How to Choose the Best AI Chatbot App to Boost Your Small Business

What Does an AI-Based Chatbot Have to Do with Business Growth?

According to the small business portal SmallBizGenius, by the end of 2022, around 80% of companies, big and small, were using chatbots. Marriott International, Babylon Healthcare, Lego, Spotify, Whole Foods, and thousand of small businesses across the world are taking advantage of an AI chatbot.

Think of chatbots this way: 25 years ago email and smartphones were groundbreaking technologies. Today it's hard to find a company that doesn't have email or an employee without a smartphone.

Today, a lot of businesses have chatbots, but it's not like everyone is using them. But the trend is there. In some 5-10 years you would be considered old-fashioned if your business doesn't have a chatbot. So why wait?

An AI chatbot can help you boost sales. Run your business smoother. Make employees more productive. How?

A Chatbot Has an Authentic Dialogue with Customers

Modern chatbots based on AI are designed to have a human-like dialogue. It doesn't mean that they are trying to pass for a human, but rather they want humans to feel comfortable using it.

Different chatbot apps have a different level of authenticity. If you are a large enterprise possessing the time and resources to code your custom chatbot from scratch, the chatbot app might come out very advanced and intelligent. But if you are a small local business, you don't have this time or resources. Luckily, there are no-code apps that help you launch a chatbot in no time.

A Chatbot is Available 24/7

Imagine your best salesperson could work all around the clock. That's what a chatbot can do. When well-designed and well-thought-out, chatbots can work just as efficiently as your employees.

It doesn't mean, though, that chatbots are going to leave all the salespeople unemployed. Instead, people could focus on more complicated, more creative tasks. According to SalesForce, 64% of sales agents using chatbots have enough time to solve more difficult and complex issues.

A Chatbot Replies Instantly

Everyone loves quick service. As stated in Statista in 2017, 34% of customers preferred to communicate with AI during online shipping. Chatbots can instantly answer simple questions, collect information, or direct a customer to a useful source. You don't have to do anything!

A Chatbot Saves Your Operational Costs by about 30%

A chatbot allows you to save costs connected to interactions with customers by simply cutting the number of customer support staff members. Investing in a chatbot app once, it will be able to handle all customer support requests. You will need a couple of employees to handle complex and more personal tasks. With chatbot apps, you will be more efficient at a smaller cost.

How to Choose the Top Chatbot Platform with AI for Your Business?

There are two types of chatbots: AI-driven and rule-based. The former is more complicated to set up, more expensive and offers more benefits. If you want to know more about the difference between the rule-based chatbot and the AI-driven chatbot, check out this post. These benefits aren't necessary for all businesses, but if you'd like to take advantage of them, here are a couple of tips on choosing a good AI chatbot app.

What will be the purpose of your chatbot?

Different artificial intelligence chatbot apps offer lots of various features. To pick the wheat from the chaff and decide what features you need, define the purpose of the chatbot. Do you need an assistant for the customer support agent? Or maybe the chatbot will interact independently with customers? Will your chatbot be supposed to just welcome the visitor and provide basic information like working hours? Or do you want the chatbot to gather visitors' information and resolve customer queries?

What integrations will you need?

You'll need to make sure your chatbot based on AI is able to integrate with all the apps your business needs to operate. For example, an e-commerce chatbot should be able to check the availability of the product via the company's inventory system as well as to look up previous order information in the company's CRM.

What pricing model will the AI bot have?

AI bot apps offer price models based on different principles. In fact, not all AI bots offer a straightforward price tag. For example, some chatbot applications may charge a recurring license fee, while others charge based on the number of chatbots, users, or chatbot interactions. Some chatbots charge for extra features like chat routing or form integration. When choosing an AI bot for your business, make sure that the pricing model aligns with your budget and your needs.

Will the chatbot offer personalization?

Almost all AI bot apps offer personalization to some extent. However, the level and the ease of personalizing chatbots may vary significantly. Make sure the degree of personalization matches your business needs.

What kind of analytics tools will the AI bot offer?

When using a no-code app to build chatbots, you expect that the chatbot will collect information about users, such as the number of engagements, the speed of resolution, and more. Collecting the right information will help you make improvements to your chatbot and make it more successful. Within the app, you want as much data about your users as possible and you want it to be well-organized.

Top AI Chatbot App Overall: ChatBot

ChatBot is a very popular no-code app along with ManyChat, HubSpot, and Chatfuel. The combination of features, integrations, ease of use, and decent pricing made us consider this bot one of the best chatbots for small businesses. Let's take a closer look at what it has to offer.

Ease of Use

ChatBot's interface is intuitive and easy to use. The platform offers welcome guides both around the app and in the builder itself, as well as popups with tips. There is also Help Center, where you can find articles and guides on building chatbots. So, if you decide to build chatbots with ChatBot, you won't be left alone.

Here is an example of a tip that pops up when you build a bot for the first time:

ChatBot has an unusual feature that we haven't seen with any other AI bot app. You can test the bot right away. Simply click the "Test" button and you will see the logic of your bot tree and how it takes the user through each step. This gives you a great advantage as you can see the journey as your customer sees it.

