How to Easily Create and Launch an AI Chatbot for Your Self Storage Website

Hi everybody and welcome to the latest episode of our podcast. I'm joined today by Stephen Hyland. Hello, Stephen.

Hi.

And we are going to get into quite an interesting topic. As lots of you know, we're always trying out new things at Stora, always looking at tools to make our customers lives easier, innovating around technology as it emerges. Ultimately we're trying to help all of our customers to, to sell more, make more money or to save time. So any of our customers, you'll know we have integrations with lots of third party tools. So things like space calculators like Calcimate, you can embed a 3D tour of your facility on your website, a store on your checkout pages. You can embed an online store to sell boxes and padlocks. You can embed lots of stuff like even HubSpot chat, intercom chat onto your page. Now today what we're going to do, we're going to explore adding in an AI chatbot to your website. Yes, even that's the plan, isn't it?

That's right, yeah.

Okay, so we're just going to look into kind of how and should you use an AI enabled chatbot on your website. And I suppose to maybe go back almost. It was about two years ago that ChatGPT kind of hit the headlines and that time, you know, remember we all looking at it and thinking this is going to change a lot of stuff. So we've implemented, implemented quite a bit of AI into the business and even almost years we built at the time, remember we built a bit of a chatbot to test it out and kind of see if it would work and thought about doing a bit more investigation into it. But ultimately we decided it's such a fast moving industry, billions and billions of dollars pouring into these language models and AI tools. So we thought let's see what happens. Let's let these companies are investing hundreds of millions, billions of dollars into chatbots and all these other things. Let's wait and see and then let's leverage their investment. Ultimately that was kind of our thinking.

Absolutely. And that's, I suppose what's led to, you know, us wanting to do this today is that now we're starting to see the fruits, I suppose of, you know, they've built these systems, different models and now what we're seeing is businesses emerge on top of them as well, which allow then operators to build their own custom bots to do, to do various things, obviously leveraging AI. There's AI technology coming out every day and they're all built on top of these. OpenAI ChatGPT Claude from Anthropic as well.

Yeah.

So we've, you know, we found a couple of tools. There are various different ones of different features we're just going to run through today, see if we can set one up. I think we can do it in about 20, 20 minutes. We could probably create a chatbot for a storage business, add it to a store, storefront and see, see what sort of responses we get from it.

Yeah. And it's worth, before we get into it, it's worth saying like we, we are constantly looking at what are we going to do at store, where are we going to invest our time, where are we going to invest our money, where's our team going to invest Building product and same for any software business really. Like what are you going to build? And we always try and spend as much of our time as we possibly can focusing on building software that is specific to self storage. So when it comes to thinking about, for example, we're not going to build our own payments platform, we leverage Stripe's payment platform. They are investing billions and dollars, billions of dollars in payments. We leverage that and bring it to our customers so they can get the benefit of that. And we do that across the board, across lots and lots of tools. And that allows us to just focus on our investment which, you know, ultimately we're a self storage software business. We're not going to have billions of dollars to invest like, like Stripe and open AI. So we have to pick carefully. So it's really, there's always a tension about what we do. Like do we go and build things or do we leverage third parties. And this is one of those obvious ones where leveraging a third party always made sense for us from the start.

No, there's value in tools like this, but the ultimate thing that we focus on I suppose is what's the biggest problem for our customers and how do we solve it. And that's generally what we're building with stores, whatever it might be. But I suppose we're going to explore how the power of what other people have built can be used in Stora too today.

So we're going to take 20 minutes and we're going to build a highly functional AI chatbot that we're going to put onto my Self storage business website. Is that right?

That's the idea, yeah.

Okay. And we can leverage it into Facebook messenger and all sorts of third party tools as well. That's the plan. Is that right? We're doing that too.

We can do that. Yep.

Brilliant. Okay. Okay, well, take it away.

Okay, thank you. So I've been exploring what tools are available. So there actually are quite a lot of different chatbot building tools. I've just picked one that I've been messing around with to see, you know, would it do the job. And from my experiments, it's. It's pretty good. So this one's called Chatbase. So if you see here, Chatbase is a custom chatgpt for your business, according to their website. It'll help you build a custom gbt, embed it on your website and let it handle customer support, lead inquiries.

And so just like. So I'm not, I'm not technical, really. So ultimately what we're doing here is like telling that chatbot, pointing that chatbot at the website. And is that right?

That's part of it.

That's one of the things. So if you point to the website, it's all in. It immediately has all the information from the website, is that right?

