Emerging TechnologyChatbotsTop seven chatbot platforms and tools available

Top seven chatbot platforms and tools available

Only 38% of consumers want human interaction when engaging with a brand. We analyzed the top chatbot platforms to help you make an informed decision.

30-Second Summary:

    • By 2020, a Walker study stated that customer experience will overtake price and product as the major differentiating factor.
    • Only 38% of consumers want to interact with a human when engaging with a brand.
    • Areas where chatbots can be used – Sales inquiries, pre-sales support, post-sales support, self-service knowledge, customer support, self-help/self-service, shopping assistance, training and education, and lots more on a 24/7 basis.
    • The seven chatbot platforms and tools mentioned:

What do customers expect when communicating with a brand? Speed, convenience, easy answers to their problems — seems simple right? In an ideal world, yes. But we all know it’s not as simple as a show of jazz hands. A Walker study stated that customer experience will overtake price and product as the major differentiating factor by the end of 2020. To top it all off, consumers will expect all this without having much to do with human interactions. In fact, a research study by SurveyMonkey and Drift showed that only 38% of consumers want to interact with a human when engaging with a brand.

Businesses will continue to be under immense pressure to live up to consumers’ expectations and flawlessly deliver exceptional customer experiences. This is where chatbots will help businesses break through to their target audience and cater to customers for sales inquiries, pre-sales support, post-sales support, self-service knowledge, customer support, self-help/self-service, shopping assistance, training and education, and lots more on a 24/7 basis.

We’ve analyzed and curated a list of the top seven chatbot platforms to help you make an informed business investment:

1. Reply.ai

Reply.ai is an end-to-end chatbot platform focused on customer support. Its AI-powered chatbot understands natural language and helps serve precise answers to customer queries, deliver 24/7 customer support, easily scale your support team efficiently, and improve your customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.

It even lets you easily transition between chatbots and agents. The Reply.ai chat tool helps ensure your customers get instant and personalized service.

Using Replyai chatbot for email ticketing order tracking and more

Product USP

  • You can build the chatbot once and deploy it multiple times across several channels.
  • You can build your chatbot on Reply.ai to cater to post-sales queries, help customers track their orders, and more.

Integrations

It integrates with your already existing platforms for email, ticketing, CRM, CMS, payments, and more. It also provides one-click integration with FAQ pages and customer service software. Reply.ai’s chatbot tool can be used across Facebook, websites, and Skype.

Does it require coding?

No. Just two simple lines of code and you’re good to go.

Customization

  • Reply.ai provides customizable templates.
  • It lets local teams customize bots to local markets. And you can easily clone and deploy the bot in over 50 languages.

Ease of use

Drag-and-drop, code-free interface.

Security

It has enterprise-grade security which is compliant with the GDPR privacy shield framework with a 99.95% service-level agreement (SLA) uptime.

Reporting

Reports with actionable insights enable you to make data-backed business decisions and work on your conversational strategy growth. The tool easily provides summaries of messages sent and received, active users, and even a user persona.

Top seven chatbot platforms and tools available Reply.ai user personaPlus, it gives custom KPI-driven goal tracking.

Customers

Coca-Cola, Samsung, Starbucks, VAIO, Nike, and HP, among others.

Pricing

First 500 deflections are free. You would need to request for a quote.

2. Botsify

Botsify is an AI-driven chatbot builder that helps businesses deliver faster customer service and reduce churn. It also boldly states to increase sales by 30% and reduce costs by 80%. Botsify, with its chatbot builder service, promises to reduce business cost increases from outsourced services and internal workforce, as well as to generate leads from different sources. It’s an easy to use, intuitive chat tool that facilitates the chatbot-to-human transition during conversations.

Top seven chatbot platforms and tools available Botsify stat

Product USP

  • Supports multiple languages
  • Its Alexa integration lets you create your own voice bot
  • Allows you to acquire leads from comments on Facebook

Integrations

Slack, Google Sheets, RSS feed, JSON API, Shopify, website, forms, Alexa, WP, Zapier, and more.

Does it require coding?

No.

