The robot takeover is coming. Maybe not like Terminator or The Matrix level, but more like a business takeover with the help of chatbot tools.
Chatbot tools are increasingly popular customer service tools because of the reduced wait time for customers. Nothing is worse than logging on to a company’s website to ask a simple question, only to be hit with a long wait time.
Chatbot tools change all that. Surprisingly, according to Outgrow, 74% of customers would prefer interacting with a chatbot to a human agent when asking simple questions.
It’s safe to say companies are reaping the benefits of advanced automation and improved customer experience. In this post, let‘s break down what a chatbot is and why they’ve become so popular in customer service. Then, let's look at the most powerful chatbots to watch out for in the next few years.
What is a chatbot tool?
A chatbot is a form of artificial intelligence that simulates human conversation through a live chat interface. It's programmed with pre-written responses that are displayed based on the customer's previous message.
Chatbots analyze the user's text for keywords and phrases related to common customer roadblocks. Then, the bot provides self-service solutions based on the information it receives.
And that's just the baseline for what this technology can achieve. Some chatbots are incredibly complex and nearly impossible to distinguish from actual humans.
AI and Chatbots
With new AI technology on the market, chatbots are becoming more intelligent. Companies that have already implemented AI chatbots have seen an increase in customer satisfaction by 80% — talk about an improvement!
Generative AI, the kind of artificial intelligence that uses machine learning to make predictions based on text input, powers these chatbot tools. They anticipate customer needs, connect them with resources, and even take credit card payments.
Instead of canned responses that are sometimes unhelpful, your customers or employees are more likely to receive the information and help they are looking for when they interact with a chatbot.
AI chatbots use natural language processing and machine learning to generate responses and suggestions. 43% of respondents to our State of AI Survey feel chatbots like ChatGPT are more effective at answering questions than search engines like Google. This kind of technology only gets smarter with each interaction, too.
After you train the chatbot tool with your company’s data, it will continuously update its processes and responses as more and more customers interact with it, improving its accuracy and helpfulness.
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Benefits of Adopting a Chatbot
1. Reduced Case Volume
Chatbots can significantly reduce case volume for customer service reps. In fact, 78% of employees say automation helps them be more efficient in their roles. Since bots are a self-service tool, customers don't have to connect with one of your human reps to get answers.
If their problem is simple or common, the chatbot can link them to your knowledge base or FAQ pages for the solution. This frees up your agents to focus on more complex and time-consuming cases.
2. Seamless Integrations
If a customer‘s problem is complicated and requires live assistance. This seamless integration creates a better customer experience because the customer doesn’t have to rewrite their problem. Instead, the rep can read the previous thread and pick up the case where the bot left off.
Chatbots can also be integrated with your CRM to personalize customer interactions. It can research each customer's experience with your brand and reference relevant information when necessary. This is incredibly important because most consumers expect your reps to know their contact information before an interaction begins.
Unlike humans, bots can look up this data immediately and know where to find the information they want.
3. Task Automation
If one of your service reps isn’t available for transfer, chatbots can also perform follow-up functions. They can schedule meetings with customers and assign your reps cases that need to be completed.
Some bots can even send follow-up emails to customers after they solve their cases. Task automation like this creates a more consistent customer experience and helps your team keep track of unfulfilled customer needs.
Now that you understand the impressive power that chatbots wield, let's look at some of the most robust options available for your team this year.
Best Chatbots of the 2024
1. HubSpot Chatbot Builder
You’ve heard of HubSpot, but what about HubBot? Jokes aside, HubSpot has a free chatbot tool and free live chat software. This chatbot can book meetings for your reps and link to self-service support articles. It is integrated with a complete ticketing system.
Additionally, HubBot is connected to the tools in HubSpot's Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs. You can save chats onto contact records in your HubSpot CRM and trigger workflows based on a conversation's outcome.
Price: Free
Get started with our free chatbot builder.
2. Zowie
Zowie is a chatbot that can give customers instant answers to questions in over 40 languages. Its no-code builder makes it easy to set up and integrate with many different software like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Shopify.
The cool thing about Zowie is that it learns from each customer interaction. It provides custom recommendations on improving existing automation and even suggests new questions to add. All of this helps personalize the chat experiences by offering solutions to customers that are unique to your site.
