The Chatbots Codal Recommends For Your Website

We see this most explicitly with chatbots, those automated messengers that act almost as virtual secretaries when you visit a website, helping users complete basic tasks and serving as the first point of contact for customer service, marketing, or sales needs.

Their level of artificial intelligence varies, but all chatbots mimic human speech patterns and behaviors to simulate conversation with a real person. The idea is to provide at least a semblance of a human experience, something more empathetic than what a user might encounter in colder customer service channels, like an automated phone bot.

Chatbots are popular (you may have noticed ours at the bottom right-hand corner of the page), and there’s no shortage of available options out there, each with their own level of intelligence, customizability, price point, and even specific use case.

Best of all, it understands its limitations. Drift automatically handles the rote minutiae of customer service and lead generation, then routes the user to a human when a real person is needed on the other end. Its routing functionality is fairly robust too — you can even send an existing lead to a specific sales rep if they’re assigned in your CRM.

With all of that functionality, you can probably guess Drift’s tradeoff: the price. Their packages that include chatbots start at $500 a month, but they do offer standard and even free services as well.

Tidio’s chatbots don’t boast a high-level of intelligence — they’re almost just a simple live chat with a rerouting service. But the automation it does offer can be a huge boon for online retailers, especially how it easily allows users to collect data on frequently asked questions, and adjust both the bot and their other content accordingly.

“As a coworking space, potential members have many questions on pricing, amenities, and locations,” says Todd Goldstein, CEO and founder of coworking space LaunchHouse. “While we have those answers on the website, it has been much easier for our staff to answer the questions directly when the website visitor has them rather than waiting for us to receive those questions via email or phone. What we also like about Intercom is the ease at which we can include documents in the answer and all of our chat messages are saved in the Intercom dashboard and a connected email account for review later.”

The conversation bot can communicate via SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google RCS, and more; on top of that, its AI is highly advanced compared to the rest of what’s available on the consumer market. Live Person bots can answer FAQs, schedule appointments, capture leads, reset passwords, and even fulfill orders.

If none of those functions apply to you, no worries It also offers a high level of customization, so companies can easily build and configure their own bot to fulfill their exact use cases. Live Person isn’t cheap, but you get what you pay for, and the savings it yields may just cover its cost — the company claims its bot costs one-tenth of what you’d pay a human to do.

The right chatbot for your website is highly contingent on your desired use cases, your industry, and of course, your budget. Though the chatbots mentioned in this post are decently representative of the options out there, we’ve still only scratched the surface of the entire market.

It’s an industry that’s only growing in size as more and more companies realize they need automation in their customer service channels. Chatbots are versatile, cost-effective, and relieves some of the most tedious parts of a marketing or customer service job. Plus, they engage customers the way they want to be engaged: effortlessly, through the communication channels they’re comfortable with.

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