How to create an AI chatbot for customer service reps

Hello, my name is Sam. You might have seen me on TikTok @marketingwithsam, and I also help clients with marketing strategy, AI, and automation. 

I am so excited to talk about Zapier's Chatbots feature today because it is a total game changer for brands that need help, but they don't necessarily want to go and hire more headcount, and they're really trying to save on costs. I think a lot of brands don't really understand the power of AI and how to use it in their business. This is the perfect use case to get started and will actually save you time, budget, and it's easy to set up in five or 10 minutes. Truly, it's amazing. 

Let me walk you through what I have here. I've created a brand called Mighty Mushroom Bites. It's not a brand that exists, and I just want to show you how this could look for your brand.

What's really cool in the chatbots setup is, I've gone ahead here, I've titled my chatbot and I'm giving an AI-generated greeting. 

So, basically every single time the new chatbot is triggered to start, you'll see an AI greeting pop up. And I've also made sure that from a voice perspective, I don't want it to be so high on the creativity scale where it sounds really fuzzy. I want it to sound professional and predictable. So I've put it a little bit here in the middle, so each customer will still get a unique response, but it'll still sound professional. 

So you can see here that this is the AI initial greeting that you will get when the chatbot either starts with the customer or it starts with you internally through using this internally. 

And then I'm going to go to Instructions. This is where I really program the chatbot to be everything that I need it to be for my brand, for my website, or let's say you're using this for an internal training tool—same thing. 

So there's a section here called Directive. And what this does is this is helping you basically program the chatbot, and Zapier makes it so easy for you. 

So you assign it a role—I've said you're a senior customer support rep who's an expert in the brand. You give it an Objective, Context, Audience, so it has all of this information when it's going through and answering questions. 

I've also included some Q&As here, but I want to show you something in a second that I think is really cool. I've included the Style, so be friendly and engaging with the user. And then Other Rules. We don't want it to make up information, don't talk about other topics, right? We don't want that. And also a support email. So if anyone has additional questions that maybe the chat bot can't answer, they want to get in contact with a human, they can do that. 

So this is what I think is really cool. I can actually download documentation or FAQs that I currently already have built and use it to supply the knowledge and the directives for the chatbot. 

So I've uploaded a Google Doc here that has Q&As that help the chatbot learn a little bit more about my brand. 

So let's test it out. I'm going to pretend like I'm a customer. "Are your products gluten-free?" And we'll see what it says. Okay, great.

I can say, "Where are your products made?", which I didn't specifically say in the knowledge source. I haven't specifically clarified this. So let's see what it says when there is a question that maybe isn't perfectly answered. Okay. "Our Mighty Mushroom Bites are made with food-grade mushrooms. They're produced in a facility." So it's a little bit vague. 

So I might say, "Is there an email that I can use to contact someone for more information?" Let's see what it says. Perfect. It gives a support email. 

So this is fully built out, ready to go. Now, I can go embed this on my brand website, or I can use this internally and—no joke—it took me maybe five to 10 minutes. That is the true power of Zapier Chatbots. You have to check it out. It is a game changer truly for any business, but especially small brands that want to act more lean and move faster.