Setting Up Your First Assistant

Unlike your run-of-the-mill chatbot, creating a functional Answer Assistant takes a matter of minutes. This is because instead of using complex decision trees, it uses your existing website content to automatically answer questions. That's great news for any team looking to drive conversion on their site. 

With just a few easy steps, you can build an Assistant that's ready for testing. In this guide, we'll share the main actions you need to complete in order to get an Assistant up and running. 

More specifically, this Guide will cover: 

• How Frase Answers Works
• Glossary of Key Terms
• Creating your First Assistant 
  • Crawling your Website
  • Creating an Assistant 
  • Customizing your Assistant's Settings

How Frase Answers Works

At a high level, these are the main steps you need to take to implement Frase Answers:

1. Crawl: Frase ingests all of your webpages and creates an intelligent knowledge base
2. Customize: make sure your Assistant looks great, and customize greeting messages, integrations, etc.
3. Train: create Assistant-specific content that might not be available on your website. Make sure the basics are covered.
4. Test: use Frase's Test Sandbox to test performance.
5. Install: installation takes 1 line of code on your website.
6. Learn & Optimize: leverage Frase's Analytics to identify topic gaps, and optimize your content.

Glossary of Key Terms

There are a few key terms that you'll need to know before getting started:

• Assistant: a chatbot-like widget that loads on your website.
• Crawl: a collection of webpages ingested and indexed by Frase.
• Trained Answer: content created inside Frase to answer a particular question.
• Dataset: a collection of Trained Answers.
• Analytics: the dashboard that displays insights related to how website visitors engage your Assistant.
• Assistant Test Sandbox: the testing environment where you can test your Assistant prior to Installation.
• Assistant Installation: the process of installing the Assistant on your website.

Crawling your website is the first step in creating an Assistant. By doing so, you’re helping Frase automatically consume all of the existing content on your website. Once completed, Frase creates an intelligent knowledge base that it will use to answer your visitors’ questions. 

Frase can crawl your website through 3 methods:

1. Web Crawler: simply submit your domain and Frase does the rest. Note: this method only works if your website has a site map.
2. Google Search Console: pull your pages from Google Search Console. 
3. Excel: import a list of custom URLs. This method is particularly helpful if you want to exclude certain URLs from being crawled.

While your crawl is processing (this can take anywhere from few minutes to a few hours depending on the size of your site) you can go ahead and create your Assistant. 

The first step is to connect your Assistant to your crawl. This will ensure that your Assistant is ready to user your content to answer questions. 

2. Customize Assistant Settings

Once your Assistant is connected to your crawl, you’ll have the opportunity to customize your Assistant in several ways. This is where you will customize the name, branding, greeting messages, and much more. In other words, this is where the fun part begins. 

To begin updating your Assistant settings, navigate to "Answers" > "Assistants", and select your Assistant. 

Your Assistant Settings are organized in various sections:

• Widget Display
• Knowledge
• Customer Journey
• Site Search
• Live Chat
• Exit Popup
• Other Settings

Widget Display

• Name you assistant, select "Widget Mode" options and the bot will respond with the design. URL Pattern needs the URL of the website in order for the bot to run on the site.
• Customize the design with "Brand Color" and "always show minimized" to decide if the welcome message popup is needed upon seeing the bot.

Knowledge

Your assistant will answer questions leveraging knowledge from 2 content types:

• Crawls: Crawls are the brains of your Assistant. When you crawl a website, you allow Frase to consume all the content on that site.
• Datasets: Datasets are trained answers (we'll get into this later).

Customer Journey

Messages your Assistant should use in certain scenarios including Default Chat Greeting and Welcome Message, in addition to what's listed here and more:

• Fallback message: This is the response the Assistant will provide if it can't find an answer inside your content to a visitor's question.
• Enable email capture: Decide when the bot will provide a field to capture a visitor's email address
• Create Custom Journey: Create a custom journey for certain pages of the bot's website

Site Search

Include placeholder text and Featured Links you'd want to include in your search bar if you've included Site Search.

Live Chat

Enable live chat integrations when your Assistant can't deliver the right answer:

• Prompt live chat as fallback: Choose whether or not you'd like to have the Assistant defer to live chat in certain scenarios.
• Live chat scheduling: Schedule the live chat fallback to fire within your desired working hours. 
• Live chat integrations: Integrate with your Live Chat tool by selecting the provider

Exit Popup

Display a popup when a visitor is about leave your website:

• Enable exit intent pop-up: Flip this switch to green to enable exit popup
• Popup header: the header of the popup message 
• Popup text: the body of the popup message 

Other

Miscellaneous settings that you may want to utilize.

• Positive Rating Message and Negative Rating Message: Shows after a visitor approves (thumbs up) or denies (thumbs down) the relevance of an answer provided
• Send Daily Activity Digest: Send your team a daily digest that summarizes your Assistant's activity. 
• GDPR Disclaimer: Show your site visitors a GDPR disclaimer. 
• Cookie Tracking: Track Visitor cookies.