A Comparison of Different Types of Chatbots
Choosing a chatbot software can be difficult if you don't which other chatbots to compare them to. Whether you need live chat websites or one simple chatbot to help do the heavy lifting of customer support on your website, comparisons and pros/ cons lists can help businesses decide which type of AI they can get.
Table of Contents
- A Comparison of Different Types of Chatbots
- Different Types of AI Technology Found in a Chatbot
- How to Compare Software Based on Your Needs
- Different Applications of Chatbots
- Top Simple Chatbot Software
- Top Smart Chatbot Software
- Top Hybrid Chatbot Software
- Best Management Software
- What's Next?
There are a few factors to keep in mind when choosing a chatbot. Almost all of these factors have to do with your target customer or target audience and what your business requires.
1) First, decide what messaging, brand, voice, and style your business needs to portray. Do you have a service based business? Are sales showing that the first point of contact with customers isn't improving your rate of conversion? Try to pinpoint the AI chatbot that can help boost social engagement, for example, like sales announcements or free access to your platform. Find that more teens are responding to this service or product type? Target teens with hip lingo, colors, and designs that speak to their interests.
2) Learn what is working for your business. If you have features that allow you to view website data every day or every month, take advantage of that to see which pages on your website is getting the most engagement. This page will be where you especially want a chatbot.
3) Learn what isn't working. You'll also want a chatbot to help a customer navigate a certain page that isn't doing well, perhaps. Or maybe you need an AI to text a customer instead of emailing them because your email messaging isn't getting through the customer. An AI can help in the marketing process, too, you know.
4) Price. The cost of a chatbot can vary from month to month. Some services offer their chatbot software for free at first until you also want to get chatbots that integrate email messaging or media, like videos and images. This all depends on the business and if the business deems it necessary to pay for a pricier chatbot that has the same text conversation as any other chatbot.
Now let's get into how we can compare an AI software based on conversation, flow, and overall setup. There are 4 main types of chatbots that are designed for webpage use and SMS. These chatbot types can also be worth creating for social media pages, like Facebook's Messenger app. Here are the following type of chatbots based on design and purpose.
Live Chat Software
Live chat is great for customer service and booking bots. Mostly live chatbots are deployed on websites of healthcare services or larger businesses, such as phone companies. Live chatbots are designed to use a live person on the other end communicating by typing to customers and leads. The purpose of this chatbot is not to replace customers calling businesses for help, but to better direct or answer questions for customers or leads. This chatbot only helps live agents serve site visitors better. Live chat software can be a little more advanced for those businesses who don't have a high-tech team.
Simple Chatbot Software
Chatbots you see on everyday sites, such as a dentist's office or attorney website, are generally simple chatbots. This software is designed to answer basic questions like FAQs. Most software for bots can perform and deploy this type of program. This is a great choice for businesses who cannot spend money on advanced chatbots, nor does it require a live agent to monitor.
Smart Chatbots
AI chatbots or "smart" chatbots are designed to have near-human interactions with humans. They can put words together in direct response to a customer's question or comment. They can sense intent of the customer, reply with sentiment (if a customer is angry), and even have free-flowing conversations. These chatbots do require a bit more programming, so if you have a team who knows how to program a bot, this could be a great marketing tactic for your business.
Hybrid Chatbots
Simple chatbots respond based on rules, such as "oh, this person said 'cat', so I'll show them cat toy options" while smart chatbots are more context based. They need to see more of the conversation to reach a conclusion of how to respond. A hybrid chatbot is a combination of both simple and smart. Hybrid chatbots are programmed to reply with text that lets the customer know it is listening, such as responding with "cat" in the sentence. But it will also recognize that the customer is angry about cat litter, so it will respond with an apology and offer a refund or give discount to try another cat litter.
Different Types of AI Technology Found in a Chatbot
The technology behind an AI doesn't have to be complicated. Programming a smart chatbot can take time, but if you understand the different types of chatbots that chatbot software offers out there, you'll be better informed to choose the best software for you.
Button-based Chatbots
These chatbots are like surveys. They rely on the visitor to interact with it using mainly buttons. It will act as a form until it can take the visitor to the destination the customer or lead wants. For example, let's say a customer has questions about cat litter, the chatbot will respond with several options to click on to see which the customer wants to ask about. These options could be "I want cheaper litter", "I want to return litter", or "I want to replace my litter."
Rule-based or Linguistic Chatbots
A rule-based chatbot uses a tree-like flow or map instead of AI to help guests with their questions or comments. This means that the chatbot will guide the site visitor with follow-up questions to eventually get to the correct resolution. The visitor won't necessarily have buttons to click, but they will have to answer "yes", "no" or even numbers, such as an order number or member number.
