Small businesses are on the rise these days, and they're responsible for creating jobs, boosting the local economy, and bringing innovative solutions to the market.
However, they also face unique challenges, often operating with limited resources, tight budgets, and a constant need to find ways to work smarter. That’s where chatbots come in – offering affordable, round-the-clock sales, marketing, and service support.
So, in this Chatling article, we’ll explore the best small business chatbots and why they matter for small businesses.
What Are Chatbots for Small Businesses?
Small businesses are constantly fielding customer questions, comments, and concerns—and with limited resources, it can be challenging to manage.
Chatbots allow small businesses to offload some of these interactions to technology, dramatically increasing efficiency and reducing labor costs. There are tons of use cases for small business chatbots, including:
- Scheduling appointments
- Answering FAQs (e.g., “Are you open?”)
- Collecting leads
- Helping customers find what they’re looking for
- Upselling and cross-selling products
- Taking orders
With chatbots, small businesses can automate conversations to serve their customers better without hiring extra staff or putting in extra hours. The benefits can be dramatic—Chatling helps small businesses fully automate 53% of customer interactions.
The Importance of Using Chatbots for Small Business
24x7 Availability
Around-the-clock availability is a constant challenge for small businesses. Chatbots work tirelessly, ensuring your customers always receive assistance, no matter the time of day or night. With this, customers can receive immediate answers to their questions or resolve issues even during non-working hours, as they are available 24/7.
Assist Screen Website Visitors
For small businesses, manually assisting every website visitor can be a time-consuming and resource-draining challenge. Chatbots can respond immediately to visitors’ inquiries, offering information assistance or guiding them through the website. This not only helps in retaining visitors' attention but also aids in collecting valuable data for lead generation.
Save on Support Costs
Providing customer support through human agents can be costly, particularly when considering the expenses of maintaining a support team around the clock. By integrating chatbots into your support processes, small businesses can efficiently save on support costs as these digital assistants can work 24/7 without needing rest or benefits.
Criteria To Consider When Choosing A Chatbot for Your Small Business
Learning Capabilities
When selecting a chatbot for your small business, consider its ability to learn and adapt. A chatbot that can learn from previous interactions and user behavior becomes more effective over time. This means it can offer increasingly personalized and accurate responses, improving user satisfaction and engagement.
It's like having a chatbot that gets smarter with every conversation, making it an invaluable asset for your small business.
Chatling chatbots can be fed with information from your website or sitemap URL. You can also upload documents like PDF or Microsoft Word files or manually enter text.
Your chatbot will use all this information to consistently improve its responses, ensuring that the answers provided are accurate and relevant. This makes your chatbot a valuable resource that draws from a variety of sources.
Analyze Conversations
A chatbot with robust conversation analysis capabilities can provide valuable insights into customer preferences, behaviors, and pain points. It should be able to track and evaluate customer interactions, identifying frequently asked questions and common issues.
Chatling allows you to view and monitor all customer conversations with the chatbot. This feature is invaluable as it helps you understand your customers' specific needs and queries. By examining these conversations, you can identify common issues, frequently asked questions and areas where the chatbot can further enhance its responses.
Ease of Integration
The chatbot you choose should seamlessly work with your existing systems, website, and other communication channels. Look for a chatbot solution that easily integrates with popular platforms and doesn't require complex coding.
Customization
Every small business is unique, and the ability to tailor a chatbot to your specific needs is crucial. When selecting a chatbot for your small business, consider the level of customization it offers. A highly customizable chatbot enables you to create a chatbot that aligns with your brand's identity, tone, and style.
Best Chatbots for Small Businesses
Let’s explore some of the best chatbot options tailored to the specific needs of small businesses.
Check out the top contenders below:
- Chatling
- ProProfs Chatbot
- ChatBot
- ManyChat
- Flow XO
- ActiveChat
- Botsify
1. Chatling
Chatling is an AI chatbot solution that simplifies the training and implementation of an AI chatbot on any small business website.
