Add an alby Experience to your site

Experiences are how your customers interact with alby on your website

Within alby, you can embed different types of conversations into your site, called Experiences.

Experiences let your customers interact with alby through floating chats or static conversation widgets, both of which can be customized to match your site's design.

The chat will let you:

• Provide customers with an AI shopping assistant that follows them across pages
• Keep alby compact on the page to maintain focus on products, expanding only when clicked

Each alby Experience can include skills—specific types of questions that alby generates and answers.

There are five steps to create an Experience:

1. Choose your widget type
   1. alby supports three types of widgets so you can choose which works best for your brand.
2. Choose where on your website your Experience will appear
   1. Some Experiences can live on product detail pages or product listing pages, which influences how it interacts with customers, while others follow customers on their shopping journey
3. Choose the type of responses customers will see on your site
   1. This is an optional step depending on the widget type
4. Customize the styling of customer interactions
   1. Keeping your branding consistent on your website is important, so you can customize how your customers see alby
5. Configure skills to define how alby responds to customers
   1. Skills fuel how alby can answer questions, as well as guide alby’s pre-generated prompts.

Pick what type of widget you’ll need

	Predictive Prompts	Single Button	Freeform Question
Description	Uses product information to generate top consumer questions about each product. Customers can click a prompt to get the answer to that question.	Launches the alby chat, giving customers the option to ask questions and learn more about your products.	Provides a text box for customers to ask any question about the product, with alby responding via the chat.
Displays pre-generated questions	Yes	No	No
Allows freeform questions	Yes	No - freeform questions available when chatbot is launched	Yes
Requires configuration of the alby chatbot.	No	Yes	Yes

Choose where your Experience will live on your website

There are two places on your site you can put your alby widget:

Product Detail Page (PDP)

The most common type of alby Experience lives on a PDP, pulling information from your Product Catalog to inform customers about the product they’re looking at.

Use this to help customers learn more about individual products, diving deep into why it might be a good fit for them.

Product Listing Page (PLP)

PLP Experiences help guide customers to specific products through broader answers. Perhaps a customer knows they need a specific item, but don’t know the differences between the 30 SKUs on your site, a PLP Experience can help.

For example, a PLP widget on a bicycle category could help customers decide which bicycle to buy, by narrowing down the choices based on the customer’s questions.

Determine widget responses

If you chose a Predictive Prompts widget, you need to choose how customers will see alby on your site, and customize the widget’s look and feel. 

Embedded chat

Embedded chat is the typical alby response Experience, with the widget inserted inline on the webpage. As customers ask alby questions, the widget expands vertically on the page.

Single Response

A Single Response offers the same functionality as an Embedded Conversation, but only shows customers one response at a time, keeping the size of the widget the same.

Trigger chat

This response setting will only allow customers to click alby’s pregenerated questions, not type their own questions. The alby chatbot launches when a customer clicks a question.

The Chat will follow customers from pageview to pageview on your site, as long as the chat window remains open.

Choosing Trigger chat will also prompt you to set up the chat view, allowing for customization of placement and styling. For more on setting up your modal, see Set up chat.

Select your Skills

Widgets are configured with one or more skills, different types of questions that alby generates and answers. Each skill comes with its own set of requirements to ensure alby has the necessary information.

Generative Q&A

Generative Q&A is the most common skill used by alby users. It will automatically generate unique FAQs for each product.

Comparison

The Comparison skill can be added to PDP widgets to help customers compare similar products.

Review Summaries

The Review Summaries skill can also be added to PDPs, but it requires integration with your review platform, or historical review data sent to alby. For more on how to send review information to alby, read Reviews.

Category Generative Q&A

On PLPs, only one skill is currently available – Category Generative Q&A. It generates FAQs for each category to help customers narrow down to a specific product.

Set up chat

If you have a widget that launches a chat window, such as Single Button or Freeform Question, you also need to set up your chat window. You can also can set up your chatbot without a separate widget.

The process for setting up a chat window is similar to setting up a widget, where you’ll choose your styling, skills, and customization options.

Setup

In the Setup tab, you can make visual settings about the chat window.

• Name
  • Enter a name for the chat. This name will display in the header of the chat window.
• Style
  • Floating Chat
    • The chat window slides in from the corner of the screen.
  • Modal Chat
    • The chat window appears centered in the middle of the screen.
  • Embedded Chat
    • The chat window displays fixed to a side of the screen.
• Chat Position
  • If you chose Modal Chat as a style, you’ll also be prompted to choose a position for the window.
  • Defaults to Bottom Center.
• Show Launcher button
  • Toggle whether the launcher button should be visible for customers.
  • Default to on.
• Launcher button position
  • If the Launcher button is shown, choose a position for it.
  • Defaults to Bottom Right.

Skills

When setting up your chat modal, you can add any of the same skills as any other widget.

Customize

Customize your chat to match your current styling and color scheme of your site. For a full breakdown of customization options, see Customize alby's look and feel.