That's one aspect. We'll walk through this, but I suppose it's up to you really, what information you give has the ability to consume multiple data sources. The website's an obvious one. And the great thing of us and our storefronts is everything you kind of want the customer to know is usually on the website. And if you're using STORA for like, say you've got availability of a certain type of unit and some sold out, some booked, you know, the website shows up with store because it's all synced to the inventory. So the chatbot will consume that information or whatever is relevant at a point in time. And if someone's sold out, it'll say it's sold out. If it's not, it won't. And yeah, it'll guide them, but it's. It's ultimately about. Feed it the information to the website and give it some light instructions to guide it through, you know, the correct answers. So what we'll do here is I already have an account on Chatbase, so I'm going to just go to my dashboard and create a new chatbot. So I'm going to walk through every step of this. So hopefully anybody can create an account and do this themselves. You don't necessarily. It doesn't matter if you have a store website necessarily either. It could be any website. So this is a free, flexible to use the lights on any website.

Before we go any further, what's the cost of this if you want to get it?

Good question. It. It does vary. I Think it starts as cheap as $20 a month.

I thought I saw 19 for like 2000 responses or something a month or something like that?

For most people that's cheap.

Yeah.

Okay. And that's, you know, for, for the average self storage operator I don't think you would need more than the base plan. It's like any tool, you can pay more for certain features. But so what I do here I've got the Creation wizard open. So the first thing it asks you is for your data sources and it gives us option of files you can drag in. You can write some text in immediately or you can pull in the website and also you can even do a Q and a question answer for it. Or Notion, which is a wiki kind of documentation tool and I might actually try and sync that up too because it's quite useful.

Could you point it to even a Google Doc or a Word document or anything like that?

There is an API so I think you can pull in information from other places but for now these are the sources to give you. And you could download your Google Doc and put it in here. But Notion is basically the same thing and I think that's if you want to point it to a source that isn't public facing to give it more knowledge. Notion would be probably the best place for that. But you can have a Notion account for free to do this as well.

Oh yeah, okay. So Notion.

Okay.

We could also create a Notion document about self storage in general presumably and let people point to it.

Yeah, we could create a template, let people clone it. Notion, you can just duplicate it and then just point it at your own account. Yep. So I'll write in. So we're going to do this for Gavin's business store stuff. So I'm going to write in the URL here first so you can ever crawl the entire website right now, which is what I'm going to do. Or you can submit the sitemap. So it's basically going to do the same thing but crawling. It's just looking at all the pages and seeing, you know, reading the content and analyzing them so that it can create essentially a blueprint of your website and know what's on it. Okay, so that's it. Pulled in the information from the website. I'll quickly connect the notion like I mentioned as well. So if I just click on Notion Connect, all I need to do here is essentially authorize my account and then pick the page and Notion that you want to give it access to. So I have already got this connected now too. I've created a Store Stuff notion document. I have some basic information from, from our business in there. Um, again, that could be, it could be anything. So it could be instructions for the chatbot. It could be stuff you don't want to put on your website. So that's the website index. Now if I scroll down here, you can see all the different pages that have been created on Store Stuff's website. And I can click Create Chatbot. So the chatbot now is going to be created off the back of that content. Okay. So the first thing you see when you do that is a playground of the chatbot. So it's already an existing chatbot that you can use on your website. You could ask questions about the business. So like I could ask what size storage units do you have? And this is just again, so you can get a feel for it and see, see what you've got. But you will want to do further training on this. So it's, it's telling me now it's got units range from 12 square feet up to 250 square feet. Does that sound right to you?

Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

It's telling me the different sizes, even already pointing me towards a space calculator, which we have on the website with Calcimate.

Brilliant.

That's the playground. And now we can have a look through the rest of the different settings here. So we have the next one is activity. So you can already see the chat that I just placed in here in activity log and kind of, you can review this over time, see your chats. It's quite useful. You can get analytics as well, which is great. You'll see the chats coming in here. But what we want to do is we want to keep modifying the actual chatbot. So we're going to go to settings and we're going to go into AI. So what this is going to let me do now is have a bit more control over how the chatbot interacts. I can pick my model, for example. So right Now I choose ChatGPT 4.0, which is probably the most suitable model that exists. But again, this is going to constantly get updated. They're releasing new stuff all the time. So you'll want to probably review this over time to make sure you're using the latest models here. Below this you can see we've got instructions and the instructions are completely customizable by you, or you can select actually default. So I'm going to pick the sales agent one. So immediately that's given me probably a slightly more Tailored to the needs of self storage chatbot on the store stuff bot. So these instructions are basically telling it, you know, you are a dedicated sales agent, you should do this X, Y and Z. You can give it constraints about like not divulging certain information. More importantly though, what you're going to want to do is you want to tailor it to your self storage use cases. I have played around that. I have some of my own that I've created previously and I'll add them in here as well. Okay. And we'll make that available to some people as well. I'm sure if they want to use it with Stora, we can show you how to do that too.