Ease of use

Simple drag and drop interface make it easy to set up, use, and edit.

Security

Botsify’s chatbot tool is GDPR compliant.

Reporting

In addition to the regular set of reports that Botsify provides, its “Tree View” gives you a bird’s eye view as well as a granular view of your customer conversations.

Top seven chatbot platforms and tools available Botsify tree view

Customers

Shazam, Autobahn, and more.

Pricing

Provides a Free 14-day trial (CC Required) Or 10$ a month

30,000 users for $50 a month.

Case study

How Botsify helped a real estate business generate leads worth $500k

3. Aivo 

Aivo is an omni-channel customer service solutions provider. It has a suite of AI-powered products namely, AgentBot, Live, and more. Of these, AgentBot is the chatbot builder which tackles customer interactions in the form of customer support. It also delivers on the sales front with lead generation, qualification, and conversion. Aivo states that they’ve helped customers save on total costs of $22M.

Aivo’s chatbot comes packed with loads of features in the hood. Of them, the “Decision tree” tracks conversations and helps sales executives know how they want to handle their existing and potential customers. Plus, it’s capable of providing “complements”, detecting human intent, and responding in human-like dialog with empathy. Live transfer from chatbot to human for better assistance and customer query handling, ensuring that your costumers are comfortable and are responded to in normal human language.

Its integration with web services, CRM, and other apps ensures that customer queries regarding bill balances, order-tracking, cancellations, and more are promptly answered with accuracy.

Product USP

  • Context and intention identification with the capability to craft empathetic responses.
  • Suggests actionables for assisted navigation, carousels, faqs, images, videos, and more.
  • Provides “dialog flows” to assist customers in order to direct them towards your respective product/service depending on their requirement/search query.
  • AI power helps anticipate customer needs.

How the Aivo chatbot uses AI to respond empathetically

Integrations

  • Seamlessly connects with Zendesk, Salesforce, Zapier, Genesys, and more.
  • Its CRM integration allows customers to be directed to the correct department.
  • FB messenger, WhatsApp, webchat, SMS, RCS, and phone calls.

Reporting

A wide range of quantitative and qualitative real-time analytics – Aivo shows interactions, answers, conversations, average time, users (unique or recurring), week-wise reviews, interaction quality charts, and more.

Customers

GM, VISA, LG, SONY, and more.

Pricing

Free 14-day trial. You can request a quote for the pricing.

Case studies

  • AgentBot helped Movistar reduce customer service costs in digital channels by +30%.
  • Aivo gave their client Movistar +2.5M conversions, 80% retention, and a support time average of 1:20′.

4. Flow Xo

Flow XO is a chatbot building platform that requires no coding skills. It helps you build chatbots that engage customers across different sites, applications, and social media platforms. Even though it helps automate customer support it also allows human execs to step in, if and when needed. What first grabs your attention is their emphasis on excelling in terms of customer-pleasing with nuances like rolling out a virtual welcome mat to arriving customers, serve up funny tips, and more.

Flow XO has two products – Flow XO for Chat which is a feature-rich chatbot builder and Flow XO for Workflow which is created using powerful workflows that can be customized as per your business model and process.

Top seven chatbot platforms and tools FlowXo

Product USP

  • Omnichannel chats that seamlessly sync for users
  • Lets you pre-filter leads
  • Gather customer information by asking a few simple questions
  • Accept payments
  • Set triggers for multiple actions (Flow XO for workflow). In simple words, based on the keyword the chatbot will serve up an image, file, answer, or payment links.

Integrations

Allows you to connect with 100 cloud-based apps – GitHub, Freshdesk, Google suite, Insightly, Jira, LinkedIn, MailChimp, Salesforce, Office 365, and many more.

Does it require coding?

No.

Customization

The flow of the chatbot can be tailored based on your specific business’ process and flows.

Ease of use

Drag and drop editor allows you to create your workflow and connect to platforms of your choice

Pricing

  • Has a free version which allows upto 500 interactions and lets you build five chatbots.
  • Paid plans start at 19$ a month.

