The chatbot market today is very lucrative and with so many chatbots emerging, it’s often difficult for organizations to select a chatbot that will fit their needs. There are two major types of chatbots that businesses can look into: traditional chatbots and custom chatbots. Both of these types of chatbots have their own advantages and disadvantages. In this article, we will explore the main differences between each to help you conclude which option is best for your business.
1. Natural Language Processing:
All chatbots are not built equally. For the most part, most chatbots are able to pick up on questions that customers have. What separates chatbots is the quality of their natural language processing. Natural language processing refers to the ability of a computer to understand human language. This is typically on a scale, instead of a black/white or yes/no answer. The better natural language processing a chatbot has, the easier it will be for them to understand customer inquiries and give back a suitable reply. Custom chatbots have far more natural language processing abilities in comparison to traditional chatbots and this makes them far better at understanding communication from a customer. What separates chatbots is the quality of their natural language processing. Here’s how natural language processing works. Natural language processing refers to the ability of a computer to understand human language.
Custom chatbots are able to recognize different semantics, dialects and intentions of customers. This makes it very easy for them to converse with customers and respond to customer inquiries. This is a major upgrade from normal chatbots that rely on pre-scripted responses. The better the natural language processing is in your chatbot, the more it will be able to carry a conversation with your customers. This ultimately means that your employees will spend less time dealing with customer service and that you can focus on other parts of your business.
2. Use cases:
Chatbots today are far more advanced than they were just a few years ago. The average chatbot today surprises organizations with what it can do. The amount of use cases for a chatbot is what separates good chatbots from great chatbots. The more applications a chatbot has, the more it can help a business automate many of its repetitive tasks. For most businesses, chatbots serve as a customer service or live chat tool. This is helpful for most businesses, but custom chatbots can do much more.
With custom chatbots, you can solve complex tasks and automate even more functions within your business. Some of the use cases for custom chatbots include:
- Shopping assistant: A custom chatbot can help customers with their entire shopping journey. From greeting them as soon as they arrive on the website to helping recommend products and providing coupons, custom chatbots can close many sales by acting as a 24/7 shopping assistant.
- Conducting customer research: Your chatbot is one of the best places to get data on your customers’ behavior. A custom chatbot can be programmed to recognize frequently asked questions and common behaviors that customers perform when they land on your site. This can be used to help inform your user experience strategy and you can optimize it to increase conversions for your business.
3. Applicable platforms:
One of the main advantages that custom chatbots have over traditional chatbots is their extensive application across a variety of platforms. The average chatbot only works with a website and does simple tasks like answering custom inquiries or providing contact information. Although this is great, it doesn’t provide businesses with many platforms with a viable solution. Modern businesses communicate with their customers on a variety of platforms and they need a chatbot solution that will enable them to do so easily.
Custom chatbots are great for organizations like this. With just one custom chatbot solution, you can automate conversations on websites, mobile apps, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Shopify sites and more. Your chatbot will be able to support you on virtually any platform that your customer is on and that will help save you significant time and money. This makes custom chatbots far more versatile than the average chatbot.
4. Integration capabilities:
A major difference between custom chatbots and normal chatbots is the integration capabilities. Most custom chatbots have several magnitudes of integrations more than the average chatbot. Instead of limiting your chatbot to the common integrations, custom chatbots allow organizations to leverage extensive integrations and this provides a more customized experience for customers. This allows for endless chatbot personalization for organizations.
Integrations typically fall into two categories for custom chatbots: API integrations and third-party integrations. API integrations enable chatbots to use data from other applications. For instance, using GraphQL, a modern query language, the chatbot can efficiently pull data from various databases and APIs with less bandwidth usage, enhancing the performance and speed of data retrieval. By communicating with other applications, the chatbot is able to perform many more functions. The third-party integrations allow the chatbot to use applications that the organization typically uses like CRMs, SEO tools, analytical tools and more. These tools allow the chatbot to leverage other data within the company to provide more tailored solutions for the business.
5. Maintenance:
The maintenance of a custom chatbot can be perceived as a con, but it’s needed in order to continue improving its productivity for a business. For most traditional non-custom chatbots, there’s little maintenance that needs to be done. Since the chatbot is very similar to thousands of others being used by other companies, bugs are typically found quicker and there’s little maintenance needed over the lifetime use of the product.
In contrast, a custom chatbot will need routine maintenance to ensure that there are no bugs and to implement new features into the chatbot. If the main use case for your chatbot was to answer custom service questions, you can update the code of the chatbot to allow for more functionalities. This includes other tasks like scheduling appointments, sending user surveys, scanning QR codes and sending drip campaigns.
The technical maintenance needed to be done for custom chatbots to allow current chatbot operations to go smoothly in addition to increasing the value for the business by continuously adding new features. The maintenance can be done by in-house developers, outsourced developers or consultants for your business.