Features

ChatBot offers a lot of features that you can integrate directly in your bot: delays, images, gallery, emojis, quick replies, free text input, email, phone number and date validation. There are, however, things that you cannot do. For example, the platform doesn't let you add vertical lists, video, audio, attachments, persistent menus, or share the location.

If these features are crucial for your business development and your marketing strategy, then ChatBot might not be the best solution.

As for the users of the bot, on the platform each user will have their own "account", where the bot stores all the information about this user it has collected. You can also see every single dialogue a user has with the bot, which is extremely valuable for future improvement. Here's what it looks like:

Channels

ChatBot can be deployed on the following channels:

Facebook
Slack
A website
WordPress

The platform doesn't connect with WhatsApp, Telegram, or Twitter. However, they are currently considering adding WhatsApp, Skype, Twitter, and some other channels

Integrations

With ChatBot platform, you get the most vital integrations: Live Chat, Webhooks, Zapier, Freshdesk. It doesn't seem like much, but Zapier is an app that helps you connect independent apps, for example, Google Analytics or Google Ads.

Analytics

Analytics tools are one of the most important part of any no-code AI chatbot platform. They let you track the success of the bot you created, analyze the interactions, sometimes read the dialogues' script. Why would you need that? Analytics give you insights into how to improve your bot and eventually, increase sales.

Different AI bot apps offer different metrics. As for the ChatBot, it's got all you need:

Total number of chats.
Total number of messages and the number of messages of each of the bots;
The popularity of actions by bot. This one allows you to see the percentage of customers who actually completed the chatbot's goal.
Total number of customers.
All interactions you any customer has with any of your bots.
Debug mode for each dialog that shows where things went wrong
Unmatched keywords (these are keywords typed by your user that were not recognized by the bot).

Unfortunately, these metrics are scattered all around the app. It would be a bit more convenient if the platform offered a single dashboard.

Artificial Intelligence

ChatBot's AI does a great job recognizing various keywords you put into it. If you want to know more about how a bot works with keywords, take a look at this post.

Best for Facebook Messenger: Chatfuel

Chatfuel is one of the most popular bots on Facebook, it's got around 1.3 billion users! This might be the best choice if Facebook is the primary source of your brand's integration with the customers.

Interface

This platform's interface is much like that of ChatBot: clean, nice, intuitive. Before you even start building a bot, Chatfuel tries to get to know you better by asking question about your company and intentions:

Best AI Chatbot Apps Combining Both Human Support and AI: Botsify

Our top choice for ai is Botsify. Botsify claims to make your first bot for you for free. Benefits of Botsify include the human support of their team as well as one of the best ai systems that is comparable to other platforms with chatbots, like Instabot.

On their website, they proudly tout that their artificial intelligence system has over 200 free trials weekly (on average). Like other applications, their free trial lasts two weeks (14 days). Some other applications may claim to give you a month free, but their best chatbot app is then limited to those users. Botsify does not have as lengthy of a free trial because the features you get are the same as those who pay per month for the premium service.

What is great about Botsify's human support is the fact that you know a human will be creating the chatbot's conversations. This means the chatbot can turn out sounding like a true friend instead of stiff customer supports. For an ai chatbot, Botsify does not seem to need much human support, though, as its fairly quick to respond to a customer in the chat. This makes a reply for someone using the chatbot on Facebook, for example, easy and pleasing. No more frustrated customers!

AI Chatbots: FAQ

Let's go over a few of the best and most common questions you might have about AI.

How Does AI Work?

Machine learning in not a new thing nor is it a thing of the past. It's still relevant and evolving each day. Ais have the ability to learn. Truthfully, a lot of a bot's ability to learn has to do with its platform.

What's great about ais is the fact that they have the ability to remember key phrases and topics asked by most customers. Then it can know which responses get better replies with customers or chatbot visitors. For example, a chat could result in a customer who wants to talk about refunds after a return. Based on which ai chatbot software you get, your ai chatbots should be able to learn the phrase around "refunds" or "return" or any topic related to those.

Can You Make a Bot without Coding?

AI doesn't always require coding. You simply need a great platform that allows you to create top ai chatbots. If you know how to navigate a software and give your bot keywords, topics, and phrases to respond to, then you can easily make a chatbot and build upon its intelligence as it interacts with a customer.

You can view some of the top chatbots in your mind and see how they were made by researching the software that was purchased to create it. You'll often find that chatbots sound more human when there is natural language learning.

Remember: an easy chatbot builder will not require coding and will offer drag and drop conversations in their apps as well as a template oriented to the type of message. you want to convey to visitors.

A Final Word

We had a talk about how to choose a chatbot app, and hopefully this has helped you decide if you want a pro account, a small fee to pay per month, or another type of account, such as a free one to start.

When it comes to figuring out how to create the best ai chatbots, the creation part should be fun and easy. We encourage trying out our marketing software at least for a month to see if the chatbot builder is for you and your business.