Have you ever interacted with a chatbot? Chances are that you have. Most of us have. Be it with an insurance company, ordering food, asking about a delivery, or booking a flight, the chatbot possibilities are endless. Research from Gartner shows that the proliferation of chatbots in the modern workplace will continue to get bigger by the day, with 70% of white-collar workers interacting with conversational platforms on a daily basis in 2022.

Other reports show that chatbot usage as a brand communication channel has grown by 92% since 2019, making it the fastest-growing channel. Simply put, chatboxes are ingrained in our day-to-day, but what exactly are they? A chatbot is a computer program that can converse with users in real time via the internet. Despite their limitations, chatbots have advanced at a breakneck pace, becoming more intelligent every day.

When it comes to conversational implementation, the chatbot market is dominated by three approaches: toolkits that focus on custom solutions, platform-based services, and targeted service offerings:

• The toolkit approach offers organizations the highest degree of customization, helping integrate conversational capabilities with different business applications. This approach is preferred by organizations with unique business solutions or very specific end-user or integration requirements.
• The platform-based approach gives organizations a centralized point of operations and management, offering broad coverage or use cases for chatbot, regardless of complexity. These can require a greater effort to implement if there are no prebuilt chatbots provided.
• Targeted service providers are easy to integrate and deploy as they cater to specific industry use cases of a particular domain or process requirement. For example, adding a chatbot to an existing application or addressing a specific user requirement like language support.

One thing is clear: a wide range or enterprises are employing chatbots to address many use case requirements. Nowadays, there’s a significant trend towards platform-based chatbots as they are a better fit for organizations looking to leverage prebuilt chatbots that can mainly be language-portfolio-centric, user experience-centric, or business automation-centric.

Developing chatbots in a rapidly evolving market requires the use of conversational artificial intelligence technologies. As part of this blog article, we're going to discuss the many benefits of chatbots, the various use cases they often cover, and the finest chatbot platforms out currently.

Let’s get started!

The Benefit of Chatbots: How They Transform Business

Gone are the days when chatbots felt insufficient, robotic, and downright unhelpful. Now, chatbots are trained to emulate human interaction by giving helpful information, carrying out a conversation seamlessly, and driving natural language interactions. Comm100 reports show chatbots handle 68.9% of chats from start to finish, showing how advanced they’ve become. Chatbots help users with repeatable tasks by enabling conversational interfaces via semantic and deep learning models, natural language processing, recommendation systems, prediction models, and personalization to engage people via voice or text.

More and more, we see chatbots automate business processes and workflows, where they are typically trained by example and fine-tuned with human-in-the-loop supervised learning. Recent findings show that 67% of consumers worldwide used a chatbot for customer support in the past year.

Here are some of the key capabilities you should take into consideration when selecting a chatbot solution:

• Channel integration. Functionality that will determine how the chatbot will engage with users, either via voice, text, or multi-channel in phones, browsers, email, or messaging apps. Live-agent chat services are another capability that must be considered.
• App integration. Would you like your chatbot integrated with a CRM system or a database? Most chatbots will need some degree of integration, so it’s best if you consider what knowledge sources or business applications the chatbot will play with so you understand the integration capabilities.
• Prototyping. Define a use case you want the chatbot to address and get a couple of prototypes to see what the workflow will look like and if it meets the goals you have for the bot. Determine the chatbot architecture, channel-based personalization, and sentiment analysis capabilities, to name a few.
• Natural language. You want your chatbot to look and feel as natural as possible, which is why you need to pay special attention to how incoming information is parsed and extracted, so the outputs can accurately analyze and detect sentiment.

Chatbots are charged with a wealth of benefits to organizations, which we’ll explore next, across the three different kinds of chatbots available as of now: rule-based chatbots, intellectually independent chatbots, and AI-powered chatbots.

From the consumer side, what users love most about chatbots is their ability to provide quick answers and their availability. In fact, Userlike's reports show 68% of users favor chatbots given their quick answers, listing this as the number one aspect of their positive interactions.

Rule-Based Chatbots

Rule-based chatbots are easy to interact with via the click of a button or a pre-defined set of options. Rule-based chatbots offer a limited selection of options, making the user interaction relatively slow, boxy, and sometimes even unhelpful.

Intellectually Independent Chatbots

Machine learning-based chatbots that learn based on user inputs and requests. These bots are trained to process and understand specific keywords or phrases to trigger a personalized reply. Over time, intellectually independent chatbots are capable of training themselves to understand a growing number of queries, getting more complex and human-like by the day.

