Importance of chatbots for businesses
Chatbots play a crucial role in automating customer communication, ensuring consistent, scalable, and 24/7 communication across messaging channels. They help in lead generation and qualification, nurturing, and prospect and customer query resolution.
By initiating conversations, asking pre-qualification questions, and offering personalized recommendations, chatbots ensure that sales teams spend their time only on high-intent leads. They can also help prospects with product comparisons, answer common questions, guide prospects through the purchase, and even facilitate transactions. They provide significant value in support by answering customer queries 24/7, enhancing customer satisfaction, and ensuring customer support teams can focus on more complex questions. Ultimately, businesses that integrate chatbots into their communication strategy gain a competitive edge by improving efficiency, building stronger customer relationships, and driving higher conversion rates.
How to choose the best chatbot builder
To choose the best AI chatbot builder for your business, you need to evaluate the chatbot platforms while considering the following attributes.
Purpose
Before choosing your chatbot platform, clearly define what you want the chatbot to do. Is it lead generation, nurturing, providing information about your products, or customer support? Is the chatbot going to handle it completely on its own or will it complement your workforce? A sales-focused chatbot might need advanced lead capture and CRM integration, while a support chatbot may require strong FAQ handling and ticketing features. So having a clear purpose ensures you're looking for the right chatbot features in the platforms you're evaluating.
Inquiry complexity
The complexity of the customer inquiries you get determines the type of chatbot you'll need. For simple questions that depend on decision-tree logic, rule-based chatbots would be perfect, but for more complex interactions, AI-powered or hybrid chatbots—a mix of both—are a better fit.
User experience
A customer-facing chatbot is an extension of your brand. Ensure your prospects and customers have the best experience, and that the chatbot can deliver a seamless, human-like interaction that aligns with your customers' preferences. The bot conversation should feel natural and intuitive, so choose bot builders that support personalized and contextual responses and multiple languages, and understand different versions of the same query.
Deployment and customization
Look for a chatbot that is easy to deploy and highly customizable, allowing you to tailor it to your specific business needs. The right chatbot builder for you should adapt to your level of technical expertise. If you don't have a technical background, choose a chatbot software that has a codeless bot builder that comes with bot templates and also allows you to design the bot flow based on your own unique needs. If you have a technical team, choose a bot builder that comes with a programming interface, developer tools, and webhooks for advanced customization.
The best chatbot platforms offer a balance, making it easy for beginners to get started while also offering the flexibility and extensibility that developers and larger enterprises require.
Scalability
Your chatbot should be able to grow along with your business, handling increased traffic and evolving needs over time without a compromise in performance. It should be easy to update and expand as necessary.
Integrations
A chatbot is only as powerful as the data systems it connects with. Look for a chatbot builder that integrates seamlessly with your existing tech stack, including CRM, helpdesk software, marketing tools, payment tools, and the like, to ensure smoother workflows, better sales, and support efficiency. This allows the chatbot to capture leads automatically, update customer records, book appointments, and even facilitate payments.
Your chatbot software should also let you leverage AI technologies of your choice like IBM Watson, Dialogflow, Microsoft Azure, Haptik, or GenAI platforms to power your bot or enhance its intelligence and capabilities.
Budget and resources
Factor in both the upfront setup costs and the long-term operational costs like maintenance, scaling, and resource requirements to ensure the solution fits within your budget and is a sustainable investment.
Security
When dealing with customer data, security should be your top priority. Choose a chatbot with robust data security features like encryption with PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy), malware scanning, DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance), and others. Your chatbot platform should also be compliant with data privacy laws of where your business is, where the industry operates, and where your customers are from, like GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, SOC2, and others.
Customer reviews
Check customer reviews and testimonials to see how existing users like the chatbot platform you're considering.