Price: Variable
3. Genesys DX
Genesys DX, formerly Bold 360 AI, uses natural language processing to assist you in creating a help center for your customers. Genesys DX’s AI chatbot can help save your reps precious time by taking over simple client requests.
If a client request exceeds what the chatbot can do, it saves a copy of all customer interactions, making it easy for reps to seamlessly transition to assist the customer.
Not sure you have enough information to help Genesys DX create a helpdesk bot? Not a problem! You can use your data, and Genesys DX will predict the rest.
Price: Variable
4. Botsonic
Botsonic is a no-code AI chatbot builder that allows businesses to train their own ChatGPT-driven AI chatbot on their data. Companies across industries can now build hyper-intelligent, conversational AI experiences for their website visitors in minutes.
Botsonic offers two ways to feed your data – upload your help docs or copy-paste your website links to create a personalized ChatGPT chatbot for your business.
Price: Freemium
5.Giosg
Giosg makes it easier than ever to provide faster and better service and save time for customer service agents. With Giosg’s no-code chatbot, you can start conversations, ask questions, recommend products, and capture high-quality leads around the clock before connecting them with the right sales agents and teams.
With the 20+ ready-to-use customizable templates and wide integration capabilities, you can launch chatbots on your website in minutes.
Price: Custom
6.Chatfuel
Chatfuel is a popular Facebook Messenger bot that can be installed for free on your company‘s Facebook account. What’s great about Chatfuel is that you don't need any prior experience with bots to create one.
Chatfuel's bot-building interface has simple, straightforward instructions that guide you through each step of the logic development process. Once completed, the bot is easily activated and starts working for your account immediately.
Price: Free
7. Xenioo
Xenioo is a chatbot-building platform that lets you build a bot for almost every type of live chat interface. It has building tools for web page chat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and more.
It even has options for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. This way, you can maintain an omni-channel experience with every bot you create.
Price: Free
8. Botsify
Botsify‘s chatbot is designed to give your reps complete control over every customer interaction. If the bot is failing to answer a customer’s question, your reps can intervene immediately to resolve the situation.
Your team also has the power to deploy feedback surveys during the conversation to measure how well the chatbot is performing. With this feature, your team can ensure the bot is optimizing customer experience and make changes to the bot if it's creating roadblocks.
Price: Varies
9. Ada
Ada offers a chatbot equipped with advanced analytics that breaks down the bot’s performance over time. This data includes average handling time, abandon rate, and multiple customer satisfaction metrics. This information will help your team tweak the bot‘s logic over time and optimize your customers’ live chat experience.
Price: Variable
10. It's Alive
Aside from its ominous name, It's Alive has a helpful chatbot with some unique features that are different from other options on this list. For example, this chatbot has a “broadcast” feature that sends automated messages to customers after a live chat interaction. Users can subscribe to the chatbot to receive follow-up on a case and get updates about new products and services.
Price: Varies depending based on the plan
11.Botkit
Botkit is an advanced chatbot builder that allows you to fully customize every aspect of your chatbot. That's because Botkit provides a baseline code you can install into a node or Javascript coding environment.
Once there, your engineers can follow Botkit's coding instructions to design every facet of the bot. While this tool is the most complex, it allows for more customization options than all other options on this list.
Price: Free
12. Mindsay
Mindsay is an easy-to-use, low-code conversational AI platform that lets anyone build a bot. You can easily and quickly improve your customer service quality and team productivity.
The company has expertise working with leading brands across industries that have allowed the company to tailor conversational AI to any business needs. With this customized customer service automation platform, you can have a chatbot ready to go (regardless of technical skills) quickly.
Price: Variable
13. Chatbase
Chatbase, a chatbot tool, enables ChatGPT to train with your data to create a chatbot for your website. Since this chatbot tool interacts with your company’s data, its responses are relevant to just your business.
You won’t have to worry about this bot giving your customers wonky answers to their questions. Chatbase can be integrated into nearly any website using an API key.
Price: Varies
14. Yuma AI
What happens when Yuma and GPT-4 meet? The AI Ticket Assistant is born. Yuma’s AI Ticket Assistant empowers your sales reps to spend time working on things that matter. This chatbot tool learns from reps’ input and can predict responses and needed actions, leaving your agents free to take care of your clients’ more pressing matters.