Keyword Recognition Chatbots
Keyword recognition chatbots are an extension of menu or button-based chatbots. With keyword recognition-based chatbots users can interact by giving free text input, such as "I want to buy jewelry." The chatbot then analyses the text on specific keywords and based on those keywords, gives an appropriate response, like "Do you want bracelets, earrings, or necklaces?" or "What kind of jewelry would you like?"
Machine Learning Chatbots
Machine learning refers to the ability of a system like a chatbot to learn from the inputs it experiences. It does this with natural language processing, which is the interaction between human language (text in a particular language, i.e. English, Spanish, etc.) and computers.
Voice Bots
A voice chatbot is exactly as it sounds. This chatbot uses conversational AI communication that can capture, interpret, and analyse vocal input given by the speaker, customer, or lead and will respond in a similar natural language. Users can interact with a voice chatbot with voice commands and receive relevant responses.
For example, you can call a company on the phone, such as a bank, which will have a voice bot ask questions like "What is your phone number under your account?" and you can respond with "555-231-5585", and the chatbot will record it and continue on with questions to help you further.
How to Compare Software Based on Your Needs
Every business has a different need. Perhaps, as shown in the previous example, a financial institution needs a voice chat to help manage the large amounts of calls they get each day. Perhaps an ecommerce business only needs a hybrid chatbot to help manage orders and recommend customer support pages to site visitors.
To compare software that you may need, you must understand what system you already have in place. Do you have a Wordpress site or blog that a chatbot can be deployed on? Do you need different platforms to help with your marketing, such as email?
Next, decide what you want the chatbot to do. Does it need to be a live bot with live agents? Perhaps you have a business that simply needs a chatbot for onboarding employees. Do you have a strong network or a weak one that could probably not handle the amount of inquiries your chatbots need to handle. Once you have these main questions figured out, you'll be ready to understand what you can get out of a bot software, so the comparison and pros/ cons list will be clear to you.
Different Applications of Chatbots
Chatbots are created for various purposes, therefore, they are designed differently for these purposes. Let's go over each to compare the features you can utilize for your business.
Appointment Scheduling
Scheduling bots are the kind of bots you normally find in healthcare, airlines, and hotel industries. These bots help customers book slots for appointments with the enterprise they communicate with.
Appointment bots are often linked to Google calendar, so when a customer books an appointment with you, it automatically gets stored in the calendar, creates an event, and sends reminders to both the customer and the business representative. The HR team can also use HR chatbots to schedule interviews for recruitment purposes.
The most common uses for an appointment chatbot are:
- For scheduling meetings and interviews for the HR department
- Healthcare chatbot for booking appointments
- Travel chatbot for flight bookings or train or bus transportation
- Hotel booking chatbot to book rooms and services
- Theater/ movie chatbot to book tickets and seats
- Automotive bookings and much more!
Customer Support
This has to be one of the most popular chatbot benefits that can be used for any business. When someone says the word ‘chatbot’, the first thing to pop up in our mind is that one time we spoke to a chatbot for customer care. These types of AI chatbots perform all tasks a customer support representative would do. And it does some real good by directing people to a document or page to answer questions and many other things. They allow your customers to easily interact with your business through conversations and also play a part in increasing sales.
Chatbot features such as 24/7 hour availability, quick and easy solutions, instant replies, and live chat facilities make support chatbots the ideal tool to improve customer service. It's much better than having a team member or agent live at all times to monitor customer questions. It not only improves communication between businesses and customer base but also builds a rapport with them to earn customer loyalty. They also gather customer feedback and send it to your team so that you can work on the shortcomings.
Some of the most common customer support chatbot templates you can find with chatbot software include:
- Retail Support bot to handle queries related to your retail product line. It's also used this to sell products directly
- Telecom chatbot to provide customers the convenience of checking their bill, make a payment, recharge plan, change plan, change number etc directly through the chatbot.
- Techdesk bot to help employees connect to the internal technical support team for issues related to system and access to services/apps. The bot is also used to send confirmation to the customer through email.
- Banking bot caters to your banking needs in an interactive manner. It provides account related information, ongoing offers, helps you get an update on your checkbook and also takes you to travel booking facilities.
- Orders, deliveries, and logistics chatbot order issues help handle issues with food delivery orders.
Marketing and Sales Chatbots
Marketing and sales are the next most popular uses of chatbots within a business after customer support. So these intelligent bots are able to personalize the customer experience, have a larger engagement capacity, reach a wider audience, analyze customer feedback and data, send relevant notifications and moves customers seamlessly through the sales funnel.