If anybody's watching this and wants to get an AI chatbot on the website, they should be able to hopefully watch this video and get one set up. But if there's any questions, give us a shout and we can give them a hand. And we will create some more resources to help improve this too.

Yep. Yeah. So we'll give the AI instructions. Save that. You can do a lot of things here. So you can, you can manipulate the chat interface. So right now I just have, you know, it's a generic interface. It sends an initial message saying hi, what can I help you with? I can do what's called a suggested message, which is pre filled messages that the customer can press like you know.

So it'll bring up options for them to sort of click on one.

You could say not sure what storage size I need. And in that scenario we can then give the bot instructions to say, ask questions like, you know, what are you moving or what are you doing?

Size of your house or what size of business? How much stuff have you got?

Yeah, but from my experience it already does that on its own intuition. So which is helpful. But we can even say request a callback, whatever it is, it's up to you. And you can then train it to answer that question in a certain way.

Basically, this AI chatbot knows it's a sales agent for a self storage business and it's going to act appropriately and try and get the customer the answers that they need in order to get them to the point where they're closer to being ready to book or even actually send them on to make the booking.

Exactly. Yep. So yeah, it is worth saying that it will push them to the relevant page, it'll give them a link. It's really, it'll do whatever it needs to do to facilitate the needs of the person talking to it.

Y. Fantastic. So if you are A lot of our customers do have chat, not chatbots chat on their website. So like HubSpot chat and some of these free chat tools. If you're currently doing that, what do you recommend people do here? Like replace. Try this as a replacement. Like what's kind of the. What do you. What way should people think about that?

I suppose it depends on what type of business you're trying to run. So if you don't want to have to answer the queries all the time, maybe try and do something more automated. It's probably as worth the AI chatbot approach. But if you're willing to put in the time, it's probably still best to be a human on the end of the line. At the end of the day, it only knows what it knows. No matter what anybody builds, these chatbots are not sentient. They don't know your business like you know your business. So they're never going to be able to answer the question as directly to the customer. It's only guessing ultimately, based on the information that's available to it that's got the right answer.

But then I used to answer phone calls from customers calling for store stuff and advising them what size One day I was just guessing too.

Yeah, but you've written the content for your website and the website is downstream of you not knowing.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. And what about if you want to run your business where you're encouraging people to phone, presumably you could give it instructions to sort of lean it towards suggesting like saying, give us a call on this number and we'll help you out. Could you kind of give us some instructions like that to kind of help in that direction?

The great thing about using a custom tool like this is you can make it do whatever you want essentially, obviously.

Within reason, you give it some directions basically in rules.

Exactly. Yeah. So we can say like in a scenario where maybe a certain unit size is sold out, tell it to suggest a bigger one. There's all sorts of scenarios where ultimately whatever you can think of, as long as it's the resources that we build on the website to push it to, it'll do that for you.

Wow, okay.

With this control, if you put a little bit effort into it, the more you put into it, I suppose the more you get out of it, that would be the way I would think about it.

And what you said to start is you can get this set up in 20 minutes so you can point it, get it set up, point it to your website, give it some more information and get it all live in 20 minutes. So it is possible. I know we're kind of going on tangents a little bit here, but it is possible.

Again, it is from when I created it, it was technically could be embedded on a web page. So now all I need to do is go to my connect screen on Chatbase.

Yeah.

It gives you the option to embed. So I can click Make Public. That's just going to make it publicly available. It gives me a little embed code here. What you want to do is take the JavaScript code. So this embed code is created. I can just take this code and embed it straight away and it'll start responding for me. But I've already previously created one for Store Stuff and I. And I'll just show you that. So it'll be a matter of Store Stuff. You just embed the code, save it and it'll just be there.

And just by embedding the code, what you mean there is go into your store account and embed it in the store account in one of the settings for the website. Yeah, yeah.

So customers can just embed it essentially in the code of the website. Here you can see this little chat icon I have here on Store Stuff. And in this example I've actually put some branding on it. Just uploaded the logo, give it a color just to make it more brand suitable. And now I can just click say not sure what size I need, which is one of the pre setup messages I've added. And it's going to give me some guidance. What should I tell it? That we need to store a piano that's quite rare.

