Smart AI Chatbot: How to Train Your AI Chatbot to Answer FAQs Without Coding

While good marketing is crucial for the growth of your SaaS business, the path of least resistance to reaching success is keeping those leads and customers your marketing team worked so hard to find happy. 

Good customer service and experience are key, and while a lot of that comes from having a solid customer support team, there are other strategies you can implement. In fact, according to Zendesk, before reaching out to support, 69% of consumers first try to resolve their issues independently. 

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

Except, who has the time to browse through those pages looking for the right answer? Certainly not your prospects or customers. Time and patience are limited resources, a shortage of which is ready to sabotage your customer experience without warning. 

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

Enter the AI FAQ Assistant. 

Landbot’s smart AI chatbot can answer customers’ frequently asked questions in a natural conversation and help them solve their queries without the need to browse through support content. 

Keep reading to learn more about Landbot’s AI FAQ Assistant and how to build your own smart AI chatbot that will help you improve your customer service operations. 

Why Use a Smart AI Chatbot for FAQs

The advances in artificial intelligence, specifically the conversational kind, are making AI FAQ chatbot assistants more accessible than ever. The ability to build one without any coding knowledge means you’re no longer dependent on your IT team or external developers to get an AI assistant up and running. But that’s not the only advantage. 

The true power and potential of an FAQ chatbot lie in its capacity for efficiency and for delivering a superior customer experience.

An AI FAQ chatbot solution can help your customers to:

• Save time by bringing the information they need straight to them instantly; 
• Request the information in their own words and in a casual conversation style 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 AI FAQ chatbot, 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. 

That’s no longer the case. 

Thanks to Landbot and AI, you can easily set up an FAQ chatbot, even without coding knowledge. 

What Makes an FAQ Chatbot "Smart"?

A smart AI chatbot behavior goes beyond answering basic FAQs. It also includes delivering dynamic, intuitive, and context-aware responses thanks to advanced conversational AI technologies.

Here are a few characteristics that make for a smart AI chatbot solution:

• Understanding context and intent: smart AI chatbots are capable of understanding the context of the conversation they’re having with the user. They can analyze the conversation’s intent and adapt their replies to the user’s needs, which guarantees a more human-like chat experience. 
• Continuous learning capabilities: thanks to machine learning and natural language processing technologies, smart AI chatbots can continuously improve their performance by learning from each interaction they have with users. In doing so, they can adapt to new questions, refine answers, and improve the overall chat experience they provide over time. 
• Personalized interactions: the previous two characteristics combine to allow smart AI chatbots to deliver personalized interactions, which, in turn, make for more relevant and engaging conversations. 
  

At Landbot, we use OpenAI GPT-4 technology to power our smart AI chatbots and offer unique solutions that combine AI with our user-friendly, no-code chatbot builder. 

Our AI FAQs Assistant enables you to create an intelligent and efficient chatbot that can answer frequently asked questions based on the content you provide. This AI-powered feature helps your customers solve their queries in a natural conversational manner and removes the need to browse through support content. 

Just like any other chatbot you build with Landbot, smart AI chatbots include multichannel deployment on web and WhatsApp, integration with tools like Slack, Salesforce and Zapier, personalization features to match your brand identity, and other advanced features. 

By combining these capabilities, our chatbot solution empowers you to build smart AI chatbots that answer FAQs and create efficient and personalized interactions.

Let’s learn how!

How to Train an AI Chatbot to Answer FAQs without Coding

Landbot’s AI FAQs features use the power of ChatGPT without you having to come anywhere near it. In other words, you don’t need an OpenAI account or to have any specific tech know-how to launch your Assistant. Landbot does all the hard work for you!

This way, you can either:

• Build a stand-alone AI FAQ Assistant;
• Add an FAQ feature inside a multi-functional chatbot through the AI FAQs Assistant block.
  

Let me show you how both options work!

Launching a Stand-Alone AI FAQ Assistant

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

This is the simplified version of the AI FAQs Assistant block (that I’ll cover later), which not only allows you to avoid “scary”, complex things like GPT API solutions but also doesn’t require you to set foot inside Landbot’s chatbot builder. 

That’s pretty amazing if you ask me. 

So, how does it work?

After you log in to your Landbot account (or sign up, if you don’t already have one), go to “AI Assistants” and select “FAQ/Customer service.”

Next, you will be asked to create your Assistant, namely give it a name, and a role (e.g. Customer Service Agent), define its welcome message, and give it a set of instructions on how to act, which tone of voice to use, and anything else you deem relevant. 

The instructions field will be pre-filled to help you out, but you can also write your own prompt that better fits your FAQs Assistant and its goals. 

The next step is to provide the knowledge your Assistant will need to answer customers’ questions. For that, you just need to upload your data sources (PDF only) such as FAQs, product books, company information, or anything else the Assistant might need to know. 

