The problem nowadays is that if you want to stay afloat as a company, let alone a thriving one, you need a robust technology base. If a major part of your leads come from online sources, it is essential to have the latest technologies like chatbot software. Chatbots can be amazing tools to convert more visitors into customers.
But…there are two main problems facing you:
1) Which one will you pick? There are thousands of these products out there!
2) Will you hire a developer, or make it on your own?
But don’t worry. We’re here to help you out.
If you have no idea about:
● what chatbots are
● how they work
● how to make them
● which are the best ones
You are going to love this juicy Ultimate Guide!
To find out more about chatbot software and how they can turn your website into a customer-generation machine, read on!
According to Investopedia, “chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation through voice commands or text chats or both.”
Chatbots can be pretty smart. Over time they can learn how to best interact with your visitors and customers.
1. Crawl Twitter Data using 30 Lines of Python Code
They can answer not only questions but also troubleshoot problems. They can evaluate and qualify prospects, generate and increase sales, and a lot more besides.
What does that mean for you? Or rather…
Think of your website as a departmental store and your precious chatbot as the store’s greeter or salesman. Customers can ask questions and get their problems solved immediately, without having to research on their own.
It is the same for your website. All the information is there, but chatbots help in accessing them.
This availability of information affects user experience and lead generation positively. Doing so improves the public image of the company and, at the same time, customers feel they are valued. A chatbots software gives improved response time and promotes customer service agent efficiency.
Customers demand informal, familiar, instant and efficient customer support.
If your business depends on direct interactions with customers, it pays to have a real-time communication model. That’s why more and more companies are emphasizing active customer engagement online.
Want to know more about how chatbots benefit you?
Read on!
How can chatbot software benefit you?
Every day, more and more companies are investing in chatbots, which begs the question:
Why are others investing in this technology? How can it benefit me?
It brings many apparent benefits, but here are the main ones:
- Bots don’t sleep: AI Chatbots don’t need to rest. Once they are integrated into your website, or into your company’s social media page platform, they continue to aid customers 24/7.
- Less work for you: When the questions or requests are similar, chatbots work with fantastic clarity. This action makes them best for answering FAQs. Unlike agents, there is no time lost in searching for answers as all answers are pre-programmed. Pre-programming reduces operating costs by 66% and service time by 5X.
- In case chatbots cannot answer anything, they always direct the query to a human agent. This action means more productivity for your employees, and you can leave your worries at the door about customers leaving with their questions unanswered!
- Fewer errors: AI Chatbots make fewer errors when compared to human agents. They had such advanced sophistication because they are capable of interpreting customers’ responses.
- Your customers will love to talk with chatbots: Sophisticated chatbots can hold a conversation pretty well. They converse as well as a human by initiating small talk!
- Spontaneous customer interaction: Chatbots, unlike human agents, are capable of initiating a conversation and even start small talk!
- Simple transaction handling: Chatbot software can also be programmed to handle simple transactions like money transfers, booking of tickets and hotel rooms, etc.
In the next section, we are going to cover everyone’s favourite topic…
Are you inspired to build a chatbot?
Great!
But before you get crackin’, here are the development stages to know.
- Define your goals: The very first thing to do is to determine what you want your bot to do. Also, list the functions you want the bot to have.
- Choose the customer engagement channel: Almost every feature of the bot shall depend on where it is supposed to function. Will it be on your website, on Facebook Messenger, on your company’s mobile app, or somewhere else?
And that, in turn, depends on whether the ‘watering hole’ of your customers is. Is it on your website, on a messenger, or somewhere else?
- Choose how you will have the bot made: This depends on several factors like time constraints, your budget, your target audience, the engagement platform, etc. There are two ways of creating a chatbot: make it yourself, and choose a custom chatbot software.
- Customize, create and launch: The final step involves testing the bot, customizing it, creating and finally launching it.
For an in-depth resource on chatbot functioning, integration and development, click here!
Now, the idea behind chatbots is to have them where your target audience is, right? Well, that makes social media a great source of getting new business and customers!
And one of the biggest social media sites being Facebook itself, it pays to be there.
In our next section, we’re going to talk about what a Facebook chatbot is, and how to make your bot in it.
Facebook chatbot software is a type of technology that functions within the Facebook Messenger framework. It is a platform where you can build individual chatbots.
This platform benefits you by:
● Reaching out to your target audience directly
● Saving time, money and effort in customer care
● Discovering leads
● Handling simple transactions
● Keeping customers interested and initiate follow-up sales
Cool, huh?
But wait till you hear what Neil Patel, one of the best-known internet marketers alive, has to say about this!
According to Neil Patel, chatbots give you:
- 154% engagement increase
- 97% Reduction in Facebook Ad CPA
- 400% lead generation!
Now, how about making a chatbot on Facebook?
