The Top 8 Chatbots For Your Website (2023)

Image: Pixabay

Chatbots are completely changing the way organizations interact with their customers: with companies increasingly doing business on a global scale, these bots provide a convenient (albeit virtual) alternative to human customer service, negating the need to hire support agents across many different time zones. Thanks to this ever-improving tech, 24/7 customer service is more achievable than ever.

Chatbots don’t just simplify information access, either —  thanks to advancements in AI, some bots are more than capable of answering complex queries, too; all without any human input. Whether you’re just researching chatbot software or you’re hoping to implement one right away, here are our top eight picks of the best chatbots on the market.

First, though, for anyone unfamiliar with the chabot phenomenon, we’ll define precisely what a chatbot is. 

What is a chatbot?

Simply put, a chatbot is a program that simulates human conversation. They are designed to respond to users’ queries on websites and apps via real-time communication, like instant messaging or voice calls.

Chatbots can be helpful for all kinds of tasks, from answering simple questions to scheduling appointments and even executing tasks through automation. In the case of ecommerce, chatbots are particularly useful for providing information that customers want or need quickly and easily, like the hours of operation, the price of a product, or shipping details. 

They’re also ideal for handling low-value tasks, like relaying advice on postal delays or quickly answering common questions with a quick, concise reply. Advanced, AI-powered bots are great for initiating conversations, too, and can prove a powerful tool for guiding your customers down your ecommerce sales funnel. 

There are three major types of chatbots: 

- Rule-based chatbots: These bots use a ‘decision tree’ of rules to determine how to respond to any given query. There’s no artificial intelligence at play here, but these bots are still an effective and inexpensive way to answer simple questions and resolve repetitive issues. 

- AI chatbots: AI chatbots are intelligent and can hold human-like conversations using NLP (natural language processing). They’re the most expensive option, but are likely to give you a good return on your investment, as they can operate more or less independently.

- Hybrid chatbots: A blend of chatbot and human input. In a hybrid bot setup, a set of rules will determine whether a support ticket is handled by a chatbot or a human agent. Typically, rule-based chatbots are used in a hybrid model. 

So, what are the best chatbots out there for your website or app?

Hubspot Chatbot

With HubSpot’s free chatbot builder software, you can lighten the load for your team. Easily create messenger bots that help you qualify leads, book meetings, provide answers to common customer support questions, and more — so your team has more time to focus on the conversations that matter most.

Crisp.chat

Crisp is an all-in-one digital marketing platform that helps you develop your brand, create engaging content and manage your online channels. Why is it featured on this list? Because it also comes with a built-in (and fully-featured) no-code chatbot builder, too!

Crisp.chat is a great choice for businesses that want to integrate a full digital marketing solution with their website, as well as make use of artificial intelligence to automate their operations. Their chatbot builder lets you create multiple bots for different departments or topics, and you can publish them to your website extremely easily. 

With Crisp, you can seamlessly create and publish content, run analytics, and optimize your campaigns — all from one integrated dashboard.

Tidio

Tidio is an all-in-one solution that offers both live chat and chatbots as part of its platform. Tidio is designed around welcoming new site visitors, determining whether a customer intends to make a purchase or requires help with a previous order, and catching users who are leaving.

Tidio’s features include real-time user monitoring, desktop and mobile apps, searchable transcripts, canned responses, and proactive messaging — where chatbots initiate a conversation with the customer. 

ProProfs Chat

ProProfs Chat is an all-in-one solution for creating your own live chat, including a fully-customizable chatbot. ProProf’s bots are more than capable of solving simple user queries, and can even gather feedback for your support and marketing teams using a post-chat survey.

ProProfs Chat’s live chat routing feature helps you to prioritize and route incoming chats to the perfect support agents, based on rules and conditions that are easy to configure. If you’d prefer to have your customers supported by a human, chats can be automatically routed to operators currently handling the least amount of chats. Want a customer to speak to a member of your team but all your agents are currently tied up? ProProf’s live chat can send them to a queue, where they’ll receive live updates on their current wait time. 

Drift

Drift’s chatbot builder helps you create engaging and conversational customer experiences. It comes with pre-built templates and integrations with tools like HubSpot, Zendesk, and Shopify, so you can get your bot up and running in no time.

Drift is a great option if you want to create a multi-channel customer service bot that responds to customer queries across different channels — like text, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and more. With this bot builder, you can qualify customer interest, share your new content, and even schedule a meeting with sales. All of this is achieved through Drift’s custom chatbot software. 

Chatra

Chatra takes the capabilities of a traditional live chat client and combines them with a powerful chatbot system. Using Chatra, you can easily automate customer conversations through triggered messages, all of which can be mapped out with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder.

Chatra’s hybrid live chat system also benefits from real-time visitor monitoring, visitor insights, end-of-chat reports, and integrations with CMS and CRM systems. 

Amazon Lex

Lex is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) solution that lets you build conversation-driven bots and apps. It has pre-built integrations with tools like Zendesk, Salesforce, and Twilio, so you can begin using it right away.

Amazon’s Lex is an incredibly powerful tool and is even capable of automatic speech recognition in any language. Your customers can communicate simply by speaking to your chatbot; and what’s more, building a chatbot on Amazon’s platform is a relatively hassle-free affair that should prove simple even to those who are new to building bots. 

Freshchat

Freshchat combines AI-powered chatbots with human service agents, allowing you to deliver efficient, reliable support around the clock.

Freshchat is an omnichannel platform capable of anticipating when customers may need help and triggering specific messages, offering proactive service, and resolving queries as quickly as possible. Freshchat’s unified messenger gives superb visibility across all channels, allowing you to efficiently respond to emails, in-app chats, live chat, and more, all from one central hub.

Chatfuel

Chatfuel’s software is designed around customer support and sales automation, with one of its key tools being an intuitive, no-code chatbot builder. Their platform uses simple, rule-based bots designed to answer the common, repetitive questions that may otherwise bog your human support agents down.

Chatfuel’s bots can be programmed to hand the conversation over to a customer service agent if special care is needed. The software is also capable of analyzing conversations, qualifying leads on the fly, and automatically booking meetings. Finding Chatfuel's bot a little too simplistic? Feel free to inject some intelligence into it by integrating your account with an AI solution such as Google’s Dialogflow. 

If you’re hoping to improve customer retention and loyalty, provide around-the-clock support and solve your customer’s issues as efficiently as possible, we’d recommend implementing a chatbot. Remember though — testing out a few options before you choose the right chat software is the most sensible approach. Don’t just take our word for it; try out a few of the options above, and see if your business could benefit from a chatbot. 

Feel free to contact us to see the unprecedented growth of your business.

---