The contents of a one bedroom flat.

Of a one bed flat. Yep. So it pretty much instantly comes back and suggests that we take a 50 square foot. Does that sound about right?

Yep.

Okay. And it's giving me the link to book, so I can just click that. That takes me literally straight to the booking form on our Store Stuff website.

And that's live on the Store Stuff website now.

Yep, that's live now. Yeah.

Fantastic.

The best thing about using the tool like this as well is these guys are working all the time releasing new features and even since I started using this, they've released a few new features, but the integrations in particular, zapier. So you can use it to push maybe some information from your chatbot out to other tools, but you can also then integrate it with other messaging apps. So you can do WhatsApp, Facebook messenger and Instagram.

Wow.

And I.

That means you can, you can add this to your Instagram like page. So It'll talk to people there.

Exactly. So it.

Wow.

The exact same bot, essentially, I would imagine, without maybe some things like the pre filled buttons. It'll, it'll, it's trained off the same information. It's the exact same bottom, except it's using a different channel. So that might actually be where some people could get more value from it. Just because you might not be checking every channel for messages all the time.

So you set this up, you put in your website, you can also put it onto your Facebook page, onto your WhatsApp account, and onto your Instagram account. And that means that anyone who contacts you in those things can have access to the same answers, the same help pointing you to the booking page, everything.

I mean, that is all the links. I have set it up with our Facebook page for store stuff and it works. And it's worth saying that this is just one tool. So Chatbase seems like a great tool, but I've also looked around at other tools like Chat Link that give even more flexibility around workflows and things like that. So it'll be really interesting to see over time how these fast evolving tools actually develop. So I'm looking forward to playing around with it more and seeing, I suppose, ultimately looking into the analytics and seeing we'll be able to see from this. Do people actually interact with AI chatbots? Does it give it the information they need?

If lots of our customers are using this, we could be pointing them to their website, their sources, but also some sources from us, which could be general industry sources. It could be more information, detailed information about how to pick a size. We could even be pointing it to that or information with other stuff to make this better and better and better. And with 250 customers at the moment growing rapidly, we're going to have a lot of data pretty quickly that can hopefully improve this rapidly too. If we start to see that it's something that is really helping to drive sales.

Yep, definitely.

I think one of the things I like the most about this is that we're talking here about using a tool in an industry where there's billions of dollars being invested. These companies probably have hundreds or thousands of engineers building these tools. They are innovating at such unbelievable pace that for a self storage business, for us, as a self storage software platform, you've got to use these third party tools, leverage their massive investments. For example, this AI chatbot has integrations with you, said Zapier Messenger, WhatsApp. Those are just things that are just so much innovation happening rapidly. This is brilliant. It took 20 minutes to set up. It looks at all the data in your website. You know, you can pull data from a Q and A elsewhere. It's, it's brilliant. And the best thing is it's just $19 a month. You know, it's like it's a, it's a really low cost way to use some of the best tech in the industry and get started with, you know, with embracing a bit of AI on your website.

Like I think it's low cost but also it's low commitment as well. So you can try these things and you don't have to. You pay monthly and try it out and see what happens. Maybe you move to a different tool. Best of modern software gives you that flexibility.

I think that's like, that's, I see a big part of our job. Well first of all is to build a fantastic platform, but it's also to keep our eye on other products and other tools that are in the industry that our customers can leverage and then making it easy. That's the purpose of this video now, make it easy. Giving a guide to how to actually do it. I think that's an important part of our job is to find these tools, share information about them, help people get set up on them and hopefully it'll help our business. It's an exciting time definitely.

And I know me and lots of the members of the team are constantly looking and trying out how we can leverage these tools. And generally what happens is from our own testing we're able to pass on some knowledge to the customer base.

Yeah. Okay. Thanks Stephen and thank you very much for watching. If you have any questions about this or if we can help you with getting this set up, then reach out to us. You can use this on your store website. You can use it on any website. It's not just for us. We'd love to hear how you get on, we'd love to hear your experience and ultimately we'd like to hear actually how much is it being used? Are customers using it? And if we see massive take up then we'll invest more and make this better, make a better integration and as well for our customers. So yeah, keep in touch with how you're getting on and thanks for watching. At Stora, our mission is to help our customers build the best self storage businesses. Self Storage Explained is here to try and bring you the best from inside and outside the industry to help you grow your business. If you want to find out about more resources, go to Stora Co to sign up for a demo or find out more. Or you can go to Stora Co Academy for lots more resources, including our financial model and other in depth guides to setting up and growing your business.