Yuma’s AI Ticket Assistant integrates with Zendesk, Shopify, and Gorgias.
Price: Varies
14. ChatBot
ChatBot stands out as a user-friendly yet powerful platform designed for businesses aiming to enhance customer service with AI-driven chatbots. With its intuitive interface, users can create highly responsive chatbots that engage customers on websites, social media, and messaging apps.
The tool offers advanced natural language processing, ensuring the bots can smoothly manage complex inquiries. It also provides robust analytics, enabling continuous improvement of chatbot interactions. The platform integrates seamlessly with various tools, making it a versatile solution for businesses of any size.
Price: Varies
15. Fini
What do Jaguar, Duolingo, and ICICI Bank have in common? They use Fini as their AI-powered chatbot tool. With Fini, turning your knowledge base into an AI chatbot takes two minutes. Fini does not require any coding. Instead, just feed Fini a link to your knowledge base, and you’ll instantly have an AI assistant.
Fini doesn’t just stay on your website. It can be integrated into various platforms, including Intercom, Discord, and Slack.
Price: Varies
16. Octane AI
Want to make your chatbot tool a fun experience for your Shopify customers? Enter Octane AI. Octane AI is a chatbot, but instead of engaging in conversation, it uses a Product Recommendation Quiz to help suggest your product offerings to your customers.
Octane AI is no-code, meaning it’s less stressful for you, especially if developing and coding isn’t your thing. This AI tool studies your customers’ activity, browsing behaviors, and purchases to suggest products and services your customers will like. Octane AI easily integrates with Shopify, Klavyio, and more.
Price: Varies
17. ManyChat
Do you use Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger as part of your company’s interactions with customers? If so, consider using ManyChat for your AI chatbot tool. This chatbot easily integrates with various apps and can answer customers’ direct messages, deliver customer support, and generate leads.
Unlike a natural language processing chatbot, ManyChat is a rule-based bot, meaning it uses simple data science techniques to determine what actions to take to guide customers in the sales or help process.
Price: Varies
18. Engati
If your business uses multiple platforms to interact with customers, you need a chatbot that integrates with all of them. Engati does just that and quickly becomes an assistant for WhatsApp, Shopify, Instagram, and more.
Engati is a Gen-AI chatbot tool powered by eSenseGPT that uses machine learning to predict customer needs. With some training, Engati can help generate leads, close sales, and answer customer queries.
Plus, if your business operates internationally, Engati offers over 50 languages, meaning all your customers will be supported.
Price: Varies
19. Tidio
Tidio uses natural language processing to help shape your customers’ experience. This chatbot tool is live support for your customers and can solve nearly 70% of customer issues. Sales reps can quickly take over the conversation, too, if it looks like your customers have a problem Tidio can’t solve.
Tidio features 35 pre-made templates to get started, making this bot a breeze. Plus, it can integrate with various work tools, like MailChimp, WordPress, and HubSpot, so you never have to worry about missing customer interactions.
Price: Varies
20. Ingest AI
ChatGPT isn’t the only generative AI on the market. So, when creating an AI-powered chatbot, it makes sense to incorporate multiple sources to get the best responses.
Ingest AI works with various AI models, including ChatGPT, GTP-4, Dall-E, Google Bard, and more. The best part about this chatbot? It’s not just an assistant for your customers. You can use it to create an assistant for your employees, too.
With some training from you to get the proper responses, integrate Ingest AI into any platform, like Reddit, Pinterest, or LinkedIn. All you need is an API key, and you’re good to go!
Price: Varies
21. Pandorabots
If you want to flex your coding skills and create a custom chatbot tool for your business, Pandorabots is the way to go. (Even if you don’t want to code, there are other options!)
Pandorabots is powered by artificial intelligence markup language (AIML). AIML is like natural language processing but follows a list of predefined rules.
This is good news for business owners because Pandorabots features a list of the top 10,000 chit-chat inputs, meaning you can skip the small talk and train your chatbot for the nitty-gritty of your operations. You can integrate this chatbot with all your messaging apps.
Price: Varies
22. Aivo
Aivo is all about the customer experience. This tool meshes ChatGPT, AgentBot Conversational Engine, and Aivo Studio to create the Aivo chatbot used by brands like Sony, Visa, and Volkswagen.
