It’s a chatbot world and we’re just living in it — but we prefer it like that! Chatbots 101, an infographic created by Oracle.com in 2017, revealed that 65 percent of consumers prefer to contact businesses through messaging apps.
These stats are encouraging businesses of all sizes to follow customers onto messaging platforms where they can respond to requests and hold conversations together. This kind of communication has a powerful effect on company ROI, with 56 percent of businesses stating that the technology has been a positive return on investment.
Related: 4 Benefits Chatbot Technology Can Provide Your Startup
However, many businesses aren’t “on” or open 24/7, which is what 50 percent of customers expect during their interactions. The solution here is pretty simple: build a chatbot, or an automated software, that customers can communicate with. Often powered by AI, chatbots interact with customers through a chat interface like voice or text. While chatbots tend to have different functions depending on the site they are configured through, they are designed to assist you by answering questions and troubleshooting.
The same infographic even notes that chatbots have the potential to save $174 billion across industries including insurance, financial services, sales and customer service.
Ready to build a chatbot of your own, but have no idea where to start? Check out our roundup of the best platforms below.
Sponsored: Visit our Dell partner page for discounts and exclusive offers
Chatbots are meant to be practical, and the team at DigitalGenius works to combine AI with deep learning. This means customer service transcripts are converted into word vectors where meaning and context are extracted using statistical operations in order to predict the answers. With additional services that include automating responses and routing cases, this platform is designed to better empower your startup’s customer service.
Smart chatbots are made simple with FlowXO, which specializes in creating several chatbots once for platforms like Facebook Messager, Slack and SMS. Conversations come alive when chatbots are able to send over text, images and links along with push messages at the right time to keep them informed. Best of all, there are no new tools to learn — you can plug your chatbot into your help desk software or email and start talking.
Sign Up: Receive the StartupNation newsletter!
The world’s leading chatbot platform does it all. From advertising to toys and games and domain expertise, this free web service builds and deploys chatbots for businesses in every industry. You can program your bots to evolve along with the customer and remember important details. You can also deploy the bot in apps that use the Pandorabots API. Beyond customizing your chatbot, the staff at Pandorabots will also help train your in-house team to maintain your chatbot, help debug or refine your AIML and select a plan that suits your bot hosting needs.
Technically, bots aren’t meant to be “dumb,” but every now and then you encounter a few that truly don’t understand you. Enter Recast.AI, a platform that creates bots that truly understand humans and put developers first by building their chatbots in minutes. The service includes a Bot Builder to create a flow of conversation and manage dialogue, a Bot Connector for reaching out on messaging apps like kik and Slack, an analytics dashboard to review your numbers, free hosting and much more.
