7 Benefits of Implementing Custom Chatbots for Your Business

There are chatbots and there are custom chatbots. 

The latter are the ones that truly exude the capacity of meeting your business needs and addressing your pain points with innovative solutions. 

You hear it all the time — Chatbots are more advanced. 

They’re more personalized. 

They’re omnichannel. 

They’re multi-lingual. 

But what you don’t hear is that all these functionalities require customizations. 

A custom chatbot is a chatbot solution tailored to a business’ needs based on its goals, size, and use-cases. Even the chatbot pricing for a custom chatbot will depend on the personalized solution delivered by the vendor to the company. 

A custom chatbot is out there more than you think. It can have automated conversations at scale and is helping enterprises engage customers to new heights. 

Let’s take a deeper look at why custom chatbots take you a step closer to achieving business growth. 

7 Benefits of Implementing Custom Chatbots for Businesses 

Customization in chatbots unlocks several benefits that you otherwise won't get to enjoy. Here, we have listed the top 7 benefits of implementing custom chatbots for your business.

1. Personalized Onboarding 

Chatbot technology is still in its nascent stage. Brands are navigating around the tool and learning how they can prove to be lucrative for them. Hence, it makes sense for an enterprise to fully understand what type of solution they’re looking at before integrating it into their tech stack. 

Before implementing the tool, brands first need a walkthrough of how bots are built on the bot-builder, how they engage visitors, and how they will benefit them in streamlining business processes.

If you choose to opt for a fixed plan, you will have to do everything by yourself — learn about the solution, understand what use-cases you should implement, figure out the integrations you’ll need, and the type of bot you’ll need, learn how to build a chatbot, etc.

But that doesn’t have to be the case with a custom chatbot solution.

But if you choose to opt for a custom chatbot, you’ll get a personalized onboarding experience. An experienced professional will sit with you and fill you in on the knowledge gaps and guide you through the whats and hows of the chatbot technology.

An education-first approach will help you get acquainted with an industry that you know nothing about and enable you to make a well-informed decision. 

2. Implementation Assistance 

As compared to many other automation tools, chatbots are fairly easy to understand and get started. But if you’re planning to implement them for your enterprise and expect to customize the bot for it to perform many functions, you will need assistance.

Custom chatbot development comes with the benefit of end-to-end service. That means the chatbot developers assist you in designing a tailor-made solution. Your custom chatbot provider first gauges your business needs looks for internal and external communication gaps and suggests solutions accordingly. Let’s take a look at these steps in detail.

a. Identifying Business Requirements

Once you share your pain points, the vendors will identify what type of solution you need. They will decide whether you need an 

• AI solution or a rule-based solution 

• Multilingual or a monolingual bot 

• Omnichannel or a single-channel solution

They will also examine your use-case and the integrations that your chatbot requires. 

With their set of expertise, they will collect the required specifications before designing the solution for you.

b. Building the Conversational UI

What’s in the script, you ask?

Everything.

It ultimately decides how to engage your audience. The scripting process may look straightforward, but chatbot conversations are quite layered. While your customers know they’re talking to a bot, they still expect some level of a humane touch. There has to be a story and flow in the conversation while it fulfills its objectives.

Thanks to custom chatbot development, you can hand over the responsibility of designing the conversational UI to your chatbot provider. They will prepare a precise interaction flow with the required built-in integrations that will drive the conversation to a positive outcome.

If not for custom development, then you’ll have to go for the pre-built template that aids with your script. But it will lack the personalized approach and will require numerous modifications before deployment.

c. Deployment and Testing 

While deployment is a one-time activity, testing isn’t. Your chatbot needs to go through rigorous testing and to do so, it is essential to have a diverse team that conducts real-user testing. Custom chatbot developers include this service where they test your bot and make revisions to the NLU (Natural Language Understanding) components if required to make it more accurate.

They will also closely monitor the initial interactions and gather the necessary feedback to understand how well the bot is engaging the users.

3. Prioritized Support 

No matter how seamlessly your chatbot is performing, you’d still want constant support for minor tweaks or additional integrations or channels. And you won’t get that if you opt for a DIY solution. 

A chatbot solution that doesn’t prioritize your support shouldn’t be on your list. For an enterprise, you need a dedicated support manager or a customer success executive who is handling your account and is in constant touch with you about the progress. 

Your chatbot is constantly evolving and learning with each interaction. You will keep finding improvements and alternative flows. For this, you need a vendor that keeps your requirements at the forefront and acts on your modifications at the earliest. 

Not to forget a customer success manager reflects on your performance on a regular basis. They understand when you need to optimize your flows and elevate your ROI. So even if you’re a chatbot pro, you need some developer expertise and support to:

• Get help in connecting and debugging APIs and channels. 

• Receive technical support for error messages. 

Clearly how much developer support you’ll need will depend on the platform and complexity of your chatbot project. 

