Chatbot skills

Conversations that your chatbot is supposed to handle can be quite complex. Even the most simple chatbot should have some key features – like a welcome message and default reply, ability to answer specific questions and maybe a live chat escalation. Then come lead generation, appointment scheduling, e-commerce orders, lead nurturing and so on.

These conversations can easily become hard to manage, and this is where skills come handy. They make it easy to build, handle and update even the most complex conversations without losing a focus.

You can think of skills as pages on your website. While it’s easy to build a single-page website for a single task, the majority of websites contain dozens (or even thousands!) of different pages, each serving a specific purpose. The main idea is to split the conversation into smaller parts, each serving a specific user need.

Imagine a restaurant chatbot, for example. Here are some chatbot skills that it can contain:

  • Welcome message and onboarding (explaining what this bot can do)
  • Making reservations
  • Arranging deliveries
  • Getting directions
  • Answering questions etc

Building a single conversation that will address all these possible options is difficult even for a simple bot like this. So, in Activechat you will build a skill for each of these tasks, and then connect these chatbot skills together with events.

chatbot skills
A simple example of a skills framework for restaurant chatbot

Skills in Activechat are triggered by events, and when you add a new skill to your conversation by clicking the “plus” button in the top right corner of the visual chatbot builder, Activechat will automatically add CATCH block that will listen to the event with the same name. You can edit the event name in the CATCH block editor later, although we advise against it.

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