Free trial availability
Once you've narrowed down the right chatbot platform, you need to test whether it meets your business needs, is easy to use, and is compatible with your existing systems before committing to a subscription. A free trial minimizes your investment risk and reduces the likelihood of potential business disruptions due to unforeseen limitations.
Benefits of using chatbots
Automated lead generation and qualification.
Enhanced efficiency and productivity by automating repetitive tasks and handling routine queries.
Cost reduction through decreased reliance on large sales and support teams.
Reduction in response time and faster query resolution.
Consistent, 24/7 assistants for prospects and customers across messaging channels.
Scalability to handle growing traffic and business needs.
Multilingual support for global customer engagement.
Enhanced user experience through personalized interactions, leading to higher conversion rates.
Check out our detailed blog post on the benefits of chatbots for businesses and customers to learn more.
Build chatbots with Zoho SalesIQ
Zoho SalesIQ offers an advanced chatbot platform—Zobot—that enables businesses to create customized chatbots tailored to their specific needs. Designed with ease of use and flexibility in mind, it caters to both technical and non-technical users.
For users with no coding knowledge, it comes with a codeless chatbot builder and customizable prebuilt templates. Businesses with developers or a technical team can leverage the scripted bot builder that allows for deep customization and advanced logic.
Here are some highlights:
It comes with Answer Bot—a ready-to-deploy AI-driven knowledge base chatbot that helps you automate responses to FAQs.
It lets you add AI capabilities—either Zoho's own LLM, Zia, or ChatGPT to a rule-based bot to create a hybrid chatbot.
It integrates with Zoho and third-party software and supports easy automations like adding leads/customer information to your CRM, creating support tickets, booking appointments, and more. With a little bit of coding knowledge, you can even create plugs to connect any app, including your own server data to your chatbot.
It also integrates with platforms like IBM Watson, Dialogflow, Microsoft Azure, OpenAI, and more to power more advanced use cases.
Chatbots are deployable across channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, WeChat, Telegram, and Instagram.
It lets you build multilingual chatbots that can assist users in over 30+ languages.
SalesIQ is built with security and privacy at its core and complies with GDPR, CCPA, ISO, SOC2, HIPAA, Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework, and more.
And most importantly, it guarantees an uptime of 99.9% each month (excluding notified scheduled maintenance), so your bots are always ready to engage.
To learn how to make the best use of your chatbot software, check out our article on chatbot best practices and dos and don'ts in building chatbots.
Frequently asked questions
Can I build a chatbot without any coding skills?
Yes. Chatbot platforms offer no-code bot builders to help non-technical users build bots without needing any coding skills. For example, Zobot comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop bot builder along with customizable prebuilt bot templates.
What level of customization can I expect from a typical chatbot platform?
The level of customization available in a chatbot platform varies by provider. At a basic level, most platforms let you design conversation flows, set up triggers, and adjust responses to reflect your brand voice. More advanced platforms, like Zobot, support deeper customization like integrations, advanced logic, multilingual and multichannel capabilities, and even the option to bring in your preferred AI technology.
How do chatbot builders handle multiple languages or multilingual support?
Modern chatbot platforms come with built-in multilingual capabilities, allowing chatbots to recognize, understand, and respond in multiple languages. Some platforms use translation engines to convert content automatically, while others let you manually configure responses in each language for more accuracy and personalization.
Zoho SalesIQ's Zobot lets you configure your responses in the languages of your choice, while the GenAI driven Answer Bot uses a translation engine.
Are there chatbot builders specifically tailored for my industry?
Yes, Zobot provides customizable bot templates for different industries like healthcare, banking, hospitality, and education so you can set up bots with minimal effort.
How do I evaluate ROI from a chatbot builder?
You can evaluate the ROI from your chatbot builder by comparing the difference in lead conversions, sales cycle length, cost savings from automation, improved response times, and customer satisfaction scores. Additionally, you can also consider the efficiency gains for your team, such as reduced repetitive workload and the ability for human agents to focus on more complex or high-value interactions.