Train your chatbot on websites, FAQs, knowledge bases, documents, and text inputs to ensure accurate, round-the-clock responses to customer inquiries. Create bots for customer service, gather leads, onboard new customers, and more to maximize limited resources.
Key Features
- Intuitive Training: Simply connect your chatbot to data sources like websites, sitemaps, and documents (DOCs, PDFs, TXTs, etc.) and watch as it trains in minutes.
- Conversational AI: Responds to natural language questions conversationally using advanced language models. Understands context, misspellings, synonyms, and more.
- Analytics: Track bot performance and common customer questions to better understand your target market.
- Simple integration: Connect your chatbot to your small business website through native integrations with WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, and PrestaShop.
- API: Connect to third-party services through our API.
- Collect leads: Give visitors the information they need when they need it. Keep them on your site and transform them into leads.
- Multilingual support: Answer customer questions in any language.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Ease of use
- 24/7 availability
- Customization
- Improved customer support
- AI capabilities
- Seamless integration
- Competitive pricing
Cons
- No live chat available yet
2. ProProfs Live Chat
ProProfs Live Chat is a simple live chat software that comes packages with a basic chatbot builder.
ProProfs allows you to create rule-based chatbots with a visual builder or by altering templates to fit your needs. Chatbots can be configured to recommend products, answer FAQs, provide support, and collect customer feedback.
Key Features
- Chatbot Templates: Pre-built and custom chatbot templates that can be used to create rule-based bots.
- Drag & Drop Builder: Easy to use drag and drop builder to customize the look and feel of your chatbots.
- Reports & Analytics: Generate advanced reports and analytics that provide insights into how chatbots perform.
Pricing
ProPros Live Chat offers a free plan for one user, including its chatbot feature.
A Team (2+ users) plan caters to businesses with more staff. It comes with features for scheduling, hours, knowledge bases, FAQs, and more.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Customization
- Enhanced customer engagement
- In-depth reports and analytics
- Ease of integration
- Support beyond business hours
Cons
- Pricing for teams is quite expensive
- Learning curve
3. ChatBot
ChatBot is a chatbot builder with an intuitive UI, visual builder, and AI capabilities in beta testing.
It features a drag-and-drop builder that enables business owners with no technical experience to create and manage their chatbots. Dynamic responses (images, carousels, buttons, and quick replies) and natural language processing (NLP) are also available.
Key Features
- Visual Builder: No-code builder opens up a world of possibilities for small businesses, making the creation of interactive chatbot experiences a breeze.
- Dynamic Responses: Provide customers with various responses to their inquiries on the platform, including images, carousels, buttons, and quick replies.
- Collect Data: As customers interact with your chatbot, it automatically gathers essential data that provides insights into their preferences and needs.
Pricing
ChatBot offers four plans—Starter ($52/month), Team ($142/month), Business ($424/month), and Enterprise (custom).
Higher-tier plans offer more chatbots and monthly chats, along with access to advanced features like dynamic responses and onboarding.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- 24/7 availability
- Data collection
- Customization
- No coding required
Cons
- The initial setup learning curve
- Limited complexity
- Integration challenges
4. ManyChat
ManyChat empowers small businesses to harness the power of chat marketing to drive increased sales and conversions.
The program allows small business owners to create Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and SMS chatbots. You can build funnels for discounts, rewards, cart abandonment, announcements, product releases, etc.
Key Features
- Multichannel: Connect with customers on the most popular messaging apps.
- Integrations: Integrate with a range of applications, including Google Sheets, Zapier, HubSpot, Mailchimp, PayPal, and many others.
- Automatic Replies: Initiate instant responses to every message, reaction, or mention, ensuring your customers are captivated promptly.
Pricing
Manychat offers a free plan that offers access to basic features.
