FAQ Chatbot: How to Train Your AI Chatbot to Answer FAQs without Coding

While good marketing is crucial for the growth of your business, the path of the least resistance to reaching success is keeping those leads and customers your marketing team worked so hard to find happy. After all, investing in new clients is 5-25 times more costly than retaining the existing ones. On the other hand, happiness and satisfaction with the buyer journey will earn you loyalty. For instance, Salesforce Research showed a whopping 89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience, while a Hubspot study revealed a good service is a good enough reason for a repeat purchase for an incredible 93% of customers.

Hence, for your business to prosper, your marketing and customer support need to work in unison. Good customer service can make your marketing team look good and trustworthy, while good marketing can help shine a light on your excellent customer team, making it a selling point hard to resist. 

Don’t panic, though! 

In this day and age, offering good service doesn’t necessarily require an army of customer support specialists. When it comes to it, the devil is usually in the detail. In fact, according to Zendesk, before reaching out to support, 69% of consumers first try to resolve their issue independently, but fewer than a third of companies actually offer self-service options. Moreover, according to Drift, 28% of consumers claim the most frustrating experience of all is needing information that is simple but hard to find. 

This is where your frequently asked questions pages (FAQs) or knowledge-base-type of resources come into play. 

Except… pages imply time spent searching for the right answer, the right resource. Who has that kind of luxury? Certainly not your clients. Time and patience are limited resources, a shortage of which is ready to sabotage your customer experience without warning. 

Brutal but true. 

Thankfully, today we have the tech to fight back and keep customer churn to a minimum. 

The Importance of Smart FAQ Chatbots

The advances in artificial intelligence (AI), specifically the conversational kind, are making virtual assistants more accessible than ever. The size of your IT team no longer defines whether or not you are able to offer such a service. 

The most obvious advantage of an FAQ chatbot is, naturally, the savings in relation to the cost of labor. However, you shouldn’t think of or treat a support bot as a substitute for your human customer service team. In fact, that type of saving is the least impactful way a good bot can affect your revenue. Its true power and potential lie in its capacity for efficiency, even under the pressure of scaling up your operations. In other words, it allows you to keep up without compromising on speed, convenience, and personalization. 

In today’s climate, these qualities are priceless. For instance, according to Salesforce, 64% of customers want to shop with brands and businesses that can meet their needs in real-time. Hubspot, too, showed that 90% of customers consider an "immediate" response as essential or very important when they have a question—for 60% of those customers, "immediate" means 10 minutes or less.

An AI FAQ chatbot can help your customers to:

• Save time by bringing the information they need straight to them instantly; 
• Request the information in their own words without worrying about finding the “right” keywords for the search option to work properly;
• Use the most common communication method—messaging—to reach their goal, whether by chatting with an assistant on the web or a messaging app like WhatsApp;
• Get to human agents quicker when they have more complex queries because, thanks to the bot, the agents in question are not busy answering basic inquiries and have time to focus on issues that actually require human intervention. 

A concept like that is hard to resist. Nevertheless, most businesses don’t even begin to consider it because of the perceived levels of technical complexity that come with the territory. 

But what if we removed that from the equation? 

What if you could get an AI chatbot to answer FAQs without coding?

Thanks to Landbot and GPT, you can do just that!

How to Train an AI Chatbot to Answer FAQs without Coding

I know this sounds like it’s too good to be true, but bear with me.  

Firstly, if you have yet to become familiar with it, Landbot is a no-code/low-code chatbot builder that allows you to create bots (rule-based and AI alike) for a variety of channels using a very simple visual interface. Here is a little intro:

Inside the builder, the bot-building experience is all about stacking the blocks like you are playing with conversational LEGO. To get a better grasp of how Landbot works, check out the Landbot Academy for short video tutorials and courses. 

On the other hand, you are unlikely to ask what ChatGPT is. In the few months since its release, the OpenAI’s revolutionary large language model (LLM) managed to wreak havoc on the status quo of what is possible. More and more businesses are tapping into the potential of ChatGPT and its APIs, and Landbot—being all about the bots—is no exception. 

We have created OpenAI tutorials and even a no-code template to build a chatbot with GPT. However, we know speed and simplicity are often essential for business, and so we wanted to make things even simpler.

Our AI-Powered FAQs block uses the power of ChatGPT without you having to come anywhere near it. In other words, Landbot Builder does all the hard stuff for you. 

Let me show you how it works!

1. Understanding AI-Powered FAQs Feature

AI-Powered FAQs block is a Landbot feature that enables you to build either:

• A stand-alone AI FAQ chatbot;
• Integrate the AI FAQ feature inside a multi-functional chatbot.

In essence, all you need to do to make it work is copy and paste your FAQs (in question-answer format or just a unified text) into the block and feed it into the bot. 

2. Launching a Stand-Alone AI FAQ Chatbot

If you are in need of a chatbot purely dedicated to answering FAQs and nothing else, then this is the solution for you. 

This is the simplified version of the AI-Powered FAQs block, which not only allows you to stay away from scary, complex things like GPT API solutions but also from Landbot’s chatbot builder. 

That’s pretty amazing if you ask me. 

Disclaimer: This AI FAQ “shortcut” is only available for bots on the Web and WhatsApp!

So, how does it work?

