Make Versus Buy: Finding the Right Conversational Automation Solution for Your Brand

Consumers have high expectations when it comes to interacting with brands and businesses. In today’s digital world, they demand 24/7 assistance in sectors such as retail, healthcare, banking and finance. Approximately 74% of consumers are using conversational assistants for researching or buying products or services. In addition, a recent survey reported that 82% of respondents acknowledged that they have engaged with a chatbot before. Of those respondents, 70% said the chatbot answered “all” or “most” of their questions to their satisfaction.

Because of this high demand, chatbots are increasing in popularity among businesses and consumers. The conversational ai revolution has taken hold.

The predicted growth of conversational automation

According to Insider Intelligence, a research authority on digital transformation, nearly 40% of internet users worldwide actually prefer interacting with chatbots to get the answers they need quickly, at any time of the day or night. By 2024, it’s predicted that consumer retail spend via chatbots worldwide will reach $142 billion—up from just $2.8 billion in 2019. And with major industry sectors turning to digital technology, the popularity and prevalence of conversational automation will likely increase in the next few years.

Your customers are ready for chatbots, and your business should be ready, too. Well-integrated and highly personalized conversational automation experiences can help your business stand out from the competition and bring new experiences to delight your existing customers and prospects. Botco.ai, a conversational marketing platform enabling meaningful and intelligent conversations between businesses and their customers, can help you determine the best way to take advantage of the technology.

Corporate conversational AI for your business

When trying to determine the right conversational automation solution for your brand, the goal of discussing the pros and cons of potential chatbot providers is rather cut and dry—implement the best solution to tackle your organization’s challenge. And it’s inevitable during these discussions that there is always one individual who poses the question: Why can’t we just build a chatbot ourselves?

Botco.ai helps companies in a variety of industry sectors to make the process easy, as well as create the perfect conversational platform that aligns with your business goals. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Botco.ai develops chatbots that have the capacity for learning, reasoning and understanding. Each chatbot interaction improves its ability to understand a user’s intent while delivering an exceptional conversational experience.

So, if you’re considering a chatbot for your business, this is the blog for you! We’ll cover four main factors to help guide you in your decision—the business challenge, tech fluency and integration, budget and the timeline for deployment.

Identifying your business challenge

First and foremost, it’s imperative to identify and define your specific business challenge. What is it exactly that you want a chatbot to do for your business? What are the pain points it will alleviate? What are the goals it should achieve?

For many businesses, it’s the concierge-style of task fulfillment where chatbots can offer the most benefit. For others, conversational automation can give business owners back their time—time they can then spend focusing more on operational objectives. And even for others, it’s all about brand loyalty and customer service, and so much more.

Conversational Automation is an excellent tool to engage users, deliver immersive customer experiences, alleviate administrative tasks, increase traffic-to-lead rates and address customer inquiries. Conversational AI reduces costs by automating repetitive customer questions and help scale your business without increasing headcount or budgets. They can also collect feedback, track purchasing patterns and analyze consumer behaviors, which in turn help companies to better market their services or products and expand their reach. 

Botco.ai makes it easy for companies of all sizes to deploy a corporate chatbot. Customized for your company and industry vertical, Botco.ai develops and connects an AI-driven virtual agent to your existing website, EHR system or CRM software to not only deliver a rich experience, but to address your business challenge.

Recognizing the challenge(s) impeding your business is essential if your company is to continue to grow and thrive. So, if you can’t really nail down exactly what your business challenge is, this is a case of a solution seeking a problem and might not be as useful an application as you may think. By identifying exactly what your business challenge is, the more successful the conversational AI solution will ultimately be.

Tech fluency and integration

It’s important to remember that conversational AI is only as smart as the technology behind it. If you build your own conversational automation, it’s very likely that you will encounter many obstacles during the process. Your staff will need to be fluent in the technology you’re building. 

