How To Decide Which Chatbot is Best Fit For Your Business?

As per the report of Gartner, enterprises will spend more per annum on Bots and custom bots development services will overcome the traditional mobile app development. Chatbots are taking over mobile apps due to their unique features to mimic conversations and provide instant, digital connections.

Although it is just the beginning, enterprises irrespective of their domain have begun to take advantage of chatbot. Chatbots enable businesses to be available 24x7 as a customer service agent. This data can be used in different ways to define business strategy for different customer base. But, it is important to consider the chatbot programming, technology and type of the chatbot which you are going to use for your potential customers.

Chatbot Spectrum: Types and Use Cases

1. Scripted/Quick Reply Bots

A scripted chatbot is the one where interaction with the customer happens through a predefined set of questions. This type of chatbot is either developed through a questionnaire, which a customer is anticipated to ask or a rule-based chatbot is created where each action by the user prompts the bot to take an action or respond.

2. Social Messaging Chatbots

These chatbots are integrated within a social messaging platform (Messenger, Telegram, Whatsapp, Slack etc.), making it easy for customers to directly interact with the bot, just like they do with their friends. Today, bot application development service for social messaging platforms are considered a vital step towards chatbot adoption.

3. Service/Action Chatbots

Service or Action Chatbots asks for relevant data from the user to take or complete an action. One of the relevant examples of such chatbots is the chatbot built for airlines business that enable customers to check flight status, booking cost etc.

4.  NLP Chatbots

Chatbots, in general are counted as one of the biggest applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI). At its core, it utilizes an AI technology- Natural Language Processing (NLP) to map user input (text or voice) to an intent. NLP chatbots classify the messages  and then language parsing is done to get variables for answer.

5. Context Enabled Chatbots

Contextual chatbots are the most advanced kind of conversational bots. With the power of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, these conversational assistants remember conversations that happened in the past with every individual user, learn to communicate and grow over time. These chatbots learn with their experiences with the user. Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant are some of the examples of contextual chatbots.

6. Voice Enabled Chatbots

Voice-enabled chatbots like Alexa, Siri creates a personalized experience for the users. These chatbots accept user inputs through voice, act upon user request, answer their queries, and perform a number of creative tasks. Businesses can create their voice-activated chatbot by using text-to-speech (TTS) and voice recognition APIs.


Planning to Build a Chatbot for your Business?

Chatbots leverage chat mediums, such as SMS text, website chat windows, social media (Twitter, Facebook), or instant messaging platforms (Whatsapp, Wechat, Messenger) to receive and respond to the messages. Choosing the right type of chatbot and platform for your business depends upon a number of factors, which may range from business size, customer base to purpose of deploying a chatbot.

For chatbot development, you can go for widely developed platforms like wit.ai, Chatfuel, api.ai. While these tools works well for basic customer engagement requirements, they do have limitations when over-the-top functionalities are to be integrated within chatbots. In such cases, the recommendation is to opt for custom chatbot development services.