Common marketing chatbot templates help with:
- Ecommerce to show images to potential buyers
- Education courses or webinars
- Real estate bots to collect a lead's information
- A quiz chatbot to take surveys from customers and, therefore, improving your marketing based on their answers
- Social media marketing
Entertainment
Entertainment bots are made for entertainment and media purposes. These bots include:
- The tv show guide that's a simple yet powerful chatbot to help track channels as per category for a service provider
- The go-karting ideal chatbot template for booking go-karting services. The bot also shows some information about tracks and karts
- Quiz bot serves a quickfire round of questions to those interested in a little harmless fun dose of quiz questions. It ends with giving a quick score based on the correct answers
- Riddle bot to engage your customers through games to keep them coming back to your website
- Discord bot to welcome new members to your server, to ban troublemakers, to moderate the discussion
- News and media bot to help users access news from different categories. So the bot flow leads the user to news categories where they can select the desired category to access news and can also subscribe to a category
- Cinema bot lets your customers book movie tickets, read reviews, browse through different genres
- The entertainment factory a bot that assists users with everything at their favorite getaway location.
- Youtube channel bot. To using this template anywhere to use it as your new social media channel to share your youtube content
- The podcast bot helps the user learn about the universe with the help of podcasts or become a VIP member to get updates!
Top Simple Chatbot Software
ManyChat
ManyChat can do a lot more than what "simple" implies, but is a great choice for beginners who need to manage mostly customer service. They have rave reviews for their chatbots and tout great customer service for their clients.
What is also great about ManyChat is that you can deploy their chatbots on instagram DMs, Facebook messenger, and SMS text messaging. If social channels are one of your main streams for leads, this could be a great choice for you.
Top Smart Chatbot Software
Genesys
Genesys chatbots are great tools for personalization when it comes to speaking with customers. They have a 360 degree view of all touchpoints with a customer, remembering everything a customer mentions or needs. It's a great software to go with if you need a month to month plan as well. If you want to add plugins to this chatbot, you can since most smart chatbot software comes with more than in necessary for a small business. However, it is great for growing businesses with a recent spike in leads and customers communicating with them.
Top Hybrid Chatbot Software
TruVISIBILITY
Capable of both performing smart and simple processes, TruVISIBILITY has all the tools to help a business's marketing team build a conversation in minutes. By using a web or map system, this app can be tied to other apps in the all-in-one suite, such as email messaging, and landing page building or web hosting. Overall, TruVISIBILITY chatbots don't easily hide on a website and can interact with a site visitor as much or as little as one programs it to do.
Best Management Software
TruVISIBILITY
To manage software is entirely different manner. If you want a platform you can have a lot of freedom with in terms of building the conversation, adding images, adding buttons, incorporating marketing chatbots, and brand colors, TruVISIBILITY offers complete freedom in how a chatbot can look.
It's also extremely easy to manage the chatbots that are live on your sites since its analysis of each chatbot will tell you if a customer is still waiting on a response or if the AI didn't respond to another person. This rarely happens but can easily be solved with the easy management page that lists the status of all chatbots and open chats there currently are.
Because TruVISIBILITY's Chat app allows you to create any chatbot from scratch or use any of the high-converting chatbot templates, the management has to be on point. In regard to price, one customer reviews starting price as a factor into the pros and cons list of ai software, and TruVISIBILITY's can't be beat.
Now, when we speak of management, we mean the ease of use when checking statistics and analytics around each individual bot. It is also simple to click on a particular chatbot to modify it in any way needed. Need to add a topic that was added to your services or FAQs page? No problem! It takes a few minutes or less to write text into a response your chatbot may encounter with a visitor.
Is a chatbot on your Facebook page not performing as well as the others? You can view the data to see where most visitors drop off in the conversation and which prefer voice live chat. You can also build a few chatbots, implement them onto your business site, and replace them after a few weeks or so to gather enough data to do testing or A/B testing. This will help you quickly learn which ai-based bot is performing and interacting with leads the best.
TruVISIBILITY's analytics software is also second to none compared to others who give you data that will not be helpful or provide an incomplete set of data. TruVISIBILITY can send messaging, webpages on social media, and other seemingly unlimited features to gather more data from and compile them all in one place.
We should mention you can get a separate management software free, but it is likely not always going to be free and will most definitely be more complicated than it has to be. If you're interested in viewing TruVISIBILITY's platform, with an all-in-one suite and built-in analytics, keep reading.
What's Next?
We hope this article has helped you decide (or teach you how to compare) which chatbot software for your business. Whether you're looking for the chat websites Facebook has or want to start as a beginning in building conversations with your audience.
Keep in mind that software is always changing. So, the chatbot software mentioned in this article may not have the same features as they once did or may not work for your business from day to day. That's why TruVISIBILITY always keeps its leads and customers up to date with guides on what is changing in the apps. Sign up today for occasional updates or check out the all-in-one suite to see if the chatbots or email messaging app is right for your business.
Related articles
Want to receive more articles?
Sign-up for our weekly newsletter to receive info that will help your business grow