When you log in to your Landbot account (or sign up for free and enjoy a FREE trial), you will be presented with the Home screen in the image below. All you need to do is select “Unleash AI-Powered FAQ support.”

Next, you will be asked to select your channel—Web or WhatsApp. 

Depending on your selection, the interface and configuration of the FAQ chatbot setup will be slightly different.

Website Chatbot

Since, on a website, a chatbot needs to be a bit more proactive and capable of attracting attention, the chatbot editor will feature two fields: 

• Welcome message. This is the first—proactive—message that your leads/customers will see when coming across your chatbot. The message is predefined (same with every interaction) and you can customize it as you wish:

• Content Configuration. This is the field where you need to input the content your chatbot will need to rely on when answering customer questions. All you need to do is copy-paste the information. It can but doesn’t have to be in the question-answer format; a uniform text with all the information you want the bot to provide will be just as effective. The field accepts plain text only, do not feed the bot any images or emojis. The character limit is 50.000. 

After you are done, click “Feed the Bot” to allow the chatbot to analyze your input. You will be able to test it instantly by taking advantage of the test space on the right side. 

If you are happy with the bot’s reactions, click “Share & Publish” in the top right corner. You will be able to share it as a link or embed it into your website. 

WhatsApp Chatbot

If you select the WhatsApp option, there will be no “Welcome Message” field. WhatsApp bots are reactive, triggered by a message from the users, so there is no need for that.

As per testing, feel free to use the same testing space on the right side of the screen as with the Web bot. However, to get a true feel for the final user experience, you can test it directly on WhatsApp as well by using the WhatsApp Testing feature. 

That is it!

That’s all you need to get an AI chatbot to answer FAQs for your customers. 

It’s simple, fast, and requires no technical experience. 

3. Integrating the AI-Powered FAQ Block into a Greater Conversational Flow

Now, let’s take a look at what needs to be done if you wish the FAQ feature to be one of the multiple functions of your bot. You will need to pay a visit to the Landbot builder, but, in essence, this is not much harder to set up.

Why would you want to integrate the block inside a bigger bot flow instead of letting it speak for itself? 

Well, the reasons are many. 

For example, you might want to offer users more options, such as the possibility to speak with an agent. Or you might want to ask more questions and collect data such as name and email. The possibilities are endless. 

‍

Pick Your Preferred Channel 

This block is available for all the Landbot-enabled channels, not just Web and WhatsApp. 

Just take your pick!

Select Build Mode

After picking the channel, you will be asked to select the building mode. 

On Landbot, you can choose to:

• Build a bot from scratch;
• Use one of our many chatbot templates;
• Leverage the “Build it for me!” option, which is our AI Text-to-Bot feature. If you choose this option, an AI bot will ask you to describe the kind of bot you need, what you want it to do, how you want it to sound, and—based on that prompt—create a unique chatbot flow inside the Landbot builder for you.  

For the purpose of this little demo, I’ll just pick the “Start from scratch” option.

Build Your Flow

If you are unfamiliar with the builder, have a look at the video below to get an idea of the blocks work to create a conversational experience:

In my sample, I created a Welcome Message that offers the user to either speak with an agent or ask the bot a question. 

As you can see in the image in the previous section, I linked the “I just have a quick question” button to the “Ask a Question” block.

Why is that necessary? 

The AI-Powered FAQs block inside a builder flow can only be triggered by the user’s question. Hence, after selecting that option, you need to create a space for the user to ask it. In this case, I’m using the “Ask a Question” block that allows the user to type out an open-text question without relying on buttons. 

Alternatively, you can also insert the “Ask a Question option directly in the Welcome Message: 

Another crucial thing to keep in mind when teaching your AI chatbot to answer FAQs is that the AI-Powered FAQs block doesn’t have an exit (the green/pink circle) that allows you to drag out an arrow and connect it to another block. In other words, once the user starts asking questions, the conversation will stay within that block.

So, how CAN you get the users back to the main flow of your chatbot?

• If you are making a website chatbot, we recommend using the Persistent Menu block. This block doesn't need to be connected to the rest of the flow, as it will appear as a permanent fixture in the header of your website bot.  
• For a WhatsApp bot—since you cannot change the UX like in the case of a website assistant—you can leverage the Global Keywords block instead. How does that work? For instance, you can instruct the user to type “main menu” to reset the conversation and see all the options again. 

Once again, that is it! 

Implementing the FAQ block inside a chatbot flow is easy. Though, how complex or simple that flow is, will be up to you. 

It’s important to note that, at the moment, this block is capable of analyzing open-text user input and answering the questions in a natural manner. However, it doesn't remember the previous context of the conversation that took place before the user triggered the FAQ responses.

Nevertheless, it’s a powerful integration that can take the conversational experiences you offer to the next level with very little work!

You can delve deeper into this block and its implementation on our Knowledge Base. 

Conclusion

This article promised you an AI-powered FAQ bot WITHOUT CODING, and I think we succeeded 😉. This little block is just one of many upcoming integrations and simplifications designed to make conversational AI adoption accessible to all businesses and applicable to any business use case with minimal effort. 

Feel free to try setting up your own AI chatbot to answer FAQs now, but keep your eyes open for more fun AI integrations to come.

Just started learning about GPT-tech? Here's some guidelines on how to write better prompts for your GPT chatbot.