Online shopping, emailing, researching, self-teaching, e-learning, streaming, downloading, uploading, video calling, chatting, trivia and quizzing, gaming, betting, reading, writing, sharing, liking, subscribing, unsubscribing, phew! Isn’t it overwhelming? The list is an infinite one, and the buck never stops.
Through all these online interactions, there comes a point where help is required. An application might stop working. An order that you place might face some transaction issues. A feature might not work, or sometimes you wouldn’t be able to the redeems wouldn’t be rewarded too. What’s the alternative? Call a toll-free number for their customer support to express your problems with the product? But more often than not, it doesn’t really go as per the plan. There might not be an agent who would be free at that moment. You wait and wait, listening to the boring music that monotonously plays on and on, along with a voice giving false hope saying, “Please stay on the line. You’re our next caller.” Well quite frankly we all don’t have that much time nor is it worth the wait, because even when you connect, the agent would ask for you to detail the problem, provide invoice number (or something similar), and so on.
What if all this is simplified? It’s not necessary to undergo all this fuss. Wouldn’t it be simple to get all the customer service that you want, on the go? Enter a chatting platform for support. Then came an even better feature – a chatbot, that uses an AI-powered learning-based tool or feature or plugin that provides automated customer service and support.
For businesses, these chatbots ensure that they don’t need to spend vast amounts of money on hiring customer support executives, while ensuring that they can serve the customers 24 x 7. Now that’s a win-win, right? So, if your organization is looking for the best chatbots out there, then this post details the best 5 chatbots in the marketplace for automating your customer services. So let’s begin.
Table of Contents
#1 Freddy AI by Freshworks
A feature available across Freshworks’ customer support products, Freshdesk, Freddy AI for CX provides chatbot solutions. The Freddy Answer Bot is a perfect fit for instant and precise answers to your customer’s commonly asked questions. You can train it to answer any common question a customer asks at the start of a new conversation. But it doesn’t stop with deflection. Freddy Answer Bot can follow up with an intent-based Custom Bot flow closing the conversation when successful – so it never reaches your team, unless necessary.
This chatbot will further categorize the questions by customers into three buckets: Unanswered, Improve Coverage, and Underperforming. Any question that has not been answered will appear in the unanswered bucket, while the existence of asking the same question in many ways would fall under Improve Coverage. Other downvoted ones will be in the Underperforming bucket.
Freddy AI is available as a self-service chatbot as well as a helpdesk. While there are multiple pricing plans available that start from $100 and going all the way to $500 (plus charges per agent), you could also implement Freddy Starter helpdesk for free for up to 5,000 sessions per month, which will give you a better idea of its capabilities.
2. Botsify
A hands-down number one chatbot in the marketplace for customer services, built to manage all your business needs. Botsify claims to increase sales by 30 percent by parallelly reducing costs by 80 percent. It also has a 14-day free trial period to experiment with your exact necessities and then to decide if it can be bought or not. The software also provides amazing features that include Chatbot for Website, Facebook, Slack, Education, and others like Human Takeover, Conversation Forms, Story Tree, Checkbox Plugin, and even a way to acquire users from comments.
The self-serviced plan starts at $50 per month, while the fully managed plan would cost $300 per month.
3. Imperson
Imperson develops turnkey chatbot solutions that automate the entire customer journey, naturally, through conversation. Its enterprise chatbots for sales and marketing are trusted by leading brands, including Disney, Microsoft, Amazon, National Geographic, Universal, Moet Hennessy, Jack in the Box, Hyundai, CBS, Warner Music, and more. The software supports all interfaces such as AR, VR, text, voice, video, on all major messaging platforms, and offers an end-to-end trusted process to build, test, launch, optimize, and maintain the bot.
Sadly, there’s no specific pricing structure that the company provides. You’ll have to contact them to know the pricing details.
4. Flow XO
Creating a chatbot with Flow XO doesn’t require hard-core coding knowledge and skills. It can also be used on a variety of websites and apps like Facebook Messenger. You can automate your customer service and improve customer satisfaction using the live chat features as well. The ‘intelligence’ behind a Flow XO chatbot is created using a powerful workflow, and you can have an infinite number of these running in your chat window. This means your chatbot can be any or ALL of the above at the same time.
Apart from a free plan, they provide the best range for small businesses at $19/m, free + 5 bots at $29/m, and 25k interactions at $44/m.
5. Clare.AI
This front-end assistant provides modern online banking services. It combines ML algorithms with natural language processing and is trained to respond to customer service questions, arrange appointments, conduct internal inquiries for IT and HR, and help customers control their finances via their favorite messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook, WeChat and many more. The engine allows having full control with higher flexibility on configurations and development.
Sadly, the company doesn’t provide any pricing information on its website. You’ll need to contact them to know the pricing details.
Bottomline
Ping a bot, get options to choose with what you need help with, do some clicks, and get help right away. This is a great way to grow your business without spending a lot of money. Involving agents only when essential and never making your customer wait is a credit. So try a chatbot today, whether it’s in the form of a widget, plugin, product, or a program. After all, a chatbot is a bridge connecting AI and customer service.
(Author details: Being an avid writer and a business analyst, Abinaya Ramakrishnan writes SEO articles and follows multiple blogs to keep in touch with current trends. She reveals her way of expressing communication as “making everyone understand what’s happening by embedding one’s talent to make that happen”. And she has been following that sincerely through her writings. Her interests also include business, technology, sci-fi, literature, and music.)