AI-Powered Chatbots

Chatbots powered by AI combine machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing to not only understand but also retain the context of a discussion as well as the preferences of a given user when combining rule-based chatbots and cognitively autonomous chatbots

The Benefits of Chatbots:

• Make live communication seem seamless
• Reduce people's interactions with customers, killing customer service as we know it
• Available 24/7/365 nonstop, with no need to rest as a human does
• Make marketing more targeted and grow your business
• Make your customer’s journeys more smooth and hassle-free
• Automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks, saving you time and money
• Reduce customer stress and humanize your brand

Now, let’s break down examples of chatbots by broad use case.

Chatbot for Website: How AI-Powered Technology Can Benefit Your Business

An increasing number of organizations are embedding chatbots into their websites to meet modern business demands of chatbot for customer service. Chatbots offer robust capabilities that strengthen an organization’s website, making it a prime communication tool.

Here are the key benefits of implementing a chatbot for website in your organization:

1. Fast and multilingual support. You can design a chatbot to handle thousands of customer queries simultaneously without breaking a sweat (they’re robots, we get it, but you know what we mean). Chatbots process responses in less than a second and what’s best, they can be customized to support client questions in their local language, empowering your business to leverage new business sectors while giving your users a superior customer experience.
2. Customization. You can integrate your chatbot with a number of business processes or applications, like CRM, payments, or other software to collect data and create personalized messaging for your customers. The logical and benefit-driven responses from chatbots make the experience emulate human conversation, which in turn, puts the customer at ease.
3. Cost-effectiveness. Chatbots can reduce the number of human customer support employees who require training, compensation, infrastructure, and more. Website chatbots have low maintenance costs, helping save money from day one.
4. Interactive engagement. Say goodbye to boring processes, as chatbots can interact with customers in a variety of ways, making the experience seamless and more dynamic. For example, clients can find the answer to their question with a series of clicks instead of having to type text. It’s no wonder chatbots have a higher response rate than any other form of customer interaction.

Chatbot for Business: Being Available is Key in a Customer-Centric World

Chatbots help you engage people around the clock and improve their experience, so they are becoming something of a must-have for businesses. Here are some of the most prominent benefits of a chatbot for business:

• Availability. As stated earlier, availability is key to creating a highly engaging customer experience. You don’t want your employees to wait for the next available operator when they can get a quick, helpful answer regardless of the hour with a chatbot.
• Consistency. Chatbots help keep your answers consistent and improve brand loyalty. They can also handle massive amounts of queries, providing instant responses.
• Omni-channel. Chatbots help you provide messaging support across various channels including your organization’s website, social media channels, and more.
• Automation. Chatbots can automate repetitive tasks, making your customer’s experience more effective and targeted. For example, you can use your chatbox to help clients book their next flight without any form of human interaction.
• Chatbot for lead generation. You can use your chatbot to guide your customers through a more effective funnel and make quick, assertive decisions. You can use your chatbot to offer a questionnaire to influence visitors and boost conversion rates. For example, your chatbot can help you qualify leads more effectively by asking relevant questions or nurturing them more strategically by taking a more poignant look at their journey.
• Monitoring and reporting. Detecting patterns in consumer behavior can help you gain actionable insights into your audience. You can collect feedback, improve products, or optimize your website with simple and effective questions asked by your chatbot. Chatbots can help you create customer profiles, send push notifications, or suggest relevant content.
• Scalability. Any customer-centric organization will need to scale support to cater to the needs of the customer. Support scalability is one of the key advantages of chatbots as they help you manage client interactions during peak hours, handle massive amounts of queries simultaneously, and work nonstop.

2024's Best Platforms for Chatbots

Now that we’ve covered each of the different chatbots available and use cases, let’s address chatbot technologies and their specific advantages.

Amazon AWS Chatbot

Monitoring, managing, and troubleshooting AWS workloads via chat channels is made easier with this interactive chatbot solution, which provides pre-selected, event-driven notifications. Amazon Chatbot allows you to get notifications and conduct instructions to gather diagnostic data from AWS, as well as configure AWS resources and activate processes with only a few taps. Your team will be able to work together more effectively, stay up-to-date on incidents and security alerts, and respond more rapidly to issues and alerts with the help of the AWS Chatbot solution.

Microsoft Azure Bot Service

Comprehensive bot development environment to design and build enterprise-grade conversational AI experiences while giving clients control of their data. Users can build multilingual and multimodal bots for any chatbot usecases, including sales, customer support, and employee productivity. The Microsoft Azure Bot Service offers a visual authoring canvas with an extensive, open-source toolkit. It also packs high-quality natural language, speech and vision capabilities, connections to popular channels, and more. The Bot Framework Composer lets you use templates to extend and customize conversations with code and pre-built components.

