?
  • How can I define the chatbot content?
  • Does my chatbot need to use AI?

Step 4: Define the marketing, or "How are you going to get people to use this?"

After creating a chatbot, now think about how you are going to engage more and more customers for Monoco Shop to boost sales.

To define your chatbot’s marketing plan for Monoco Shop, ask yourself these questions:

  • Will it have a virality functionality?
  • How much marketing budget do I have?
  • Does my chatbot need branding or any collateral along with its persona?

Step 5: Define your business model, or “How are you going to make money?”

In this step, you need to sit down and think of your chatbot’s business model and what your chatbot is going to do for Monoco Shop. Think of your chatbot as a business!

To figure out your chatbot’s business model, ask yourself these questions:

  • Is my chatbot going to make me money, save me money, or neither?
  • What is the ideal path a user should take when interacting with my chatbot?
  • What resources will my chatbot take to build, maintain, and grow?

Map your content

Great job! After brainstorming your chatbot, now you will map your content to build the bot flow for Monoco Shop. Follow these steps to map your ideas to design the conversation flow:

1. Use Existing Chat Logs and FAQ Resources to discover the most recent common questions to define the user’s journey. Customers may ask some questions about the type of clothing, size, quantity, etc.

3. Make a decision on how your chatbot displays the information:

  • Type out a text to your chatbot
  • Click on pre-set buttons that will navigate them throughout the conversation
  • Combine buttons with the option for typed text

4. Optimize conversation flow by preparing the set of keywords for Small Talks:

  • “Halo”
  • "I want to buy a T-shirt"
  • "Why this dress is so expensive?"

5. Set default responses for what bot don’t know and guide your customers to Live Chat support with shop assistants

Draw a flowchart

After mapping your content, let's go to the part of drawing a quick sketch of mindmap on paper or draw a flowchart that helps you visualize the overview of your chatbot for Monoco Shop.

From the planning above, in this part, you will learn how to plan and draw a flowchart for "Monoco Fashion Store". By answering these questions above, you can divide your conversation flow into two categories:

  • Sales: Shopping (show products), Save orders and customer information, Shipping and delivery
  • Support: Contact and Show locations

Let's start drawing a flowchart for Monoco Shop. There are two methods of demonstrating a flowchart:

Method 1: Using pen and paper to sketch your chatbot

This method will be applied for a fast and simple chatbot by using a pen and a paper to sketch your chatbot as shown below:

Method 2: Using online tools

This method helps your chatbot's flowchart look more professional. You can use many online tools to draw a flowchart for Monoco Shop. In this lesson, we suggest that you use Draw.io to do this.

Go to Draw.io and sign up. Then you can drag and drop the diagrams and add connectors to create a flowchart as you expect. Here's a flowchart for "Monoco Fashion Store":

Note: For more information, please visit Draw.io Tutorial

Prepare for a chatbot

This part of our lesson covers the basics of creating a Facebook Business Page and a Website for Monoco Fashion Shop. If you have already had your own Facebook Page or Website for Monoco Shop to publish your chatbot, you can skip this step.

Create a Facebook Page

Follow these step-by-step instructions via two articles to create a Facebook Page for Monoco Shop:

After following these steps above, you will have a Facebook business page for "Monoco Fashion Store" as shown below:

Create a Website

If you don't have any idea to start creating a Website for your fashion shop, don't worry, we will guide you on how to create a simple website. Try one of these free programs: Wix, WordPress, Weebly, Squarespace, Shopify, etc.

Take Website templates from the Wix platform as an example, just simply choose the most related and suitable template with Monoco Shop and start editing this website by using drag and drop tools. Please follow the instructions via these articles:

Congratulations! Now you have a Website for "Monoco Shop":

Ta-da! You've experienced our template by cloning it and learned how to brainstorm as well as plan your chatbot from scratch. In the next lesson, you will learn how to create a chatbot for "Monoco Shop" based on the flowchart above in the next lesson 😉

If you have any concerns, please feel free to leave a comment below or contact us through support@botstar.com. For more details on how we have helped our customers grow their business, you can view our use cases, blogs or join our BotStar community to learn and share new things 😊

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