There are a wide range of AI chatbot platforms available to help brands develop suitable chatbots to help them attract and retain customers. These AI chatbot platforms usually contain tools to help you develop and customize suitable chatbots for your customer base. With their ability to guide customers through the marketing funnel, keep people engaged after sales all the while adding personality to a company’s brand, AI chatbots are adding new value to brands’ content marketing. These chatbots create more personalized experiences for customers by tailoring companies’ responses and content to the customers’ queries and interests, which aids reputation management. They are also cheap and can work around the clock without requiring human intervention. According to Grand View Research the global chatbot economy will total $1.25 billion by 2025. A survey done by Oracle showed that 80% of business decision-makers said they already used chatbots or plan to use them. Chatbots.org lists more than 1,350 chatbots and virtual agents in use around the world. Many large brands have created fascinating bots that have hit it off with their customers and their target demographics. Most people already know or use chatbots in some form, such as Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant.
Best AI Chatbot Platforms In 2023:
What is an AI chatbot?
A chatbot is a computer program that imitates human conversation, either spoken, written or both. Chatbots have conversations with people online, and developers usually design chatbots in the hope that its users will not be able to tell whether they’re talking to a person or a robot. The term chatbot comes from “chatterbot,” a name coined by its inventor, Michael Mauldin, in 1994. He created the first chatbot named Julia. A chatbot (also known as a talkbot, bot, IM bot, intelligent chatbot, conversation bot, AI conversation bot, artificial conversation entity, or virtual talk chatbot) is a computer program or an artificial intelligence which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. What differentiates Artificial Intelligence chatbots from regular chatbots is that it is possible for chatbots to “learn” things about users by tracking patterns in data. Without training, these chatbots can then apply the pattern to similar problems or slightly different questions. This ability gives them the “intelligence” to perform tasks, solve problems, and manage information without human intervention. AI chatbots are very much the future of online marketing, with many businesses incorporating it in their inbound marketing strategies. Here are the 10 of the best AI chatbot platforms to build the exact right bot for your business.
How to choose among the best AI chatbot platforms?
With the rising number of AI chatbot platforms around, it can be difficult to choose the best one. Working with you all the way, EBI.AI has a team of specialists who know about conversation design, linguistics and psychology who review every conversation your AI assistant has with your customers. By doing this, they are constantly improving the performance of your AI assistant without you having to lift a finger! The engineers at EBI.AI have also been working in data engineering for more than twenty years, so there are no two pieces of tech they can’t get to talk to each other. You’ll find loads of case studies on the EBI.AI website for clients like Coop Sweden, Legal & General Insurance and Stena Line ferries as well as helpful blog posts and features by industry or use case. They even have their own AI assistant called Clawson who you can chat to on their home page. If you’re looking for a chatbot platform, EBI.AI’s really does suit everyone, whatever stage you’re at. Building chatbots using ProProfs does not require coding skills. You can easily customize your chat flow within minutes. Create chat invitation pop-ups, customize greetings, and add product tours. Use the chatbot to engage customers proactively by sending personalized greetings or tailored product announcements. ProProfs Chat also helps ensure a great customer experience by anticipating customer questions, providing quick responses, and resolving issues fast. Canned responses can be set and self-help articles incorporated into chat widgets to give customers real-time answers to their questions. Other features worth noting are ProProfs’ ease of integration with other apps and data analytics capabilities. The software can be integrated with over 50 apps and platforms so you can build your support bundle. Moreover, ProProfs gives you access to in-depth reports and analytics that help you monitor website traffic, track customer ratings, and analyze performance. These provide you with valuable insights for optimizing customer service and personalization. With all these features, ProProfs offers businesses a comprehensive customer support solution that ultimately rakes in profits. It is a worthwhile investment for businesses looking for cost-effective yet efficient solutions for marketing, sales, and customer support. The bot will use NLP to understand and recognize phrases, and will send users predefined answers. You can build a chatbot to serve as a customer service advisor, an event assistant, or a personal avatar. A useful feature is that when a person interacts with the chatbot, it adds them to your database, which allows you to reach out to them in the future. Chatfuel’s analytics technology provides insights about the performance of the bot. It has created Facebook Messenger chatbots for various big client including Adidas, TechCrunch, Lego and T-Mobile. In terms of pricing, some of Chatfuel’s features are free, but the Business Plan starts at $11.99/month to build unlimited bots and for up to 30,000 users. While MobileMonkey is easy to use for the novice, it also has features that can build sophisticated behavior. For example, it can store the user’s response to a question in a variable to be reused later in your bot’s replies. With MobileMonkey you can build chatbots for Facebook Messenger and employ various lead generation tools such as chat blasts or broadcast messages (messages sent to multiple users, whether all users or a specific segment), drip campaigns, and list building to enhance business’s marketing efforts. It also allows you to automate customer service by providing the answers to frequently asked questions and reduces the wait time. It allows for easy human intervention and lets you override your chatbot and to enter the conversation at any time. The starting plan is $59 a month. To get an estimate on MobileMonkey’s pricing, you can book an appointment or chat with the team. Aivo builds bots for organizations of all shapes and sizes. Their bots are AI-powered and allows your business to respond to customers in real-time with either text or voice, and can be set up to understand the different rules for each channel, then adapt to offer the appropriate auto-responses. It easily integrates with a number of third-party tools, including Salesforce and Zendesk. Aivo’s AgentBot pricing starts at $90 per month, which includes 1,000 monthly sessions. It also comes with a free 30-day trial. ItsAlive is a bit more tech orientated than counterparts such as MobileMonkey and Chatfuel, although it goes to a lot of effort to make sure non-tech users can also use it. Its bots work with keywords that it learns from users in order to answer their questions in future. It also makes use of recipes to