Should I Hire a Chatbot Development Company?
Customers are changing their preferences when it comes to communicating with businesses. They increasingly expect real-time responses and prompt replies. Looking to embrace these changes, many organizations have implemented rudimentary AI solutions, most often in the form of chatbots. This specialized software is a user-friendly program designed to automate interactions between people in real time. Have you been asking yourself, should I hire an AI chatbot development company? If so, our analysis below should answer that question.
What Are Chatbots?
Chatbots emerged with the popularity of natural programming language processing, a branch of AI academia that studies how computers understand, interpret and utilize human language. Modern descendants of this technology include digital assistants like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa. Large tech companies have made major investments to bring the technology into the enterprise arena, with the most widely used being chatbots.
Chatbots are designed to recognize phrases and voice commands of the users they’re interacting with. Depending on both the kind of chatbot software used and an organization’s area of expertise, each bot will be a little different. Some bots target specific subjects like news, e-commerce, medical queries, and information aggregation. As more industries and sectors adopt chatbots within their organizations, we expect the number of these specialized bots to grow over time and offer greater utility.
Automated Communication for Your Business
Choosing a developer to create a chatbot for your organization is an important decision. It pays to understand the reason other organizations use chatbots in their business models and customer support applications. We’re going to highlight some of the most common benefits chatbots offer to enterprise organizations.
According to a report from Drift, the expectation customers have of getting an immediate response has only increased over the last few years. As this data suggests, it’s critical to keep your potential customers engaged when they visit your site. Chatbots are one of the best ways to do this, but ONLY if they are done right. That means understanding your customers and the types of questions they are going to ask. That may sound like it involves ESP, but you can gain a lot of insight into the customer’s mind through surveys and services like Hotjar and Google Analytics.
A Solution That Scales
Customized chatbots are scalable when compared to in-house-designed solutions. The platform interface of a custom chatbot is not confined to proprietary hardware, while still being tailored to your needs. One can scale up the chat features and add new communication patterns, intent, entities, and dialog anytime. This is useful for growing organizations.
Customer Personalization
Custom chatbots have great AI capabilities allowing businesses to provide personalized conversation for customers. It can be powered by machine learning APIs like Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS), which can analyze the day-to-day conversations of customers to deliver them context-based information and improve the overall customer experience.
Streamlined Interfaces
With chatbots, enterprises can provide continuous any-time support and guidance for their customers. Custom chatbots require expert chatbot developers to produce high-level conversational UX, including display images, links, and CTA buttons that provide a rich user experience that is otherwise not feasible with in-house bots.
Data Security
High security and control over personal data is another great advantage of developing custom chatbots. Customer data including name, contact number, and email will be hosted on the company server and are highly secured. This data can later be exported to another chatbot platform without being under the threat of hackers.
Efficiency
Chatbots help increase the business’s productivity and operational effectiveness by reducing attended calls and emails. This allows your staff to focus their time on other important tasks. Similarly, chatbots are programmed to serve in different languages, enabling your organization to process requests from different regions and countries.
The top benefits of chatbot AI according to Drift:
Qualify customers in real time
Increased sales productivity
Efficient ticket support with online concierge
Engage buyers 24/7 across the globe.
Accelerated sales pipeline
Increased ROI of conversational marketing strategy.
So back to the original question – should you hire an company to develop a custom chatbot?
There are plenty of white label AI chat solutions out there like Acquire and Tidio (seriously, your cup runneth over with options). They do some great things and would certainly be a great place to start since many are free at a base level. The problem will always be customization. Other companies will be using the same solution, not unlike a stock photo that pops up all over the internet. While there’s nothing wrong with that, it won’t help you stand out from the competition. You’re also stuck with whatever features the chat service has deemed important, so if you want something different, you’re completely out of luck. It’s going to be hard to find a white label solution that truly does it all.
Work with the best chatbot development company
Developing and implementing chatbots is an entire field of software development unto itself. If you’ve considered the advantages of chatbots and decided that your organization would benefit from implementing its own bot, the next step is finding a reliable chatbot developer. With close to three decades of custom software development experience, Zco Corporation offers unrivaled development capabilities. Get in touch with one of our account executives today and find out how we can help you implement a customized solution for you.
