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What’s Your Chatbot Flavor?

Sorting through a seemingly endless array of Chatbot trends

Artificial Intelligence, and chatbots, in particular, are all the rage currently. There’s no doubting that chatbots are the future of several industries with customer support at the forefront for now. Botfunded.com keeps tabs on all of the chatbot startups that are receiving funding. While some of the funding rounds have been modest, others such as the $56 Million just raised by Interactions, show just how much optimism there is on the impact and profitability of the chatbot industry. With hundreds, if not thousands of chatbot startups in the market, how does someone choose the right chatbot product to enhance their current service or business offering? Let's take a look at two major chatbot trends we're seeing today.

General or Niche?

A quick glance at the chatbot industry reveals two major trends in the capabilities of chatbots. Initially, the majority of chatbot platforms seemed to focus on providing an easy to use interface with which users could build basic support-based chatbots for their service or product. While these type of chatbots are perfect for embedding in your business website and handling basic support questions, they lack in more advanced support capabilities.Recently, chatbot platforms are sprouting up that specialize in niche support situations. For example, Troops is a chatbot startup dedicated to providing automation and assistance to sales teams using Salesforce.

At Boomtown, we are developing chatbots devoted to supporting merchant services technologies such as point-of-sale systems and credit card processors. These bots are provided to our partners with knowledge of hundreds of industry-specific questions and answers already created. Our goal is to use these chatbots to help provide the best support experience possible to small businesses all over the world that utilize these merchant services technologies. So, when trying to decide what chatbots are best for supporting you or your business, start off by figuring out the level of support you need. If you’re looking for a chatbot that answers questions about your business to website visitors, then you may be best off using a platform that allows you to build your own bots with a simple but potentially limited interface.

However, if you’re looking to automate a more advanced process like providing tech support on point-of-sale systems or enhancing your sales team, you may want to look at chatbots that are dedicated to solving more niche problems, which often come with more robust functionality.

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