How to Evaluate Chatbot Companies

Inbenta discusses how to evaluate chatbot companies so you can choose the best one.

With the growing popularity of smart automation and bots, more and more businesses are interested in developing a chatbot of their own.

Looking for a reliable software vendor can be challenging, so here’s a list of the main criteria to take into consideration when choosing a chatbot development company.

What Are the Different Types of Chatbot Companies?

As with any important project, you need to understand what different options are, i.e. chatbot companies, are available on the market and assess the suppliers you’ve short-listed to ensure you pick the right fit for your business.

Chatbot Development Platforms

A chatbot development platform is a platform that allows you to build your own chatbot without the need for developers to be involved.

When you subscribe to a chatbot development platform, such as Inbenta for example, you can access a back office that enables you to create the user interface, a knowledge base and dialogs, as well as allowing you to manage integrations with third-party technologies.

Natural Language Understanding Platforms

This is the linguistic technology platform that powers a chatbot in order for it to answer users’ queries. It is separate from the development platform and has to be combined with the framework to get a viable product.

Many bot providers use symbolic AI to power their natural language processing (NLP) technology. That piece of technology sits behind every chatbot that many chatbot providers deploy and enables it to understand the intent behind the questions.

To draw a parallel, if a chatbot was a computer, the chatbot development platform would be the operating system, and the natural language understanding (NLU) platform would be the processor.

Chatbot Developers and Consulting Firms

These companies take care of a project from beginning to end and build chatbots as turn-key solutions using a chatbot development platform and an NLU platform for their customers.

Criteria for Selecting a Chatbot Company

Now that you know what different options are available, take the following criteria into consideration when selecting a chatbot company.

Ease of Use of the Developing Tool

This is the first point to consider as it is what you’ll use on a very regular basis when building your chatbot, and even afterward when managing it or developing new capabilities.

A tool that is not user-friendly and that is difficult to use will make your life a living hell, and will ultimately be the difference between maintaining and improving your chatbot or not once it’s been put into production.

You also need to think about future developments you’d like to implement and see if the platform can cater for these.

Security, Speed and Robustness

Although this is quite obvious, it is paramount to use a platform that offers the best security possible to ensure the data collected is safe.

Speed is another important criterion to factor in as you want a platform that is super-fast when using it yourself but also ensures that your users will get their answers in milliseconds, not seconds, regardless of traffic.

Dashboards and Actionable Statistics

A platform that offers an admin panel with dashboards and statistics will enable you to monitor your chatbot KPIs and make the adjustments needed in order to improve it and make it more efficient over time.

In addition to monitoring performance, a good back office should enable you to administer your bot by managing admin rights and adding or modifying content, as well as helping you identify missing content.

Criteria for Choosing an NLU Platform

If you are looking for an NLU platform, take the following criteria into consideration.

Natural Language Efficiency

What we refer to here is how the system matches answers with questions. Some technologies will need to be trained on a huge amount of data, whereas others like symbolic AI don’t need any training.

How Many Languages Are Supported

This ensures that your chatbot can answer questions in a range of languages and that you can implement it on multilingual websites.

Certain chatbots can understand 30+ languages and we’re adding more on a regular basis.

Response Time and Scalability

Once again, response time is paramount, but scalability is another important criterion to factor in.

Indeed, your chatbot may only have to manage a couple of hundred or thousand users’ requests per month at first, but you want to be sure that the technology that powers it is able to handle much more than that if needed.

Criteria for Choosing a Chatbot Developer or a Consulting Firm

Take the following criteria into consideration when selecting a chatbot developer or consulting firm.

Understanding Your Specificities

First and foremost, you want your potential chatbot developer or consulting firm to have a clear understanding of your specific use case and vertical.

This will ensure that they know what your chatbot will have to do and the developments needed in relation to your users’ expectations and best practices in your industry.

Reliability

You also obviously want your provider to be reliable – i.e. able to deliver what has been promised and on time.

Documentation and Maintenance

And finally, make sure that the chatbot developer or consulting firm you’re thinking of working with has good documentation available and is responsive for maintenance.

Clear documentation will help you understand the different functionalities of your chatbot, how they work and how to fix something by yourself.

If some kind of maintenance is needed, and it will be needed, you want your provider to be available as quickly as possible to fix a bug or make a change without having to wait for days or weeks for an issue to be fixed.

When you’re clear about what kind of solution you need, you then need to consider a few other things in order to choose your chatbot vendor.

Selecting Chatbot Companies: Other Points of Consideration

Here are some final pieces of advice for selecting the right chatbot provider.

Technology Used

We won’t even talk about keyword-based chatbots here. If you’re after an AI chatbot, you have to be aware that a lot of chatbot companies use machine learning nowadays.

Using symbolic AI to power conversational agents allows chatbots to be deployed very quickly and to be effective within a few days, without the need for them to be trained on massive amounts of data.

What Kind of Integrations Are Available

As a client, you want a chatbot that can seamlessly integrate with your current tools and software ecosystem rather than having to adapt your existing tools to your new chatbot.

So, make sure you ask the right questions right from the beginning and check that the chatbot companies you short-list already have existing integrations with your current apps.

Check Feedback and Testimonials From Other Clients

Finally, you’ll want to check the reputation of the chatbot companies you pre-select by having a look at who their clients are, what their customers have to say about them, if they have a stable relationship with them throughout the years and if they develop several products for the same client, for example.

All of these elements will help you make an informed decision and avoid bad surprises after the deal is closed.

Author: Robyn Coppell