What is a Google Business Chatbot and how to create it?

Have you ever thought about automatically replying to potential customers on Google?

Now that’s possible! Google has opened up their platform for chatbots and now we can automatically reply when somebody starts a conversation on Google.

In this tutorial, I will explain:

• What a Google Business chatbot is
• Why you should create a chatbot for Google Business
• And how you can create a Google Business chatbot without writing any code

Let’s dive in!

 

What is a Google Business Chatbot?

A chatbot is an automated conversation partner.

Normally, when you talk to on a messenger platform (such as WhatsApp), you are talking to another human.

But with chatbots you are not talking to a human, but to a computer that can understand what you’re saying and automatically talk back to you.

But what is a Google Business chatbot then?

Simple: an automated conversation partner on Google Business.

 

Why should you create a chatbot for Google My Business?

Google is the most active website in the world.

In fact, 1 billion users are searching on Google, each and every month.

And together these users are accountable for 6.9 billion searches, every day.

That’s 2.5 trillion searches a year.

Let that sink in.

So basically, you should create a chatbot on Google Business, because your customers are there.

They are searching for a solution to their problem, and they probably have questions about your company, your offering or whether your company can solve their problem.

And that’s where your chatbot comes in. Ready to answer their questions 24/7, even when you and your company are sleeping.

 

How to create a Google Business Messages chatbot

Now that we know what a Google Business chatbot is and why you should create one, let’s create one ourselves.

And for this tutorial, we are going to use Xenioo:

Create Xenioo account

And the best part about Xenioo is that you can create one chatbot and publish it on over ten channels. So the Google Business chatbot that you’ll be creating today, can be published on other channels (such as Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram) with just the click of a button.

On the Xenioo website, you can just click on Signup and fill in the form information.

Once you’ve created your Xenioo account, click on Create New Bot:

Now, Xenioo creates a new bot for you with a pre-built flow in it.

In the rest of this tutorial, I will show you how to:

1. Set up a greeting message when somebody starts a conversation on Google
2. Automatically reply when someone asks a specific question on Google
3. And forward the chat to a human when your chatbot doesn’t understand the conversation

 

Set up a greeting message for your Google Business chatbot

Let’s start with creating the greeting message (this is also called the “welcome message” of your chatbot).

Let’s say we are a local web design agency and we want to use Google Business to get potential clients to easily book an appointment with us.

Then we first need to remove all the elements that we don’t need from the start interaction (this is the first message of your chatbot):

And we can change the first text to:

Hey there! I’m the chatbot of Web Design Agency. If you want to book an appointment with us, please click one of the buttons below or text “book appointment” to me!

The next step is to add a button to this first message. You can do this by clicking on the tool icon and select Add action:

Choose the Quick Reply Button:

But before we are going to configure this button, we first need to add another flow (this will be the appointment booking flow). You can do this by clicking on the “+” icon on the top:

By the way, a flow in Xenioo is called a “behavior”. Just so you know 😉 

Then, we need to change the name of the flow. You can do that by going to the settings of the flow:

And change the name of the flow to “Book appointment”:

If you now go back to the Quick Reply button, we can set the Button Title and Trigger Text Expression:

The Button Title is the text that will actually appear in the button. The Trigger Text Expression are all the words that will trigger the button to perform the action.

Then, you also need to to set the Go To Bot Interaction to Book Appointment and Start Interaction:

What this will do, is when someone clicks on the button or says “book appointment”, the user will be redirected to the Book appointment flow (we just created).

But our greeting message doesn’t respond to any greeting right now.

So to make it automatically respond to greetings (such as “hi” and “hello”), we need to set up a Global Bot Operation.

In Xenioo, you can click on the Art icon, which will bring you to the Global Bot Operations:

Here, you can click on Add Bot Operation:

Select the Text Parse under “Input”:

Then, you need to set the Control Expression to “hey|hi|hello” (these are the words we want to reply to), the target variable to “last_user_message”, the behavior to “Your Main Bot Behavior” and the Interaction to “Start Interaction”:

What this will do is that:

1. If the user types in “hey” or “hi” or “hello”
2. We will send the user to “Your Main Bot Behavior” flow
3. And we will send the block “Start Interaction” (the one we just created)

 

Book an appointment in your chatbot

Now that we’ve created our greeting message, it’s time to create the flow for booking an appointment.

When somebody wants to book an appointment, we are going to ask four questions:

1. What is your name?
2. What is your desired date of the appointment?
3. At what time do you want to have the appointment?
4. What is your email?

Once we received all this information, we are going to send an automatic email to someone within your business.

Head over to the “Book appointment” flow we created before and change the first tex to:

Let’s start with creating the appointment. What is your name?

Then, you need to add an action and choose the Generic Input (under “Input”):

Here, you need to set the target variable to “user_name” and remove the Go To Bot Interaction:

What this will do, is that it will wait on input from the user and store the input of the user in the variable “user_name”, which we can use later on in our chatbot.

Then, we can duplicate the first text bubble:

And change the text of the duplicate bubble to:

And what is your desired date of the appointment?
Please put it in the following format: 31-12-2021.

