Designing conversational UI is a challenging task. I say this from my experience of designing a conversational AI chatbot in healthcare. From the moment I began working on it, I knew it wouldn’t be an easy feat. Questions like what kind of visual elements would I use, how can I reduce the user’s cognitive load in effort-intensive activities, were always on my mind. Prior to this, I had worked on UI design of many web and mobile apps. But none of them was as challenging as this one.The most challenging part for me was designing to handle the human-machine interaction. Each user is different. Unlike in websites/apps, where users can simply browse and leave, the chatbot users open the chat window to interact. They come with all sorts of questions- vague /smart /genuine /rogue /irrelevant and (sometimes) absurd. When they type a query, they expect the conversational UI to adapt to their needs–digest questions and construct intelligent answers/follow up questions.
The uncertainty of the usage makes the design process complex. Unlike websites/applications, there are no specific UI design principles for designing conversational interfaces. It might appear as a small thing but the limited knowledge on the UI design patterns for healthcare chatbots ultimately affects the customer experience.
So, what can a designer do to make sure that the conversational AI solution caters to most, if not every, user persona? I can share a few suggestions. Since I worked on a healthcare chatbot, most of my suggestions would be about best design practices for healthcare conversational user interface.
Chatbots are now making their way into healthcare solutions like patient engagement solutions, handling emergency situations or first aid, medication management, and so on. To create a great user experience, it’s crucial to pay attention to the process of designing the chatbot. One of the ways to do this is streamlining the process of UI design through UX research.
When I started working on UX research, I borrowed a few tried-and-tested methods applied in web and mobile apps. However, healthcare is a complex domain where data security is a major concern. Therefore, I modified a few of them to suit my needs.
Let’s talk about a few UX research methods which are important to conduct before deep-diving into UI design of a healthcare chatbot.
Discover users’ pain points
To discover users’ pain points, you must first know who your users are. So, the first step to any good UX research is defining your user persona. Your user persona should include demographics profiles, health profiles and task profiles.
The persona diagram must include needs, difficulties, frustrations, motivations, aspirations of your end users. For instance, a 56-year old woman’s persona should include pain points like– “I’m an old woman, I don’t have the patience to repeat the same thing over and over again” or “I am ageing towards dyslexia, I forget conversations I had 15 minutes ago.”
After you’ve defined your user persona, the next step is to figure out how they will interact with the chatbot. For that you can invest in any of the below attitudinal approaches-
Gather inputs by rolling out surveys to your target audience and asking them related questions.
Conduct interviews and listen to what users say.
Depending on the kind of healthcare chatbot, your choice of the method will change.
For example- if you’re doing UX research for a chatbot that guides people towards better mental health, then you can do anonymous email surveys as people don’t openly talk about issues like depression and anxiety.
Observe users in their natural environment
Direct observation (a primary research method) is the key to understanding user needs and preferences for a new product. During observations, record verbal comments and the time spent on various tasks.
For example, if you’re designing a chatbot for surgeons, then observe them when they plan the pre and post surgical procedure. If the patient has a lot of complications, what dietary guidance do they offer? How do they perform the surgery? What instruments they use and how its usage differs from surgery to surgery?
By conducting interviews with people while they perform tasks, you can collect valuable inputs from them and use it to recreate a similar experience in a conversational chatbot.
You can also create interactive mock-ups to show artificial interactions. This gives sufficient scope to test the chatbot with users without requiring the engineers to actually build it. This helps in quick iterations with the users after validating the user experience and understanding their perception of the chatbot.
Research through complementary data gathering techniques
A quick and rewarding UX research method is secondary research. This is done by doing competitor analysis to see how others are solving the same problem. This approach isn’t useful if you’re developing something unique. But, if it’s something you are trying to improve, this method is easy and gives quick results.
You can experience real conversations, access failure threads and use data to improve your chatbot’s experience. Secondary research also includes searching through customer service logs, FAQs, online reviews or comments on blogs.
For example- if you’re building a patient registration chatbot, look at other chatbots available in the market. What is the tone and personality of chatbot? How much time does it take to book an appointment on the chatbot? What are the demographics that the chatbot covers?
Study the chatbot as a user and find out things that they are doing right or things where the experience could be improved. You will find some unsolved problems that could become a major feature in your chatbot.