 

5. TARS

TARS isn’t just a simply put chatbot builder platform, it’s one of the few that emphasizes on the ROI front by delivering 2x conversion rates with conversational landing pages. The first thing that grabbed our attention are these 16 industry-wise chatbot templates and a total of nine-plus use-case templates. Plus, you can also select templates by use-case, for example – lead generation, customer support, education and training, order and transactions, and a lot more.

Top seven chatbot platforms and tools available TARS

Product USP

  • Supports multiple languages like German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Thai, and more.
  • Tracks people who click on your Google ads and converts them into leads.
  • Lead qualification through simple conversations.
  • The chat window serves as a post-click landing page as seen in the image above.

Integrations

Integrates with your desired CRM and marketing apps.

Does it require coding?

No.

Customization

Let’s you customize as per your business processes.

Ease of use

Easy to use edit and customize.

Security

  • Runs on one of the world’s safest cloud computing environments, Amazon Web Services (AWS).
  • 128-bit SSL encryption.
  • Daily data backups.

Reporting

Provides conversion analytics which indicates how many people visited the chatbot window, how many became leads, and other such relevant information.

Pricing

  • Free 14-day trials.
  • Monthly plans start at $99 and $499.
  • In case of customizations, you can get a quote.

6. Chatfuel

Chatfuel is undoubtedly one of the world’s leading chatbot platforms. As stated by Chatfuel themselves, 46% of all Facebook Messenger bots run on its chat tool. With Chatfuel, you can build a chatbot for either of these business verticals – customer support, shopping assistance, and more.

Top seven chatbot platforms and tools available Chatfuel

Product USP

  • AI allows you to set rules to recognize particular topics.
  • Easy chat handover from bot to human.
  • Multi-lingual.

Integrations

Zapier, WordPress, Shopify, and more.

Does it require coding?

No need for coding knowledge or development skills.

Ease of use

Pre-built flows let you build bots faster. Could be complicated, but their team and knowledge base could help you build and set up your chatbot.

Reporting

Reports that easily let you analyze and derive insights about total users, conversion rates, user engagement, broadcast user engagement.

You can also get use-case metrics like direct sales numbers, sources of traffic, and more.

Customers

Adidas, TechCrunch, T–Mobile, LEGO, and more.

Pricing

  • Provides a free account.
  • Paid accounts start from $15 a month (Pro).
  • Premium $199 a month.

Case studies

  1. Chatfuel gave Lego 3.4X increase in ad spend returns and a 71% reduction in cost per conversion.
  2. Chatfuel helped a university generate $3.1 million with a one-day campaign.

7. BotKit

Geek alert!

BotKit is an open-source chatbot developer tool that also provides custom integrations for major messaging platforms. BotKit has a Slack network/community, also known as a #botkit channel where you can collaborate with nearly 10,000 developers. BotKit’s chatbot builder is part of the Microsoft Bot framework.

You can build conversational interfaces with Botkit’s opensource GitHub programming library, that comes with a suite of supporting tools and plugins to provide bot builders with a platform-independent, language-like interface for building a chatbot.

They also have an easily accessible knowledge base here.

BotKit

Product USP

  • Open-source libraries.
  • Built-in stats and metrics.
  • Storage middleware can be used for storing attributes about a user or channel or a team. It’s compatible with most of the major storage methods.

Integrations

  • Facebook, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Twilio, and more.
  • The possibilities for integrations are limitless.

Does it require coding?

Yes.

Customization

You can do wonders if you’re code literate!

Ease of use

Not exactly the easiest for laymen who don’t know programming. You could reach out to their team or the Slack network for help.

Pricing

You can start with a free plan and then unlock all its features by upgrading to the following:

Developer – $5/month (3 bots, 100 active users)

Professional – $20/month (unlimited bots, 2500 active users)

Business – $99/month (unlimited bots, 10000 active users)

Closing note

In simple words, chatbots are an investment that eventually pay for themselves. And it’s essential to remember that chatbots and chat tools aren’t here to replace humans, they’re here to enable us.

Feel free to leave your queries in the comments section.

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