Upgrade to Pro for $15 per month to unlock all advanced features. For businesses looking to take automation to the next level, the Premium plan, with custom pricing, offers the expertise of an automation expert.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Lead generation
- Seamless integration
- Automatic replies
- Easy to use
Cons
- Advanced features are only accessible through paid subscriptions
- Learning curve
5. Flow XO
Flow XO offers small businesses a powerful automation tool to create sophisticated AI chatbots easily.
The platform excels in lead generation, with responses recorded in real-time. Flow XO also offers an array of customization options, including the ability to inject a bit of humor or personality into your chatbots.
Key Features
- Routing: Routing messages to the right agent or team based on content, context, and customer behavior.
- Collect Information: Collect customer information using questions with responses recorded to your database or CRM.
- Answer FAQs: Automatically answer frequently asked questions from customers.
Pricing
Flow XO offers a free plan with access to 500 interactions monthly.
If you want more advanced features, you can opt for the Standard plan, which is available at $19 per month. This plan provides unlimited access to all the features and includes 5000 interactions, support for 15 bots, collaboration for up to 5 team members, and access to 3 months of logs.
In case you need more capacity, Flow XO offers cost-effective add-ons. You can pay $10 monthly to add five more bots or active flows or $25 per month for an extra 25,000 interactions.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Versatile automation
- Integration options
- Human handoff
- Live chat
- Pre-filtering leads
- Virtual welcome mat
Cons
- Limited free plan
- Learning curve
- Additional costs for more features
- Requires time and effort to set up
6. ActiveChat
ActiveChat is an on-premise chatbot-building solution that allows businesses to create, deploy, and manage bots.
It features a visual builder that allows for all kinds of use cases—lead generation, support, FAQ responses, payment processing, and more. Since your data is helpful in your business network, there’s also the bonus of data privacy and security.
Key Features
- Conversational AI: ActiveChat’s AI-powered bots provide conversational experiences that feel close to human.
- No-Code Builder: Create and customize your chatbot with the drag-and-drop interface, enabling your customers to find what they need quickly.
- SMS Automation: Enhance your customer service by engaging with clients via text messages.
Pricing
ActiveChat offers two licensing options:
- Company License ($995): Designed for businesses and end-users, this license covers all aspects of building and operating multiple chatbot projects within a single company.
- Developer License ($4,995): Intended for developers and agencies, this license provides the flexibility to develop the platform, add new features, and resell it to other businesses.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Cost-efficient licensing
- Comprehensive features
- Customization
- Private cloud or on-premises option
- High response rates
Cons
- License can be costly
- It may require additional integrations
- Complex to use
7. Botsify
Botsify is an AI chatbot platform designed to supercharge small businesses.
With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, you can create a sophisticated chatbot in minutes without any coding experience.
Key Features
- Automate sales: Automate interactions transform ordinary web forms into engaging conversations and effortlessly schedule meetings and sales calls.
- Boost Revenue and Conversations: AI-powered chatbots can help you expand your customer base, increase conversions, and drive revenue growth like never before.
- Smooth Customer Journey: Proactively engage with visitors, convert them into paying customers, and automatically qualify potential leads.
Pricing
Botsify offers three plans—Do it yourself ($49/month), Done for you ($149/month), and Custom.
Do it Yourself offers two chatbots and 5,000 users per month, and Done for You offers five chatbots and unlimited users.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Lead generation
- Sales automation
- Boosts revenue
- Smooth customer journey
- White-label option
Cons
- Pricing complexity
- Learning curve
- Limited free plan
Try the Best Chatbot for Small Business Today!
Small businesses are starting to realize the immense value of chatbots in streamlining customer interactions and driving growth.
At Chatling, we make AI chatbots accessible with our easy-to-use platform that requires no coding or technical skills. Our chatbots can help small businesses engage customers, convert them into paying customers, and collect leads. Just link your data sources, and your chatbot will train itself in minutes.
Get started for free today.