Get help from stakeholders
There may be situations where you wouldn’t get time to do surveys and interviews with end users. In such cases, ask for help from people who want to build this chatbot. Get to the behind-the-scenes of the problem. Go to their sales and marketing calls. Understand the ‘why’ behind building a chatbot and what problems they are trying to solve.
Talk to the sales team to understand what kind of customer support calls/tickets they receive frequently. Interview their marketing team to understand what vision they have for their end users. What motivates their users? What do they need in order to be happy? What’s their idea of a good chatbot?
Gather real quotes/statements from the end users and use them to draw an empathy map and user journeys. This will help you identify major pitfalls and crucial moments.
The UX research phase is a crucial part of developing a great customer experience. When it’s given its fair share of time and effort, UX research helps discover important insights and reduces the number of iterations required to build the chatbot.
However, there’s no surety that your research findings will translate into a flawless user experience. All the research findings must be implemented and tested in real-time for you to discover if your research was right or not. Sometimes, a wrong method of research or the timing of the research may give you erroneous information.
I hope you figure out the right UX research method for your chatbot. If you have worked on a healthcare chatbot, I would love to hear the UX research methods you used.
The chatbots have made strides since their inception almost a decade back. There are many of them who gives customer support on Slack and yet others aim at lonely people keeping company with their surprising wit.
The potential of these chat based bots is game changing and there are many experts who even predict that these will eventually dislodge the apps with their uniquity, usage depth and importance in our daily lives.
Almost all of the technology majors are putting all their investments behind AI, which is in turn is based on machine learning and Big Data, as they are continuously trying to reach what may be termed as nearest to human intelligence. The bots in the present times are for initiating dialogues and to spur conversations with the customers.
However, there are many instances when these bots go bad. Some of these may tell the same thing repeatedly and yet some others are unable to answer the simplest questions, as the designers mistakenly overlooked that the humans often ask questions which are unpredictable and silly.
A poorly designed chatbot user experience will quickly turn a customer engagement into a terrible user experience. The users generally have high expectations from these bots powered by Artificial Intelligence. It is these which are taking customer experience to the next great level. The UX experience rendered by these bots must be able to make the customer feel as if the chabot is speaking in its own human language.
The foundations on which these bots are based on are not only dependent on the programming skills but there are lots of dependencies on the chatbot UX design. The usability of the bots is determined by how much they are able to answer the queries asked by their users.
Here are some UX elements that builds successfully the most engaging and interactive chatbot:
1. Smart Chatbot
AI must have the ability to comprehend in-depth human behaviour. Not much cross questioning is required, but they must be able to answer all the queries from the humans. Your bots appear with a smarter personality with fully incorporated AI and language interpretation in place.
2. Visual Representation
Humans prefer to think that the bots used by them are more like friends who are answering all their queries in the form of some useful information, rather than one human machine interface or for that matter a robot.
There are many users who quite annoyingly ask repeated silly questions to their bots, so that they must be designed in such a way, that the most polite and non-offensive answers are provided with.
3. Chatbots with Compact Replies
Short and simple answers are what attracts your users. If the chatbot is unable to reply in lengthy sentences, then they must be programmed in such a way that the replies are made in short and compact sentences.
The conversation with these bots is made more engaging and interactive with videos and photos to explain something in further details.
4. Escalation System in Chatbots
These bots also need some human supervision as it is not always possible to get all the answers based on them. There are some levels of interactions which require customer interactions to be carried out with the company executives.
The best of the UX for chatbots ensures that the bots are programmed in such a manner so that it understands when to escalate the query to a higher level supervisor. This will make it possible to resolve the customer issues, without causing any delays whatsoever.
The bots that are developed must ensure that the bots say the right things at the right time. You can involve a set of random people to test the bot, whether it has the right effect. This will be successfully bring out those areas which were overlooked earlier. Once the flaws are rectified, these chatbots can be successfully displayed to millions of users. The chatbots must not be the ones that performs some mundane activities, but must be designed as a specialized purpose-driven bots that engage your target audience.
Anteelo is one of the best custom chatbot development company, that have seen an outstanding pace of growth, in a matter of two years time. They have worked in many verticals like restaurant, health, learning, entertainment and many more. They believe in delivering user-centric apps for their customers, utilizing cutting edge technologies.