Google DialogFlow

Google DialogFlow is called a "lifelike conversational AI solution." It comes with cutting-edge virtual agents that help businesses support rich, natural conversations with customers. It uses Google's well-known AI in a single platform for chatbots and voice bots. The solution gives clients access to multi-turn conversations with follow-up questions built with the same deep learning technologies that power Google Assistant. It has a visual builder and pre-built agents that you can easily deploy across your contact center and digital channels, such as web, mobile, and messaging services.

Chatfuel

Chatfuel is a chatbot platform that only works on Facebook Messenger. It helps users use natural language processing to understand intent and nuances so that chatbots can give smarter pre-programmed answers. One of the best things about Chatfuel is that it has a database that lets businesses get in touch with prospects whenever they want. The platform works with more than 50 languages and can work with third parties.

ManyChat

Chatbot platform that helps clients grow their brands by automating interactive conversations in Instagram Direct Messages, Facebook Messenger, and SMS. With over 1 million customers and more than 1 billion conversations powered by their bots, ManyChat knows a thing or two about helping businesses drive sales, get more leads, provide timely support, have personalized conversations, and engage prospects on the listed social media platforms in an easy, powerful, automated, scalable, and instant way.

MobileMonkey

Automation chatbot platform that automates SMS text messaging, chatbot for Instagram, Webchat, and chatbots in Facebook Messaging to get more leads, generate more sales, and improve the customer experience. MobileMonkey is mainly designed for agencies, in-house marketers, SMB owners, creators, and the like, to grow their messaging across client portfolios, maintain a full sales pipeline with 24/7 integrated chat automation, and automate 24/7 DM and Facebook Messenger interactions.

Pandorabots

AI-based chatbot development platform that offers robust, full turnkey chatbot development capabilities. Pandorabots has made a name for itself as one of the early players in the field, with one of the largest chats hosting globally. The platform does require a certain level of coding expertise to develop chatbots that are custom, but the possibilities are endless thanks to the platform’s flexibility. Many clients favor Pandorabots thanks to its completely voice-enabled capabilities, multilingual support, multichannel support, RESTful APIs, and the capability to understand context and download code.

SnatchBot

Chatbot builder is a platform that lets people make smart chatbots for messaging across multiple channels. To meet regulatory requirements, the solution has strong administrative features and enterprise-level security. Snatchbot's omnichannel platform has tools that help with the whole bot lifecycle, from development to testing to deployment, as well as hosting, tracking, and monitoring. SnatchBot has the ability to understand natural language, to learn on its own, and to recognize your voice.

SendPulse

SendPulse is a visual chatbot builder that lets you create chatbots to set up auto-replies and create chatbot for sales funnels on Instagram, chatbot for WhatsApp, Facebook, and Telegram. Clients can write and fine-tune chatbot flows for each messenger outlet and create multi-channel widgets to convert website visitors into subscribers, thus boosting conversions. SendPulse chatbots can become an effective sales channel with online payment buttons embedded into the flow, including options like PayPal, Stripe, Kassa, Fondy, and more.

Tidio

The Tidio platform brings together live chat and chatbot tools to help customers provide great customer service and make sales. Tidio is an all-in-one customer service tool with live chat, virtual AI help, omnichannel support, and more. It aims to be the go-to platform for building customer relationships. Tidio works well with tools like Shopify, Wix, WordPress, HubSpot, and more.

WotNot

Chat development platform that helps you build intelligent chatbots with a broad range of capabilities targeted to cater to your business needs. WotNot comes packed with a no-code chatbot builder where you can easily create bots in a simple drag-and-drop interface and leverage existing templates. The platform also offers a feature that allows a human agent to engage in conversation, whenever needed in what’s called the chatbot to human handover. Clients favor WotNot thanks to its support of multiple channels including website, Messenger, WhatsApp, and more, unlimited conversations and messages, and seamless integration with tools like Salesforce, WordPress, Slack, IBM Watson, and more.

Boost Your Business With AI-Powered Customer Communication

Juniper Research shows the projected value of e-commerce transactions by 2024 will be $112 billion. It’s safe to say that chatbots are here to stay.

Chatbot technologies are simple to use, and most importantly, they are effective. To choose the right solution for your organization or endeavor, you must carefully evaluate your requirements and the capabilities you want your chatbot to address. Take a comprehensive look at the workflow you want your chatbot to follow, which will help you determine your next step.

Svitla Systems is equipped with expertise, skills, and know-how about everything you need to take your next step with chatbots. Thanks to our experts in the field, different service models, and unique offerings to meet your needs, we can help you create a chatbot from scratch by selecting the right chatbot development platform or integrating a pre-built chatbot into your system to grow your business effectively, through a scalable, reliable, and customizable chatbot of your choosing.

For more information, please reach out to our Svitla Systems representatives, we’d love to help you.