Best Chatbots
Based on In-Depth Reviews

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) CAPABILITIES

There are two key questions to ask your chatbot provider related to AI capabilities: 1) How quickly can a chatbot “learn”? Most chatbot providers have very similar learning capabilities. The secret is the data that’s fed into the AI brain, which is why access to consumer interaction transcripts will speed the learning process and ultimately result in a smarter chatbot. 2) How well can a chatbot “understand”? This refers to a provider's natural language processing (NLP) capability, which is the ability of a chatbot to map consumer inquiries in raw form to specific intents. Providers have varying degrees of NLP sophistication which is an important capability to take under consideration during the selection process.

ADMINISTRATIVE PLATFORM

Every chatbot needs a platform for hosting, monitoring, routing, and managing interactions. A platform is critical to understanding how a chatbot is performing so that it can be optimized for a higher containment rate — meaning it’s able to successfully resolve a consumer’s inquiry. A platform should also have the capability to transition the interaction to a human agent if the bot can’t address the inquiry.

CONSUMER EXPERIENCE

Channels available for bot-to-consumer communication are an important aspect of the overall solution. Consumers want to communicate with businesses in their channel of choice, whether it’s website chat, text messaging, Facebook Messenger, or chat directly within a brand’s mobile app, etc. It’s important to understand the various channels your consumers are using to interact with your brand and to select a chatbot provider that can support all or most of these communication channels.

EXPERTISE

Chatbots can play a critical role in every business as they are used to address consumer inquiries and communicate with consumers — typically for sales or customer service. Key metrics including customer satisfaction, retention, sales conversions, average order value, etc. can all be greatly impacted by a chabot. It’s critically important that a chatbot provider has a proven track record of successfully building, deploying and optimizing chatbots for a variety of different use cases.

PRICING

Chatbot pricing varies and depends on the scope of the overarching solution needed to address business requirements. One-time upfront fees are charged to develop and implement chatbots — these can vary greatly depending on the complexity of use cases. Ongoing usage fees are based on either volume of API calls or interactions, and in some cases a monthly licensing fee. Recurring monthly or annual optimization service fees are typically optional, but highly recommended, as most chatbots need human intervention so they can continue to learn and contain a higher percentage of consumers interactions.