It is a known fact that human is a social animal. A human needs to interact with his fellow humans to express himself. Interaction gives a human a sense of comfort and understanding. This fact is well utilized by Chatbots, which has been a revolution in the market in a short time. The Chatbot technology has taken a giant leap and has emerged as a ground-breaking trend. All the businesses are eager to keep up with the updating trends and utilize the Chatbot technology to interact with their customer base and influence the market. Within the brief time-period, Chatbots have taken over the market. They are seen to be rocking the sectors of Customer Support, Customer behavior Analysis, Customer Service & Management, DevOps Management, Branding, and other Qualitative tasks.
What is a Chatbot?
In the most simple layman language, A Chatbot is an automated computer program that talks back to you. It interacts with the users as a human would and attends the customers round the clock without needing any break or having any geographical limitations. The conversation can be either text-based or voice-based, depending upon the requirement of the business. It is a virtual assistant that aids businesses to get closer to their customers and broaden customer engagement. With the introduction of ultra-modern technologies like speech recognition, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and NLP (Natural Language Processing), Chatbots have advanced so much that they can simulate a human conversation very closely.
Broadly, Chatbots can be divided into two categories:
1.Command Based Chatbots:
These Chatbots are based on the “if-else” algorithm. These Chatbots do not learn from the conversations they have; instead, they can only answer a limited number of predefined questions. It has a set of pre-written questions with specific answers. In these situations, users do not usually type or converse with the bot; instead, they select one of the many options provided to them. They have a fixed database so they can not answer the questions which are not listed in their database and can not function outside their code.
2. Artificial Intelligence Based Chatbots:
These Chatbots learn from the conversations they have with users and better themselves over time. They are contextual Chatbots and utilize high-end technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and appear quite sci-fi at the initial glance. They can understand natural questions and reply with the most appropriate answers. They remember the details about their customers and improvise their communication with them accordingly.
Now, if you are asking yourself, “Do I really need a Chatbot for my business?”, the question itself is problematic. The market is ever-growing, and the competition is getting stronger every day. The inability of a business to keep up with such a trend, which is woo-ing the market with its exceptional capabilities, could be a fall-behind for and your business. NOW is the ideal time to introduce your business with this cutting-edge technology and watch your sales and business fly high. Your business/company might be in a need of Chatbot Development if you relate to any of the below-mentioned points:
If you own an E-Commerce Business:
As per a recent study, it has been established that E-Commerce is one sector that is expected to make the most benefit out of the Chatbot Technology. The Chatbots can turn the monotonous shopping process into an exciting one by encouraging more user engagement. A Chatbot can keep an account of customer history, preferences, location, address, and navigation and, based on that, personalize the whole shopping experience for the customer. The Chatbots can recommend customers new products according to their preferences and also provide them with personalized vouchers and coupon codes, which can boost up customer engagement, resulting in an extremely positive impact on the sales. For example, if you have are a Pizza delivery App, a Chatbot can remember the previous orders made by the customer, additional topping requests along with their address and contact details so that they need not fill in the information again while placing an order. This makes the ordering process seamless and attracts more customers. This also increases the loyalty of the customer towards the brand and ensure that the customer revisits your app/website.
If you have customers/queries coming in round-the-clock:
Chatbots are not bound by and physical or geographical limitations. They can work day in and out without getting tired or needing a break. So if you are a business that deals with customers from different time zones, or if you like to keep your services open each and every day, every time, Chatbots can be a blessing for you. This takes off the burden of this redundant job from the shoulders of a human employee and allows his energy to be utilized for something more crucial.
If you need to give repetitive/similar information:
Most of the businesses need to answer an almost identical set of questions all the time. Customers usually inquire regarding the timings, address, or prices. A significant portion of human effort can be saved by automating this process with the help of Chatbots.
If scaling your business is requisite:
Unlike humans who can handle just 3-4 customers (at max) at a time, there is no such limit for the Chatbots. Chatbots can be assigned as the initial point of contact for the customers. In this manner, they can help to filter or segregate the customers according to their issues and then raise the issue to a human representative if required. This way, the tedious and redundant part of recurrent question-answering is handled by these new-age virtual assistants. They increase your productivity and efficiency, thereby improving your ranking and reputation in the market.
If you are low on time and budget:
No matter how fancy and sci-fi these Chatbots sound, the cost of building one won’t be leaving any holes in your pocket. The cost of developing a Chatbot is often similar to or sometimes even less than developing an application. Additionally, Chatbots aren’t just economical but are worth the price you pay for them as they bring in a commendable amount of business along with them. They are like a one-time investment that can take your business to a new height.
