There are few main things that can help you identify what kind of chatbot to choose for your company.
Time Available
How much time do you and others in your organisation have for setting up the chatbots? Can you you be there to constantly optimise, teach and maintain the chatbots? Do you want the value of chatbots but with a no-fuss, quick setup?
AI and ML chatbots are time-consuming projects but it doesn’t stop there. Someone needs to constantly train an AI bot as well as monitor the algorithm. Essentially, it’s not a project or tool, it’s an entirely new process for your company to manage.
Rule-based chatbots, on the other-hand, are quick and easy to set up and some providers even create and optimise bot conversations for you. Good customer support will pick your brain about your industry, customer behaviour and your company’s strengths and then create the bots for you.
Skills
What kind of skills do you possess in-house? Do you have skilled data and IT professionals committed to the project?
To get them up and running, all chatbots need the customer knowledge from your people (including sales, marketing and customer service). There’s no way around that. Then it comes down to what other competences you have in your organisation, like data and IT specialists. Have you got these kind of people in-house and how committed will they be? If you’re even a little unsure, taking AI or ML chatbots will probably lead to bad bots that don’t help anyone. If you only have business people involved, rule-based bots are definitely the way to go. Rule-based bots are quite easy to setup – check out our best practices here.
Setup Time
This is quick & easy to assess: do you need chatbots up and running asap? If your answer is yes, then go with rule-based chatbots. If not then you can allow other considerations to influence your chatbot decision.
Budget
Are you willing to invest hundreds of thousands into your chatbots or are you more interested in getting started with something smaller? Does the investment need to be precisely budgeted or do you have space to move if you need to invest more into your project?
Rule-based chatbots are fairly cheap and easy to budget. It is also quite easy to calculate the ROI for your investment.
The cost of AI and ML chatbot projects tend to start in the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands. Like many other IT projects, it’s hard to estimate the expense accurately beforehand.
Versatility
You are most likely planning chatbots for a specific use case, like automating website customer service or for lead generation purposes. Bear in mind that chatbots have several other use cases as it states in this article. Don’t let the chatbot technology you choose limit your options in the future.
Optimization & Analytics
One might think it’s easy to create conversations that help website visitors. Actually, that’s not always the case. That’s why it’s really important to have proper analytics in place when operating your chatbot. Analytics will show you which parts of the conversation work and which don’t.
AI, ML or Rule-Based chatbot?
All have technological pros and cons. For example, in all their intelligence, AI-bots still tend to have a low tolerance for real human language. Another weakness is that if people are given the opportunity to ask the bot anything then they really will. As a result, the conversation isn’t always moving towards conversion. On the other hand, handcrafted conversational bots don’t reach the adaptability level of AI. Nor do they have the ability to learn like ML bots do.
Much of the decision-making comes down to the service part of the deal. Having a dedicated expert guiding you through the design process, challenging your assumptions and providing further optimisations, can make all the difference in ensuring a return on your investment. In most cases, AI chatbots are unnecessary, particularly for smaller and (most) medium-sized businesses. Larger companies needing to organise customer service for thousands or millions of consumers are a better fit for AI and ML.
If your goal is to generate leads from your website, you should already know the questions and concerns that your prospects are seeking answers to. The same goes for handling frequently asked questions. In other words, nothing is stopping you from designing conversation paths that address your website visitors’ needs perfectly well. Handcrafted conversations are surprisingly effective. On top of that, they’re quick to get started with and easy to improve as you go.
If you are interested to dig deeper into the differences between AI, ML and Rule-Based chatbots, we wrote this thorough article on the subject.
Chatbot providers to look at:
Leadoo – A chatbot provider that offers chatbots along with messaging features and tools for the mapping of a customer journey. Focuses on making websites convert more sales and leads and enhance the customer experience. (Note: author of this article.)
Drift – A conversational marketing chatbot provider focusing on creating a better user experience through chatbots.
Intercom – A customer service-oriented chatbot provider that originates from live chats.
There is also this pretty handy comparison whitepaper that places these competitors up against one another and lets you decide which is the best.