While good marketing is crucial for the growth of your 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. 

This assistant 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.

The Importance of Smart FAQ Chatbots

The advances in artificial intelligence, specifically the conversational kind, are making virtual 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 conversational AI lie in its capacity for efficiency and customer experience improvement.

An AI FAQ Assistant 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 AI Assistant, 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 Assistant, even without coding knowledge.

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 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 the AI-Powered FAQ Block 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 the 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 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 experiences you offer to the next level with very little work!

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 any use case with minimal effort. 

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