After you’ve uploaded your document(s), you’ll see all its contents in the field below, where you can edit the information, or add even more. 

Once you’re done, click “✨Generate.”

The last step is simply to select the channel (either Web or WhatsApp) to publish your AI FAQs Assistant. 

And that’s it!

In three simple steps you have created an AI Assistant to answer FAQs for your customers. 

As you’ve just seen, it’s easy, fast, and requires no technical experience. 

Integrating FAQ Chatbots into a Greater Conversational Flow

Now, let’s look at what you need to do if you wish to make the FAQ feature one of your bot's multiple functions. 

A standalone FAQ Assistant serves its own purpose, but you might want, for example, to offer users more options during a chatbot conversation, such as the possibility to speak with an agent, or you might want to ask them more questions and collect data such as name and email. 

To use the AI FAQs block, select the point in your chatbot flow where you want to add the block, then go to “AI Assistant” and pick the “AI FAQs Assistant” option. 

Then, 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 your bot. 

You’ll see that I added an “Ask a question” block after the “I have a question” button option. This is because the AI FAQs Assistant block can only be triggered by a user’s question, which means you need to create the space for the user to ask it. The “Ask a Question” block allows the user to type out an open-text question without relying on buttons, and this question can then be answered by the next block. 

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

Another crucial thing to keep in mind when using the AI FAQs Assistant block is that you turn on the “Enable an exit to this bot” feature for it to have an output option where you can connect another block. If you keep this option turned off, the user will remain in a loop of asking questions to the bot. 

In that scenario, there are two options to get users back to the main chatbot flow of your chatbot: 

• If you are building a website chatbot, you can use the Persistent Menu block that appears as a permanent fixture in the header of your website bot.  
• For a WhatsApp bot, you can use the Global Keywords block instead. You can instruct the user to type “main menu”, for example, to reset the chatbot conversation and see all the options again. 

Finally, it’s important to note that, while the AI FAQs Assistant block is capable of analyzing users’ questions and answering them, at the moment, it has no way of knowing the context of the conversation that took place before the user triggered it.

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

Avoid These Common Mistakes When Setting Up Your AI FAQ Chatbot

As we’ve just learned, using Landbot to launch a smart AI chatbot to answer FAQs is easy and straightforward. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to common mistakes that can happen when setting up your AI FAQs bot. 

• Not optimizing your prompt: one of the steps of building an AI FAQ Assistant with Landbot is giving it a prompt with instructions on how to act, which goal it should achieve, what tone of voice to use, and anything else you deem relevant. Your smart AI chatbot prompt should be as effective as possible and avoid mistakes like being too vague. For tips on how to write the best prompts, check out this guide. 
• Skipping human handoff: even though they’re smart, FAQ chatbots may sometimes not be able to solve the user’s problem if it's related to a more complex topic. To ensure a superior customer experience, remember to include a clear handoff path to a human agent during the conversation. 
• Not giving users an exit: as already mentioned, if you’re using the AI FAQs block inside a bigger chatbot flow, don’t forget to give users an exit so that they’re not stuck in a loop of asking questions to the bot. 
• Forgetting to analyze & iterate chatbot behavior: even though smart AI chatbots can learn from each interaction they have, that doesn't mean you can just let them out in the world and forget about them. It is important to regularly review the bot’s interactions to refine its performance, as well as include any user feedback you might have and, possibly, new or updated FAQs or other business resources. 

Being aware of these common mistakes is the first step to your smart AI chatbot’s success. By addressing them, you can ensure your FAQ chatbot delivers a superior customer experience that helps retain customers.

Landbot AI FAQ Assistant Use Case: 24/7 Support on WhatsApp

FASTA is an online consumer finance business based in South Africa, that offers a range of services and products that provide consumers with access to financial resources through an online self-service application.

To improve its customer service accessibility and efficiency, FASTA integrated Landbot’s AI FAQs Assistant on WhatsApp. The result is a chatbot for FAQ that is directly integrated with FASTA’s database to provide real-time updates, tailor the chat experience, and enhance its self-service capabilities by letting customers obtain account information and ask account-related questions. 

Using an AI FAQ chatbot for customer support has helped FASTA significantly reduce request resolution times to minutes instead of hours and achieve amazing results: 

• 24/7 customer support;
• 20% reduction in phone and email support dependency;
• 4000% increase in customers opting to pay their accounts via WhatsApp. 
  

As you can see, a chatbot for FAQ not only improves customer satisfaction and meets their expectations, but it also has a positive impact on overall business performance and results. 

Conclusion

This article promised you an AI FAQs Assistant built without any coding, and I think we succeeded. This feature is just one of many Landbot integrations and simplifications designed to make conversational AI adoption accessible to all businesses and applicable to a wide range of use cases with minimal effort. 

Feel free to try setting up your own smart AI chatbot to answer FAQs, or try one of our other AI Assistants for lead generation and appointment booking.