automatically respond when users use specific keywords or phrases. You can add as many recipes as you want and switch them ON/OFF as you want. Big clients include Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson. Its free plan lets you send 1,000 messages per month. Its Pro Plan is $99/month and includes full analytics and KPI’s, as well as lead generation and Intercom support. The conversation navigator uses relationship memory, NLP user intents, and deep dialogue context to lead conversations. And an AI moderator helps to achieve customers’ goals. According to its website, Imperson strives to build its bots to use natural language that is tailored to each brand’s authentic voice in order to create connections with customers that translate to relationships. The platform supports an open standard scripting language called Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) and while it’s easy to use even for those who don’t have a programming background, it drives sophisticated conversations. Its bots can be built and deployed on web, mobile, home hubs, and popular messaging platforms like Twitter, Telegram, Line, and Slack. Pandorabots has a free service that allows you up to 1,000 messages/month, Developer plan, Pro plan, and custom Enterprise plan. Its Bot studio has a code editor, test chat, live debugger, and visualizer. It integrates seamlessly with third-party applications and lets you easily scale your bots to take advantage of those that are most popular. Meya has a dedicated customer support manager that you can communicate with through a private Slack channel. You can expect to receive a response within 12 hours of any query. Its cloud-based system lets you and your team work collaboratively by allowing you to connect directly to your business backend to send and receive data. You’ll also be able to gather insights into your customers and keep them engaged with your business. Meya offers a 14-day free trial. Its standard plan costs $99/month. It also provides tools to grow your Messenger audience. It lets you broadcast content to all of your subscribers at once. Broadcasts are not based on an algorithm, but go out to your subscribers, who, once they signed up, are forevee yours. You can also automate your Messenger marketing and send messages from RSS, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube based on time delays or certain user actions. Sign up for free and upgrade to a range of packages depending on how many subscribers you have. The platform introduces conversation forms which collects information from users through chatbot conversations and it offers plugins for integration of your platform with chatbot via JSON API or RSS Feed. Their customers include Apple, Shazam and Unicef. Botsify’s Do It Yourself Plan costs $49 per month. It’ll give you two chatbots, up to 5,000 unique users and unlimited messages. It also offers a free 14-day trial. Live Chat has an excellent capacity for customization, analysis, and administration functions. The program is highly recommended by companies and websites with high volumes of traffic, capable of segmenting and managing a quantity of information. You can start with the platform on your own. The platform was created with non-coders in mind. It allows you to create, update, train, and analyze the chatbots results on the go with a simple, user-friendly interface. The platform currently offers multilingual bots with native integrations with FB Messenger and website widget. You can connect other platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter, Telegram, etc. on-demand. The bot you create will live on multiple platforms with no need to duplicate it. The BotsCrew chatbot platform pricing starts at $600.00 per month, but the price can vary based on the integrations, features, and customization that you would like to have. The setup fee usually starts from $3K. The benefits of Zendesk are spectacular: advanced personalization, sales/conversion tracking, and real-time monitoring. It allows you to keep a record of all the information related to the chats from a single screen, allowing the configuration of objectives and different follow-ups. This conversational marketing platform is suitable for any business looking to grow, as it is designed to help capture leads, increase sales, and provide support. It also enables analytical reports to help you improve conversation performance and optimization. Finally, they provide GDPR-compliant services, making them an ideal option for companies in the European Union. It is recommended for medium-sized teams that need a live chat that meets the needs of their customers and allows different integrations with their tools. The most advanced plans integrate analytics and user and conversation tracking options. Pure Chat is the ideal solution for sales and marketing teams who need a dedicated live chat operator for pre-sales or support. This tool allows you to respond to chats in an estimated time of 15 seconds, offering optimal customer service. Jivo Chat offers visitors a non-invasive chat with personalized messages. In this way, if the potential client decides to start a conversation, you or your agents will receive an immediate notification on their mobile or computer to answer this question. It is very easy to use and integrates with daily tasks efficiently. Furthermore, it can be installed on an unlimited number of web pages at no extra cost. It is recommended for businesses that need a simple and inexpensive online chat solution to improve the experience with customers interacting in real-time. Companies looking for not just a live chat, but a complete package on the same platform: support assistant, lead generation tool, marketing automation, and user engagement software. It is recommended for any customer support platform based on user behavior and smart segmentation to understand and benefit from customer interaction. With its drag-and-drop interface and AI and NLP features, Landbot can automatically reply to questions with keywords that are pre-programmed into the bots’ vocabulary system. It’s a great solution for businesses looking to implement a customer service bot that can be integrated into their website, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. Landbot offers a variety of subscription plans that start at $39 per month. You can test the app for free, but if you want to use more or all of its integrations, features, and support, then choose their Starter, Pro or Business subscriptions. Dialogflow’s Google cloud extension can be purchased at $0 to try it out. It is priced monthly based on the edition and the number of requests made during that particular month. New customers receive a $300 credit for their first use with the platform, which expires 12 months from their activation date. Unlike other types of chatbot software programs on the market, Wit.ai is open source. Although it is flexible, it was built with developers in mind and those who are already familiar or comfortable working on other open-source solutions. If you’re looking to add speech recognition or voice control to your app or device, you will just need some skills in programming and an understanding of how they work if you want it done right. The best way to determine which chatbot platform is the right fit for your business is by conducting enough research on what each platform has to offer together with the kind of bot experience you want your customers to have.
