Conversation Bots
What are conversation bots?
Conversation bots, also known as chatbots, provide automated responses to questions and/or statements provided by the user. The use cases for these span across multiple industries. For example, customers of a coffee shop could place their order by saying “I would like to order 1 large latte and 1 espresso for pickup at 8am”, without needing to fill out an online form or wait in a phone queue. Another example could be an internal data reporting bot that can answer questions like “What were my sales figures for last month?” or “What was my most popular product last week?”
How can they be built?
Conversation bots can be built to suit your needs, with a mix of voice and text inputs and responses:
| Voice input | Text input | Voice response | Text response | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Option A | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Option B | N | Y | Y | Y |
| Option C | Y | N | Y | Y |
| Option D | Y | Y | N | Y |
| Option E | Y | Y | Y | N |
| Option F | Y | N | N | Y |
| Option G | Y | N | Y | N |
| Option H | N | Y | N | Y |
| Option I | N | Y | Y | N |
What are the benefits to my business?
Conversation bots can be set up on your website, messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, Kik, Slack or Twilio SMS as well as your mobile apps. This provides another way for your customers to engage with your business. You can easily automate simpler interactions like booking appointments or ordering products from stock, which frees up your customer service staff to deal with more complex conversations. Conversation bots can be used to inform decisions about how you speak to your customers in terminology they expect. The main takeaways from why you should be running a conversation bot are:
- Easily automate simpler customer interactions
- Build up complexity over time to provide an even richer experience to your customers
- Free up customer service staff to deal with more complex conversations
How much does a conversation bot cost?
As a guide, here are a couple of examples:
Handle appointment bookings via your website (text only input and response)
- One-off setup and configuration of conversation bot framework: £799
- Setup and configuration of specific conversation bot – appointment booking: £499
- Integration with your existing appointment system: £699
- On-going operational costs: £0.01 per text request
Handle appointment bookings via your website (text and voice input and response)
- One-off setup and configuration of conversation bot framework: £899
- Setup and configuration of specific conversation bot – appointment booking: £999
- Integration with your existing appointment system: £699
- On-going operational costs: £0.01 per text request and £0.04 per text request
Q&A via Facebook Messenger (text input and response)
- One-off setup and configuration of conversation bot framework: £899
- Setup and configuration of specific conversation bot – Q&A: £699
- Population of existing list of questions and answers: £299
- On-going operational costs: £0.01 per text request
These examples are just a guide and actual cost will depend on your website, the access available to change it and how detailed your conversation bot requirements are.