Best Chatbots – Top AI Chatbot Technology in 2022

By now, you likely already know. You know that the best AI chatbots reduce operational costs and provide cost effective 24/7 availability. You’ve read it before. You’ve seen chatbot examples. Maybe you even calculated the ROI your specific company can generate by using chatbots.

Now it’s time to take the next step – choose the best chatbot platform for your website and significantly improve your customers’ and agents’ experiences. It’s time to choose a partner that will help you get there.

Today, we’ll give you a shortcut to doing just that. We’ll cover some of the best AI chatbot technology in the field, then give you some tips on how to make your final decision.

Best Chatbots in 2022: Chatbot providers that stand out from the crowd

With a wealth of AI chatbot technology in customer service, it can be hard to choose the best chatbot for your business. To help you out, we did some research for you and narrowed down the list to the top 7 performers of the year. Ready to explore the best chatbots of 2022?

Ada

Best for: Companies that want to offer a purely automated service without live chat agents to support.

Ada’s AI customer service bot helps you personalize automated customer experience. The bot relies not only on what the customer types in the chat, but also on the customer’s intent, interests and status with your company.

To give you a couple of chatbot examples; the bot can escalate the chat to the right human-centered support channel based on the customer tier (for example, free, paying, or premium). It can also identify whether a customer is eligible for a promotional offer and upsell a deal automatically. The bot can be used through mobile, social, web, SMS, or live chat. However, Ada doesn’t have a live chat offering, so if you want to be able to hand off chats to human agents when the bot can’t resolve their issue, you’ll have to invest in a separate live chat solution.

Ada’s chatbot solutions are available in 100+ languages and don’t require coding abilities, so your customer service team may be able to integrate the chatbot into your website without extra tech support. Then, Ada allows you to track customer behavior and agent performance. It’s easy to understand which answers you still need to develop and integrate in the bot, and how many agents you need to allocate to chat every shift.

Bold360

Best for: Companies that want to use a chatbot across the customer journey

Bold360 lets you serve customers with an AI bot across live chat and social media from one spot. Its customer service chatbot is driven by AI, so it can understand complex language, respond in conversational language, and remember context throughout an interaction with a customer.

The chatbot can even initiate strategic interactions with customers. For example, if you have a low-traffic website, your agents can review data about current site visitors – including the keywords they used to find the website, how long they’ve been on the site, and where they’re located – then manually select a customer to engage while they browse through your site.

If you get too much traffic to do it manually, define rules and the chatbot will automatically select the best customers to engage. The chatbot can test different elements of the invitations, from type of buyer to type of invitation, to give you data on what works best.

Comm100

Best for: Customer service teams that want to automate the majority of queries so agents can focus on higher-value customers

Comm100’s AI Chatbot is designed to automate up to 80% of frontline customer service, while retaining a high level of customer experience. Comm100 pairs natural language processing (NLP) with industry-leading functionality so that the bot can understand what a customer is trying to achieve and either help them to do it, or put them in touch with the best agent who can.

The Comm100 AI Chatbot can help customers to accomplish a range of goals such as order tracking and making payments through a suite of flexible integrations. For the conversations that bots shouldn’t handle, chats can be automatically or manually diverted to agents, such as your most important customers or high-value sales.

As well as web and in-app, the bot can be used on Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, WhatsApp for Business, SMS – and you only need to build it once rather than create a chatbot for each platform. Comm100’s intuitive user interface eliminates the need for coding experience to program and maintain your bot.

Comm100 offers iron-clad security and compliance, more than the industry standard (including for highly regulated sectors), so your customers’ sensitive information and business operations always remain safe.

eGain

Best for: Companies that want a lifelike bot to help visitors navigate a website and its products.

eGain refers to its AI customer service bot as a virtual assistant because it can take site visitors on website tours, give them links to relevant pages and help make shopping decisions. However, it can also answer questions on social media and in app. It understands text to text, speech to text, text to speech and speech to speech. Just as importantly, the use of AI enables its chatbot to understand intent and context.

Thanks to machine learning and reasoning technologies, it can escalate the conversation to the right channels. Once the conversation has escalated to a human agent, eGain automatically surfaces relevant knowledge files based on what the agent is doing and the conversation it’s handling, so it can stay focused on virtually listening to the customer. This function also supports compliance, as eGain guides agents to properly follow their industry’s rules and regulations.