4. Custom Integrations

We’ve probably mentioned integration again and again. But that’s because it holds the utmost importance if you want to ensure your custom chatbot solution works. 

Think of a chatbot as a building supported by pillars of integrations. One pillar falls and boom, your chatbot falls too. SaaS tools today are incomplete without integrations as they directly impact customer experiences. 

And these integrations will be different for each company. They will depend on the business goals and use-cases. 

And that’s where a custom chatbot solution benefits you. You opt for a custom plan and you get to decide which integration you want to use as compared to a fixed plan where only limited integrations are offered. Most chatbot providers have an arsenal of third-party solutions and systems such as CRM, accounting systems, marketing analytics, payment gateways, etc. 

With a custom chatbot, you also have the benefit of integrating native integrations. So, if you want to integrate your live chat system into a chatbot, it can very much be a possibility. 

5. White label/Custom Branding Options 

A lot of brands don’t want to compromise on their brand voice or image while integrating a third-party tool. They don’t want their customers to open their chat widgets on a website and see that the widget is ‘powered by’ a third brand. Especially for enterprises. 

Custom chatbot solutions often include white-label options where you can use all the technical abilities of a third-party vendor but retain your branding on the chatbot.

White labels are quite prominent in software solutions because not every brand has the resources to develop tech from scratch. 

Essentially, what you can do if you opt for a custom chatbot solution is purchase a white label chatbot and present it to your end-consumer under your own brand name. When your clients and potential users see your name on the software, it builds a sense of trust and makes your brand more credible. 

This arrangement allows you to focus on your core competency and outsource the technical expertise to a third party. It also helps you become a chatbot reseller, target new markets, and add an integral product to your tech arsenal without too much of an investment. 

WotNot offers one of the best white label reseller programs, where you can access our features, rely on us for backend support, and sell the chatbot tool in disguise as your own. 

6. Competitive Advantage 

One thing you can be assured of with custom chatbots is that you’ll always have options and the power to choose. You get to decide what channels you want to deploy your bot. You get to pick your bot language, and of course, you get to decide what integrations will go into your solution. 

Since all these decisions are taken to specifically address your business needs, it is less likely that your competitors will have the exact same solution. 

Chatbots also play an influential role in personalization which drives a brand’s competitive advantage. The custom chatbot flows offer companies the opportunity to differentiate their business workflows and service experiences. Some of the top ways you can achieve a competitive advantage via custom chatbots are:

a. Omnichannel Conversational Marketing

While websites remain a prominent platform in deploying chatbots, a lot of social media handles and instant messaging apps like WhatsApp are gaining traction for bot deployment. This is giving brands quite the edge. 

For example, Gamescom built a WhatsApp chatbot to provide customer service on the go for its annual event. It is how it connected with customers and guided them through the entire event - from assisting them on how to reach there to the event itinerary. It was definitely a move that helped them stand out and get people talking. 

b. Streamlining Internal Workflows

Not a lot has been said about how brands can use chatbots internally. But if you get it right, your custom chatbot can be the company assistant that new employees seek and a communication tool to bridge the gap between different departments. 

c. Speeding Customer Support

Did you know that 73% of companies with an above-average customer experience perform better than their competitors? Customers need support and they need it quickly. This experience is majorly driven by support and support is majorly driven by chatbots. A custom chatbot that facilitates answers to FAQs, or hands over the conversation to agents in real-time can work wonders for your customer support. 

7. Multilingual Deployment 

As you grow your business into new regions and countries, language is an obvious barrier. So what do you do?

You can go for hiring a multilingual team but that’s quite a hassle. It would probably turn out to be an expensive affair and it’s also difficult to find professionals that are proficient in multiple languages.

You can instead simply deploy custom multilingual bots on your platforms. Multilingual bots not only enhance customer experiences with an extremely personalized approach but also allow you to break barriers between you and your customers and boost your sales.

Most NLP integrations provide options to build bots in more than 20 languages. Since support is becoming more customer-centric, custom multilingual bots help you go a step further and deliver a localized experience that truly makes the customer cared for.

Conclusion

Chatbots are good. They provide numerous benefits and help businesses perform more efficiently. But in a highly competitive environment, it is all about going the extra mile and designing memorable experiences for customers. And to do so, you need to add the extra pinch. 

Custom chatbots are your answer if you want unlimited applications and organize complex workflows. As you might’ve noticed, custom chatbot development is less product-oriented and more service-oriented. Along with the product, you’re also getting assistance from professionals who know the nuances of the technology and have relevant experience in deploying successful chatbot solutions for different industries. 

So if you’re looking to build a custom chatbot solution, you’re at the right place. You can trust us to deliver an end-to-end solution  — from identifying your business needs to deploying and testing your chatbot. Talk to us to understand more about our custom chatbot solutions. Or just schedule a demo to get things started.