Now, you need to add a new action and choose the Generic Input again.

And then, we will set the:

1. Control expression to “(0[1-9]|[12]\d|3[01])-(0[1-9]|1[0-2])-([12]\d{3})”
2. Target variable to “booking_date” (you need to add that new variable)
3. Max wrong numbers before give up to 3

P.S. Don’t forget to remove the Go To Bot Interaction at the bottom!

The chatbot now asks the desired date of the booking, waits on input from the user and check if the input from the user matches the “31-12-2021” date format. If it doesn’t match the format, it will say “Sorry I can’t understand you.”.

Next, we want the desired time of the booking, so add another text bubble with:

At what time do you want to have the appointment?

Again, add a Generic Input here, which will store the answer in the “booking_time” variable (which you need to add):

And lastly, we will ask for the email of the user:

Last question: What is your email?

But now, we are not going to add a Generic Input, but an Email Address input. So just add a new action as you did before and choose for the Email address input (Under “Input”):

Here, we only need to remove the Go To Bot Interaction:

The last thing we need to add to this flow is a thank you message + an automatic email to someone within your business.

First, add the text bubble with the following text:

Thank you, {{user_name}}. Someone of our team will contact you as soon as possible.

Did you see what I did there? I used the input of the user (their name) inside a chatbot message. That’s the best part about chatbots: you can have personalized conversations with your users.

Next, you need to add an action and choose the Send Custom Mail Message (under “Integration”):

Here, you can fill in the email of the recipient and the message you want to send to him/her. In this case, I will send the following:

Hey Joren, here is the booking information:

Name: {{user_name}}
Email: {{user_email}}
Desired date: {{booking_date}}
Desired time: {{booking_time}}

And as you can see above, you can just use the values of variable by typing in {{variable_name}}.

But again, this flow does not respond to anything yet, so we need to create another Global Bot Operation for this.

Just like we did before, add a new Bot Operation, but now we want to reply when someone types in “book appointment” or “Can I book an appointment”:

And that’s it! Now we created a complete flow for booking an appointment!

 

Send the chat to a human

The last thing I am going to show you is how you can send the chat to a human when your chatbot doesn’t understand a question.

And in Xenioo, this is called the Fallback interaction. This is the message that appears when your chatbot does not understand anything.

So if you go back to Your Main Bot Behavior flow and go to the fallback interaction, you need to change the text to:

Sorry, I didn’t understand you. Do you want me to forward it to a human?

Before, we are going to add two buttons, we first need to duplicate this block twice by clicking on the Tools icon and clicking on Clone:

And after copying the block, we can change the name to “Forward to human”:

Likewise, we can change the other one to “No”.

Then, we can add one quick reply button to the Fallback interaction just like we did before. Just add an action and choose Quick Reply button.

Set the Button Title and Trigger Text Expression to “Yes” and the Go to Bot interaction to the “Forward to human”:

And then you can also do this for the “No” option, so the flow looks like this:

Now, we change the text of the “Forward to human” block to:

Great, we are forwarding you right now to one of our agents.

You also need to add an action to this block, which is the Set Chat Operator State (Under “Flow”):

And set it to the following settings:

With this action, a human can take over the chat with the live chat of Xenioo (you can find this under “Conversation” in the menu at the top) and give an answer to the user.

For the “No” option, we will also change the text so the eventual flow looks like this:

 

Test your chatbot on Google Business

Now that we’ve created our chatbot, it’s time to connect it to Google Business.

And currently, this is still a manual process.

So in Xenioo, click on Publish at the top:

Choose for Business Messages:

And then you’ll see that you need an Agent ID and a Brand ID.

To get those IDs, you actually need to send an email to Xenioo with the following information:

• Agent Name (name of a person within your company)
• Brand Name (name of your company)
• Phone number
• Privacy policy URL of your company

And then Xenioo will send you an email back with an agent ID and a Brand ID, that looks like this:

If you get the email back, you can copy & paste the brand ID and Agent ID into Xenioo.

On the “Chat Details” Tab, make sure that you add an Avatar (otherwise the chatbot will not be working):

And on the third tab, make sure that both options are checked:

Then, you can click on Save and Publish and your chatbot will work on the URLs provided by Xenioo (which are only accessible through a mobile device).

 

Connect your chatbot to your Google Business Profile

But this is only a testing environment you have, your chatbot it is not live yet.

If you want to connect your chatbot to your Google Business Profile, you need to be approved by Facebook.

This process takes up three steps:

1. Xenioo sends an email on your behalf to Google
2. Google will send you two emails for verification
3. A human will look at your approval request and will approve/disapprove you

As said in step 2, Google will send you two seperate emails. One email contains a security key, like this:

And the other one contains information on what you need to send to Google:

Once, you have send the confirmation to Google, a human will look at your request.

If Google approves your request, it is successfully connected to your Google Business Profile.

 

Now It’s Your Turn

And that’s how you can create a Google Business chatbot!

If you have any questions on how you can use Xenioo to create chatbots or on how to use Google Business, please leave a comment below and I will reply as soon as possible.