Kustomer

Best for: Customer service teams that deal with simple queries in multiple languages.

Kustomer’s AI chatbot can be deployed across chat, social and messaging. They connect to your knowledge base, and include semantic search capabilities, in order to provide a wealth of accurate responses to common inquiries. It also helps you automatically recognize a customer’s language and translates your pre-written answers to that language.

When it comes time to transfer the chat to a human agent, Kustomer can either facilitate the communication by continuing to translate the conversation, or it can simply route the conversation to an agent that speaks the language, if you have one on staff.

The knowledge base is then used to surface content for agents, and to recommend responses for them to use, similarly to what is done with the bot. Finally, you get insights regarding what works and what doesn’t with your chatbot, so you can make your chatbot better the more you use it.

LivePerson

Best for: Ecommerce companies that want a bot to help drive purchases.

LivePerson’s customer service chatbot includes web messaging, social messaging, voice to messaging and email messaging, among others. You can integrate the bot with your brand’s own app, as well your CRM system, your scheduling tools and your data and inventory management tools. Building the bot is easy, as LivePerson provides a point and click interface.

The use of artificial intelligence technology enables the bot to easily understand customers’ intent which makes it easier to meet their expectations, both automatically and when the chat is escalated to human agents.

The analytics feature allows you to track customer service operations alongside marketing and sales KPIs so you can see the bot’s impact across the customer lifecycle, plus understand what you need to adjust in order to improve. LivePerson provides enterprise-grade security and compliance so it’s suitable for highly regulated industries.

Salesforce Einstein

Best for: Larger organizations that use Salesforce and have plenty of resources for bot development.

Salesforce’s Einstein’s is a CRM assistant, part of a large suite of artificial intelligence-based products aimed to help companies with customer support, marketing and sales.

If your company already uses Salesforce, the bot will connect to your database and start training. By studying your data and using natural language processing technology, it will grow to understand customers’ requests. This data is then fed into the virtual Salesforce machine, helping you receive more accurate language and issue resolution over time.

This will make it easier to automate chat operations on your website, social media platforms and via SMS. Just like with the other chatbot examples we’ve seen, over time, you’ll be able to gain insights, and even predict the best responses and actions to take, both in chat and in your other Salesforce tools.

Salesforce has made it easy to get started, with a point and click platform for building the bot. However, Einstein bots require a lot more development than the other bots in this list and have to be manually linked to the channel, so it may only be suitable for organizations with a lot of resources.

How to Choose the Best Chatbot for your Business

So now that you’ve narrowed down the list for best chatbot providers, how do you make the final decision and choose the best AI chatbot for your specific company and customers?

1. Decide your top goals

Get management together, and make it clear what you want to accomplish. Don’t just build a bot because we tell you it’s important. Make sure you’re solving real problems in your company, and that you know what KPIs you strive to achieve with a bot.

2. Learn what makes AI chatbots successful

Check out these helpful resources to make sure you make an educated decision and choose a bot that :

1. Top 10 Chatbot FAQs
2. Chatbot Dos and Don’ts: These are the Best and Worst Chatbot Practices
3. Top 10 Chatbot Fails and How to Avoid Them

3. Review chatbot examples to see what’s possible

Once you’ve narrowed down the list to your top two or three providers, check out the use cases and customer stories to see how they’ve helped other companies. If you’re still unsure what capabilities are possible, check out this list of chatbot examples from across industries [link to chatbot examples article] and get some inspiration.

4. Schedule a demo or consultation call

Most providers will be happy to answer your questions and show you how you can serve your customers better, so share your goals and ask for what you need. You can schedule a demo for Comm100’s Chatbot here.

Wrap-up

Companies are always looking to make their operations more efficient without damaging the customer experience. In a world that sometimes feels like it got turned upside down, retention is more important than ever.

To get ahead of the curve, start building your AI customer service bot as soon as possible. You don’t have to have all the possible functionality working from day one. You just need to get started. Then, gradually, keep adding more ways to delight your customers and exceed their expectations.

And who knows? Maybe a year from now, you’ll find yourself showcased on a list just like this one, as one of the top chatbot examples of 2023!

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Your business is going to grow, and your customer base will grow with it. A Comm100 AI-powered chatbot will equip you for the ride, at a price that will make your head of finance smile.

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