We shall be covering that next!
The best way to build a Facebook chatbot software is to use dedicated tools. These are into two categories depending on investment needed and capabilities: self-serve tools and enterprise tools.
We shall now look at some of the best chatbot examples from both the categories.
Chatbot examples:
Self-serve tools
● Chatfuel
● ManyChat
Enterprise tools
● Chatkit
● Reply.AI
● Automat
For a more detailed post on how to make your own Facebook chatbot, check this out!
Facebook Messenger is just one of the many chatbot platforms.
Next up, we are going to give you an exhaustive list of chatbot platforms and software.
Let’s look at creating chatbots using chatbot builders!
There’s no shortage of chatbot software nowadays.
These can be simple software that are programmed to answer questions only linearly, based on a database of questions and answers. These can also be very sophisticated software that can converse like humans.
However, your chatbot can only be as good as its programming allows it to be.
But what if you need to build a chatbot from scratch?
Don’t worry. It’s not that hard. You don’t even need to know coding!
Chatbot platforms mentioned below require no knowledge of coding. Many of these even have in-built templates that you can use to make bots within minutes!
How great is that, huh? It saves you from staring into a computer screen all day, wondering how coding works!
There are only two things that you need to do.
- The first one is to gather as much information as you need for making the bot. This information needs to be put in the platform’s editor.
- The second is to format the information into a logical and realistic conversational structure, as questions and answers, that the bot will use to solve user’s problems.
Since the toughest part is picking the chatbot system that’ll suit you best, we’ve made that easier for you.
We are going to give you tons of chatbot software options so that you can pick the one that suits your business requirements most.
But which is the best chatbot?
It can get confusing.
Choosing a chatbot can be daunting due to the sheer scale of options. Every option has different features, benefits and pricing strategy.
In that case, your best option would be to start with free plan options.
Most chatbot platforms have free options, and you only pay if you want to upgrade the package.
Here’s a range of chatbot examples.
Free Chatbots
Chatfuel can power up your business if you are looking for a Facebook Messenger bot. And best of all, you can use it for free. No coding skills needed. Chatfuel allows you to use different tools to experiment with the bot, edit it, add conversation rules and set up its working patterns.
And if that’s not enough, this free tool has in-built analytics for monitoring your bot’s performance!
Chatbot software price:
Free pack: n/a
Pro pack: $15 per month
Premium pack: $300 per month
Flow XO is an excellent choice for making a chatbot on your website, on Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram and SMS. Additionally, you can integrate its bots on third-party sites like Twitter and Google Drive.
Flow XO Pricing:
● Basic pack:
● Free (5 bots per 500 interactions)
● Standard Plan $19 per month
● Add ons:
● Every additional 5 bots- $10 per month
● Every additional 25,000 interactions- $25 per month
It is the most popular chatbot development platform for Facebook Messenger. One of the best things about it is you can create bots for various purposes: marketing, support and e-commerce.
Manychat shines in engaging new leads and in monetizing your target customers.
For ManyChat’s guide on Messenger marketing and Facebook chatbots, click here.
ManyChat Pricing:
● Free
● Pro pack: from $10 every month
Wit.ai is one of the most potent bots out there. It is powered by a strong AI that lets you create both voice and text chatbots.
Bots created this way can learn from every conversation on their own, and use that knowledge to give a better conversation next time.
Wit.ai Pricing:
● Free
Pandorabots is the largest chatbot hosting and development platform. It works on AIML (artificial intelligence and markup language), and an easy-to-learn markup language.
You can create bots for both websites and messaging apps using Pandorabots.
Pandorabots Pricing:
● Free pack: (2 bots or 1,000 messages per month)
● Developer pack: $0,0025 per message (10 bots or 100,000 messages)
● Enterprise pack: (custom fee)
It is one of the most well-known builders out there. It is developed by, yes you guessed right, by Hubspot. With its easy interface, creating chatbots is a cakewalk.
Coding skills are not needed, and you can get started within minutes with built-in templates. Bots created on Hubspot are highly customizable.
Hubspot Pricing:
● Free
● Starter pack: $50 per month
● Professional $800 per month
● Enterprise $3,200 per month
Drift Chatbot helps you build an automated AI personal assistant.
Drift chatbots are highly talented. They not only talk with your customers almost like a human, but also book meetings, qualify leads and collect data throughout the day, link your Drift bot with Salesforce,
Hubspot and Marketo, and gather and outline answers to questions from Drift into Hubspot, Salesforce and Marketo.
Drift Chatbot Pricing:
● Free package: n/a
● Standard package: $50/month
● Pro package: $400/month
● Premium package: $1,500/month
● Enterprise package: (custom)
Are you ready to create a chatbot? Drift has this fantastic guide just for you!
