To test them, I connected them to some test social accounts and used them to build an FAQ or signup bot. With all this in mind, I was able to narrow the field down to a dozen or so apps that could potentially meet the criteria. Having considered the options out there, I don't feel most small businesses need to spend huge sums of money to start using chatbots. I also had a cap of around $120/month for any service, though most don't come close to that. While affordable means different things to different companies, where two apps offered similar services, I went with the one that charged less. That's a tad out of the price range of most small and medium-sized businesses. Hire a developer, pick one of the enterprise options, and you could easily be looking at a bill of $250,000 per year. There's nearly no limit to the money you could spend on chatbots. Not every app had to support every channel, but they had to offer enough options that you could comfortably steer your customers to a popular chat service that they like (or your website). Support queries can come in from multiple sources, like Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, email, and a live help box on your website. To make this list, each bot builder had to integrate with as many popular apps and services as possible-whether directly or through using an app like Zapier as a bridge. If it can't answer their question, then it should be able to ping your team on Slack. Is a customer wondering where their order is? Then your chatbot should be able to check their order status on Shopify. In practice, this means they need access to the tools you use most often. Chatbot solutions are supposed to take the hassle out of repetitive tasks and questions. Basically, if I as an experienced tech writer couldn't get a grasp on how to use the tool in 10 or 15 minutes, it was out. Any coding requirements had to be limited to copying and pasting snippets into HTML headers or adding API keys to easily manage settings pages. This doesn't mean there's no learning curve, but it does allow anyone who's moderately computer literate to watch a few tutorial videos, read a how-to doc, and build a chatbot. All the tools on this list have both a drag-and-drop interface, which makes laying out the logic and response trees of your chatbots easy to manage, and some templates to get you started. Sure, if you're a seasoned developer, you can probably whip up your own chatbot with an API and some PHP, but that shouldn't mean you need to know your GETs from your POSTs to build one. They're easy to use and get started with. To narrow the list down a little more officially, I assessed them all on the following criteria: Remember: you won't find any of the big enterprise chatbot companies or great live chat customer support platforms on this list-only dedicated chatbot builders for smaller operations.Īs I started my research and testing, some apps were too expensive, others required too much technical know-how, and yet more were just kind of bad. When making this list, I considered more than 32 platforms capable of making chatbots. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.
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