Whether you utilize standard conversational automation frameworks currently on the market or create a chatbot completely from scratch, organizations should examine a number of factors that could make a crucial impact on the overall success of the project. Aside from having the required resources and user experience, IT specialists and project managers should understand that the initiative will involve multiple components, depending on the complexity of the business-use case. This includes:

• a natural language processing (NLP) engine that has the ability to interact with end-users, as well as understand and answer questions
• machine-learning capability powered by AI
• access to and management of a linguistic corpus (a vast collection of naturally occurring examples of language stored electronically)
• cybersecurity features to ensure authentication, user management, HIPAA compliance and data protection
• APIs and connectors to manage the integration with your organization’s applications 

The biggest risk to building your own conversational automation is the wasted time and money, especially if you don’t know what to expect or you don’t have a firm grasp on the multiple components to make it successful, both in the short term and long term. Building chatbots from scratch likely is not the core competency of your organization. When investing in chatbots and conversational automation, it’s best to partner with an expert in that area of technology.

Botco.ai takes the guesswork out of the equation and easily manages these complex components and any other technological obstacles so your company’s IT staff or engineering team can focus on their core competencies. For example, many companies that build their own chatbots are not HIPAA compliant. This puts healthcare organizations at great risk when not having the capability to keep data and privacy secure. With Botco.ai as your chatbot provider, privacy breaches and security risks are averted. 

 

Establishing the budget

While it may be tempting to build your own conversational automation, you’ll also likely have to outsource highly skilled tech specialists as you build out your conversational AI platform when you encounter software and integration challenges to make sure it’s all compatible with your existing tech stack.

In addition, there’s a multitude of conversational intricacies that you likely may not have even thought of as you’re building your own conversational automation. While you can certainly learn these intricacies over time, Botco.ai’s vast experience in a number of industry verticals and niche markets streamlines the process, eliminating any downtime or need for additional funding. 

At Botco.ai, every conversational automation proposal includes an ROI calculation for the potential client. Why? If we can’t demonstrate a significant ROI on the deal, we shouldn’t do business together. It’s that simple.

If you’re considering conversational automation for your business, you likely already know that automating up to 80% of inquiries through your company’s corporate website will save you both time and money. Consider going with an experienced chatbot service provider to not only ensure success, but to make sure the project is completed on time and on budget, right from the start. It can be expensive to learn hard lessons. We’ve all heard the phrase ‘time is money’…which is why it’s important to use both wisely.

The timeline for deployment

Sooner rather than later is not merely a mantra, but a solid deployment strategy. The longer it takes for your company to build your own conversational automation, the more money it costs. 

Time to market is not only important, but a big game changer. Botco.ai’s conversational automation platform is typically deployed between 4-6 weeks, as opposed to 6-12 months when companies build their own. With Botco.ai, you have access to a dedicated team that’s already built a multitude of chatbot experiences similar to your company’s existing business challenges or for your particular vertical cluster.

Delivering a user-friendly experience, Botco.ai’s customizable conversational automation solution provides a training module within the app that allows you to enter inputs coming in from users, which in turn improve your chatbot. And with Botco.ai’s comprehensive onboarding and training, dedicated tech support, and post-deployment maintenance that watches for conversational insights and visualizes results within a dashboard, your company gains a built-in team to serve all of your conversational automation needs. Additionally, Botco.ai works with the technology your business already has in place. Essentially integrating with a company’s existing tech stack, Botco.ai delivers a seamless experience without having to switch out platforms. 

With over 400 platforms built so far and counting, Botco.ai has ironed out all the glitches and even the customer conversations you haven’t thought of yet, saving you and your company time, money and unnecessary frustration. From the initial consultation and build, to integration and testing, through the launch and post-deployment, Botco.ai provides excellent customer service to help your business achieve its goals. By leveraging the cumulative knowledge of Botco.ai’s dedicated team, your business is guaranteed to experience positive results and fast ROI.

Learn more and get started today

Forward-thinking businesses, brands and organizations across a wide swathe of industry sectors are increasingly adopting virtual agents and connecting AI-driven chatbot platforms to their websites. If you’re ready to adopt AI-driven automated conversation for your business, get started today!

Botco.ai has many use cases that illustrate to potential clients where they can expect to see similar results, whether that’s to generate leads, increase conversions, automate time-consuming tasks, or answer general questions. Discover the benefits of investing in Botco.ai’s accessible AI-powered chatbots to deliver ROI-driving customer service, support and so much more.

Contact Botco.ai to develop the right conversational AI solution for your brand. If you’d like to learn how to integrate automation and AI technology into your growing organization or to see a product demo from Botco.ai, schedule a call with our team or email us at info@botco.ai. Discover more best practices for chatbot success at https://botco-2020-dev.icmcdev.com.