Want to boost your bot and improve customer satisfaction? Head over here.
In our next section, we’re going to talk about Google Chatbot.
Dialogflow is Google’s chatbot. It works on Google’s own very-powerful machine learning.
Dialogflow allows you to create bots for almost anywhere, ranging from your website to social media sites like Facebook Messenger, third party platforms, to Google Assistant. It is also great for customer support.
Heck, it even does small talk with customers!
Dialogflow Pricing:
● Standard Edition package- Free
● Enterprise Edition package- Custom fee
Till now, you have seen companies/bots that offer paid packages but also free packages.
Next up, we’ll look at companies/bots that offer paid packages along with a free trial period.
Chatbot Software with Free Trial Period
Not every company offers completely free packages.
Some of them charge you for their services, but they do provide a short, free trial period. You can use this time to evaluate the suitability of the service to your purposes. Trial periods may range from 7 days to 14 days, and even beyond.
Here are some of them:
Botsify runs on machine learning and AI. You can use it to create bots both for your website and for the Facebook Messenger.
It learns from its conversations with customers. The bot does this by analyzing a conversation and seeking to do better next time. Besides, with the analytic tools, you can detect gaps in a conversation pattern that crops up repeatedly.
And since the bot may be unable to answer a customer at times, the system allows a human agent to be connected to at any time by the bot.
Smart, huh?
One of the best things about Botsify is that it supports a whole range of third-party plugins such as Slack, ZenDesk chatbot, Alexa, WordPress, RSS and others.
Botsify Pricing:
● Free trial period: 14 days
● Self Serviced package: $50 per month
● Fully Managed package: $300 per month
TARS lets you create bots for your websites and Facebook Messenger. Its USP (Unique Selling Point) is that TARS is accessible, intuitive and easy to learn. Programming and coding skills: not needed!
With TARS, bots are highly customizable. Thus, you can mould the bot for order processing, customer processing, booking, surveying and for a range of other tasks.
TARS comes with templates, which make the development of a bot faster and easier.
TARS Pricing:
● Free Trial period: 14-day
● Professional package: $99 per month — (5 chatbots or 1,000 chats + 1 chatbot made by TARS experts)
● Business package: $499 per month — (10 chatbots or 5,000 chats + 3 chatbots made by TARS experts)
● Enterprise and Agency package: Custom price (20+ chatbots or 50,000+ chats)
None of the above options suits you?
Are you looking for an alternate chatbot software?
Open-source chatbot software might be what you are looking for!
Chatbot software open source
Whatever type of business you have, you can find a suitable option in this category. One of the best things about the items in this category is that these are very versatile and flexible, apart from having superb learning resources and collaborative frameworks for mutual benefit.
Here are some open-source chatbot platforms.
Want to make powerful AI Chatbots?
Botkit can be your guide. It comes with a horde of useful tools you can use to create your bot for integration into Slack, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, and others.
Botkit includes Botkit Web Connector, which you can use to create chatbots for apps and websites without having to worry about using third party services. Besides, you can also learn how to better your chatbot building skills from its community feature.
Pricing: Free
Rasa X has several tools that let you make chatbots or assistant bots for various channels. It is powered by Rasa’s own open-source machine learning platform.
Rasa X is one of the smartest chatbot development platforms. It is capable of understanding the human language on its own, thanks to its NLU system and machine learning.
The platform has an analytics interface through which you can detect errors, notice conversation gaps, and thus improve your bots.
But wait, Rasa X has much more!
Chatbots developed on this platform can easily be integrated on Slack, Facebook, Google home and on other platforms.
Rasa X Pricing:
Community Edition package: Free
Enterprise Edition package: Custom fee
Botpress has a refreshing interface. Botpress is user-friendly, flexible, has an easy-to-understand graphical interface, and makes bot customization a walk in the park.
And if that’s not enough, Botpress allows for the integration of several third-party APIs. This integration will enable you to publish your chatbot on multiple platforms like Skype and Facebook Messenger at the same time.
The USP of Botpress is that non-developers can manage a bot after publishing or deployment.
Thanks to its NLU engine, it can even understand the meaning behind a customer’s words.
Botpress Pricing:
Community package: Free
Pro package: from $45 per month
Custom package: Custom fee
Want an extensive database of chatbot platforms, chatbot builders and software? Yes, such a resource exists too!
Creating and integrating a chatbot can seem very daunting, but in reality, that’s not how it is.
Chatbot software makes creating bots very easy. Some even have a drag-and-drop interface. Such features save you a ton of time and effort and create for you a chatbot software your competitors may soon learn to be envious of.
You’ve already learnt about:
● chatbots in-depth
● how they work
● how to create them
● how to integrate them
Now get out there and use a chatbot software to make a bot your competitors run back to their mama!
We wish you the best in your endeavour.