Chatbots are the future of online marketing
AI chatbot platforms have become increasingly popular in recent years, and for good reason. AI chatbots can be extremely effective for your business, providing a cost-effective way to automate customer service, sales, and marketing. When you define the scope of your business, you will be able to determine which platform is the best fit for your needs. It will not only give you a better understanding of the chatbot market but also improve your chances of success. There are a few things to look for when evaluating the user experience of chatbot platforms. First, how easy is it to use? The platform should be intuitive and easy to navigate. Second, how reliable is the platform? You don’t want your chatbot going offline or losing customer data. Third, how responsive is the platform? The platform should be able to handle a high volume of requests without slowing down. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, how human-like is the platform? The best chatbot platforms are those that can provide a more natural and realistic conversation experience. That means the chatbots on the platform should be able to understand user intent and respond accordingly. After all, chatbots are meant to improve communication, not complicate it. Find a chatbot platform that offers a great user experience on the messaging channels you are using and you will be one step closer to improving your business communications. First of all, consider the conversation flow. How will users interact with the chatbot? Will they need to type out questions or can they just select from a list of options? Make sure the platform you choose supports the type of conversation flow you’re looking for. Secondly, research on the flexibility of the chatbot. Can you create multiple chatbots that you can use with your brand? Does the platform have the ability to customize the chatbot’s appearance? These features may seem simple, but having them available could make an impact on the overall experience of your customer. Moreover, research on the kind of analytics each AI chatbot application provides. What kind of reporting do they offer? Do these reports give data together with your other systems that can give you a more complete picture of your customer? In the world of technology, data is king. If an AI chatbot can provide you with additional data that can be used by your business, it’s a win. AI chatbots that cannot handle increased traffic as you accommodate more users will quickly become overloaded. This will lead to longer waiting times and even more frustrated customers. Likewise, chatbot features that are not regularly updated can quickly become outdated, leaving bots unable to provide a high level of service. The bottom line is, that you will also want a platform that offers regular updates and new features to keep your chatbot fresh and engaging. That way, you can continue to provide your customers with the best possible experience. Security should be a top priority when choosing an AI chatbot platform. Make sure to choose one that offers the following:
End-to-end encryption of all information exchanged between the customer and chatbot. This will help protect your customers’ personal information from being intercepted by third parties. User authentication system. This will ensure that only authorized users can access your customer data. Provision for detailed logs of all interactions. This will allow you to track any unauthorized access to your customer data and take appropriate action if necessary.
By taking these measures and precautions, you can ensure that your customer data is always safe and secure. Luckily, most chat software providers offer 24/7 training and customer support through a combination of live chat, phone, and email. However, some platforms also offer knowledge bases and help tools that can be extremely helpful when troubleshooting issues. Be sure to check what customer support options are available for your choice before making your final decision. You want to find a platform that has a pricing plan that fits your budget, while also providing the features and functionality that you need. Once you have made a shortlist, it could help to take some time to read the reviews before making your final decision. If you’re still not sure which chatbot platform is right for your needs, consider enlisting the help of experts and checking out user reviews. Take advantage of the available resources online, such as forums and product reviews. Alternatively, you can hire a consultant to help you choose the best platform for your specific needs. Even though there are several options available, there are a few key factors to consider that will help you make the best decision for your business. First, consider your budget. AI chatbot platforms can range in price from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars per month. Second, think about your company’s needs. What type of customer service do you need? What kind of sales and marketing automation do you require? Keep in mind that AI chatbot technology is still evolving rapidly, and we do not see it slowing down in 2023 and in the years to come. This trend is only going to continue to grow, making it as good a time as ever to start using AI chatbots for your business. With so many advantages, there’s really no reason not to give them a try.