Aivo, a low-code chatbot, gives your customers instant responses and answers to their queries. Aivo is a Meta Business partner, so you can use Aivo as an assistant on your website or put it to work answering customers' direct messages through WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram.
The best part? Aivo offers AI-backed solutions, including voice and campaign creator tools.
Price: Varies
23. Inbenta
Inbenta is a three-in-one chatbot. Use Inbenta to help solve customers’ queries, incorporate a smarter, user-friendly search bar, and upgrade your knowledge management system.
Inbenta’s accuracy rate to responses is good, like 95% kind of good. But with each customer interaction, Inbenta learns and continues to improve, making your customers’ experience that much better. Inbenta is also multi-lingual and available in 35 languages.
Price: Varies
24. Drift
If your main focus is converting leads and providing a customer experience like no other, consider Drift. Drift uses a patented conversational AI and open GPT sources to offer a chatbot tool that responds to customer input in the most natural way possible. Drift has been trained on thousands of marketing conversations and interactions, plus it can quickly learn your brand’s voice so it can respond to your clients in the exact tone you would.
Drift can easily integrate into your CRM, making it the perfect companion to assist your customers through every point in the sales journey.
25. Flow OX
Spend less time coding and more time helping your customers with other matters with Flow OX. Flow OX is a no-code chatbot fueled by ChatGPT. With a little building, training, and integration, this chatbot tool can provide live support, accept credit card payments, and filter new leads.
Flow OX works across various channels, including SMS, Telegram, Slack, and Facebook Messenger.
Price: Varies
26. Amplify.ai
Facebook is a great place to source leads, but keeping up with and responding to comments can be tough. That’s where Amplify.AI comes in. This AI chatbot tool is the solution to your Facebook comment conundrum.
Amplify.ai analyzes Facebook (and Instagram!) comments and can flag comments, like customer complaints, for your team to act upon, like positive comments, hide problematic comments, and more. With this AI chatbot tool, your team can spend more time doing meaningful customer outreach, instead of monitoring your company’s social media posts.
Amplify.ai also offers a chatbot tool for your Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and SMS inbox.
Price: Varies
27. Dialogflow
If you’re a fan of Google Suite, consider adding Dialogflow to your toolbox. Dialogflow is powered by generative artificial intelligence, which constantly improves based on your customers’ text input. Connect Dialogflow to your webpage to set up a chatbot or a voicebot to assist your customers.
Dialogflow is not exactly user-friendly and requires coding know-how. Or, you can integrate it with other chatbox and IoT services, such as Genesys, Cisco, and Avaya.
Price: Varies
28. Imperson
If you want to convert visitors to your website or social media pages into paying customers, consider using Imperson.
Imperson is a complete offering chatbot tool, meaning you can use this chatbot for voice calls, social media messages, and as an assistant on your website. Imperson uses state-of-the-art natural language processing capabilities to deliver real-time responses to your customers. It also factors customer goals, user profiles, conversation history, and past purchases to make more intelligent conversations with your clients.
Price: Varies
29. Wit.ai
Wit.ai is a comprehensive artificial intelligence option. Although Wit.ai can function as more than a chatbot (think smart home services and wearable devices), we’ll focus on its chatbot functionality for this post.
Wit.ai uses natural language to turn customers’ input into a command, whether by voice or text, into a command. Once your chatbot has been built, you can integrate it into your Meta account to act as a virtual assistant for your direct message. Or, add it to your website.
Wit.ai is not a no-code chatbot. If you’re a developer who likes dabbling with code and building bots from scratch, this chatbot tool is for you.
Price: Varies depending based on the plan
30. TARS
TARS is a conversational AI chatbot designed to enhance interactions between businesses and their customers. Not only can this bot support your customers in various ways, but it can also be an assistant for your employees.
Use the TARS platform to build your chatbot tool or any of their 1,380 templates to get a headstart. Need help to finetune your bot? TARS offers webinars, guides, and personal support to get you up and running in no time.
Chatbots will never replace the human experience that reps create, but they can be powerful allies to your customer service team. So, as your business adopts its first chatbot, remember the age-old lesson from Spiderman, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” But, if your bot starts questioning orders and saying it's for your safety, please unplug it immediately.
Editor's note: This article was originally published June 2019 and has since been updated for comprehensiveness.
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