Paid or Free Bots: 5 Questions to Help You Decide

Since Conversational Artificial Intelligence is becoming an integral part of most business plans, and as a CMO / CPO, you have probably already considered getting a chat bot to manage some aspects of your business. This can be anything from customer support to lead generation, engagement, and gathering feedback.

As part of this, you may have done a lot of research to know what chat bots are, what they can do for your business. You have focused on one or more weaknesses a chat bot needs and now you are ready to accomplish that goal. Decision "BUILD or BUY"!

Before we begin, here is a definition of what we mean by the terms "paid chat bot" and "free chat bot":

But should you go for paid or free bots?

A million dollar question every business asks itself before implementing a new service. Based on our experience creating chat bots for 50+ customers in all companies, we can offer some advice.

Here are some questions to ask yourself in order to decide which model is right for your business:

1. Do you want to answer complex or simple questions?

If all you need on your website is a "Chat Now" button that users can tap to enter their query, a free bot option is fine for you.

Most of the free 5 minute chat bot options are an easy way to replace a form option and provide you with a chat window for users to type in their questions which will then be routed to a human agent. A few options allow you to configure some basic questions that are then routed to a human agent.

With a paid chat bot provider, you get the full flexibility of a comprehensive bot building platform that supports complex chat flows and open questions.

Complex bots not only guide users towards achieving a specific goal (e.g., buying a plane ticket, receiving a test report), but can also switch contexts when a user sends an unexpected response. A well-trained bot can answer most of the basic questions its users have, leaving your human agents free to deal with the more complex and nuanced questions.

2. How much yardstick do you have to manipulate?

Most of the free bot options have a limit on the number of users. These bots are not trained with personalized data and may not be able to answer detailed questions about your company or your products. This limits the number of questions you can answer yourself.

If your business appeals to a large audience, it makes sense to invest in a paid chat bot that answers most everyday questions and supports many users at the same time.

Choosing a non-scalable option when you have to deal with a large crowd can lead to terrible results and unhappy customers. Go ahead and choose an option that suits the size of your audience base.

3. Is cross-platform support important to you or do you only need a single platform presence?

Most free chat bots give you the option to install the bot on a single platform like Facebook Messenger or your website.

According to this Global Web Index report, the average person has at least 7 social media accounts. Therefore, your company must have multiple networks at all times.

It is important that your company can respond to urgent inquiries on many digital platforms 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A fully paid chat bot platform can ensure that multiple profiles are constantly monitored. If you want to know more about Macro Software check out our latest blogs

4. Would you like to offer personalized answers?

Due to the generally limited functionality of free chat bots with back-end integrations, it is difficult to receive personalized responses. At best, these bots allow you to add some basic FAQs, but cannot connect to your existing database.

Paid chat bots can contextualize responses and incorporate your CRM and custom data using back-end integrations.

Suppose it's a bank. There are endless combinations of queries between sending notifications to customers, providing balance information, providing credit report updates, and paying bills to help customers with simple transactions.

5. Do you want smart AI bots that have been trained beforehand or do you want to start over?

A free chatbot does not provide any pre-trained data based on your business needs as it is just a ready-to-use solution. You start from nowhere. A paid chat bot can help you get to market faster with a central data corpus that has already been trained with years of data.

✨ For example:

Future Pay increased its stake by 30% by integrating Haptik's quiz bot into its digital wallet app. The bot is part of our Concierge Bot SDK, which contains over 40 bots that have been pre-trained with chat data for over 4 years. .

When KLM Airlines launched its Facebook bot, there was an increase in customer inquiries due to the high level of acceptance of the bot. The bot's AI has learned from the actions of various human agents and offers suggestions for how to respond to human agents. Over 50% of the inquiries are now answered with the help of AI. The bot's ability to automatically answer repetitive user queries enables agents to solve more complex tasks, resulting in a better user experience.