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Leveraging Google Groups for Cost-Effective Customer Support Using ChatBotKit

Learn how to leverage Google Groups and ChatBotKit to create a cost-effective and efficient customer support system. Follow this tutorial to set up and integrate the two platforms, enabling automated handling of customer inquiries while maintaining high-quality support.

Google Groups, combined with the powerful AI capabilities of ChatBotKit, can provide an economical and efficient customer support system for businesses of all sizes. This tutorial will guide you through the process of setting up such a system.

Step 1: Setup Google Groups

Create a Google Group for your customer support team. Configure an auto-reply on your group email to notify customers that their message has been received. You can refer to this Google support article to learn how to configure auto replies in Google Groups.

Step 2: Integrate ChatBotKit with Google Groups

ChatBotKit can be easily integrated with Google Groups. Here's how:

  1. Log in to your ChatBotKit account and navigate to the "Integrations" tab.
  2. Expand "More Integrations" and select the "Customer Support" integration.
  3. Specify a name and optional description.
  4. Provide the incoming email for your Google Group (i.e., support@company.com).

Remember, the email you provide here should be the Google Group email you set up in the previous step.

Step 3: Configure your AI Chatbot

There are two ways to collect a user's contact information and email the conversation transcript directly to the Google Group:

Option 1: Instruct your bot to collect the user’s name and email through the bot backstory.

Option 2: Use the AI Widget Contact Collection feature. This feature can be enabled in your Widget integration settings.

Once this is set up, your AI chatbot will automatically forward the summaries of all conversations to the Google Group. The email received on the Google Group will have the correct reply-to parameter, making it easy for customer support agents to reply directly to the customer.

Caveats

When using Google Groups, ensure that the email address from ChatBotKit is not marked as spam. If you encounter this issue, we recommend adding the ChatBotKit email address to your Google Group's whitelist to ensure that emails are received properly. You can do so by marking one of the incoming ChatBotKit emails as not spam.

Final Words

This setup provides a simple, cost-effective customer communication system. It scales with your business, and best of all, most of the requests will be handled automatically by the AI bot. Replacing traditional systems like Zendesk or Intercom with Google Groups and ChatBotKit can save your business money without sacrificing customer support quality.

Also having an AI agent is fun and provides a unique experience to your customers.