One Chatbot is equal to an army of employees. It saves the time of your team, which might otherwise go into redundant tasks or hiring a team to do the Chatbot’s jobs.
If you are targeting social media:
The integration of Chatbots with various social media websites and apps and their capability to engage the audience on the same has swept off the market. In this age of social media and smart devices, people prefer having apps that are multi-functional. Therefore, it is crucial for businesses not to leave any potential area to grab the customer base. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. have become the greatest markets, and Chatbots can help you acquire them by interacting with your customers on the same.
If you need to analyze customer behavior:
The Chatbots can be made to ask for feedback from the customers regarding their experience on your website/app or about product or service. This feedback can be a great help while making the marketing strategy and targeting a more precise clientele. The data acquired by the Chatbots can be used to provide a personalized experience to the customers, which can significantly impact the engagement on your platform.
Conclusion
A Chatbot is the need of the hour for every business, whether big or small. No matter which industry you belong to, Chatbots can definitely scale up your business and put you on the front foot, a step ahead of your contemporaries. The customer is always looking for a smoother experience, and with a Chatbot, you can ensure that your customer gets exactly what they want.
The modern-day business world has found a number of uses for chatbots. From increasing the user engagement count to play a major part in the lead conversion process, chatbots have entered the world across industries. The fact that chatbots are equally famous among baby boomers and millennials, increases the user base of the technology to a great extent. Seeing the business benefits and the flourishing market size, there are a number of businesses that are looking forward to launching their chatbots, both for their own app and for others to use. In this article, we will be looking at how much it costs to build a chatbot and everything surrounding the transformative technology. But before we get into cost benefit analysis of chatbot part, let us first look into what the flourishing chatbot market looks like.
Chatbot Market
Within the past one decade, chatbots have witnessed an unprecedented demand from a number of industries around the globe, including logistics and on-demand. What was earlier restricted to only eCommerce has now shifted to a number of other domains ever since the advent of mobile apps. All this has been the doing of growing inclusion of growing level AI in customer experience.
By the time we reach 2024, the market size of Chatbots would have increased to $1.34 Billion – a number that is driven by the inception of disruptive technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the chatbot mechanism.
From the simplistic rules specific chatbots developed to manage uncomplicated queries to cloud-based self-learning bots that are designed to understand the user intent and automatically modify the output, chatbots, no matter how learned or simple are being used extensively in fields like eCommerce, Healthcare, etc. via business data integration.
The fact that chatbots have proved themselves to be this useful in the world, has prepared them to contribute $1250 million by 2025.
Seeing the market share that chatbots hold, one thing is clear – Chatbots are going to be a very prominent part of businesses across industries. And why not, after all, the business benefits that they have to offer are unmatched and unparalleled.
Talking of business benefits of Chatbots, let us look at what they are before we move on to the chatbot development cost.
Business Benefits of Chatbots
It is invalid to ask the question ‘How much does it cost to build a chatbot’ until you are convinced that they are needed.
Besides the obvious benefit of making your business a 24*7 business, Chatbots, no matter how much you pay in the name of chatbot development life cycle, come with a number of advantages that are known to lower the cost of business operation, which tend to unnecessarily tend to close the gap between gain and loss numbers in the balance sheet. All aimed at changing your business growth story.
Here’s what they are:
A report by Juniper Research validates that the cost of building a chatbot is going to be a much smaller amount in front of the costs that chatbots are all set to cut down – $8 Billion on a yearly basis – by the time we reach 2022.
Let’s see how:-
Lowered operational cost
The biggest operational cost in businesses is around the number of incoming calls. By giving the visitors answers to what they are looking for, chatbots are able to save on the cost associated with the increasing call volumes and in fact the whole interaction volume.
In addition to this, when users call businesses after having the preliminary level of interaction with a chatbot, the time of customer care executive that would go behind answering the first level interaction gets lowered to a huge extent.
Cut down labor expense
In a report, McKinsey estimated that around 29% of customer service position in the US can get automated via a properly designed chatbot. The fact that chatbots can interact with multiple people at the same time, hints at a time where the customer engagement industry would be dominated by chatbots.
In addition to this, businesses who have employed chatbot in their customer service program know how chatbot implementation costs much lower than the annual salary of an employee while doing twice their work.
Cost effective 24*7 availability
Modern-day customers expect businesses to be available 24*7 to answer their queries at all hours. The fact that a number of businesses are still not able to function on a 24*7 mode has not just made them lose on to prospective sales but also has affected customer loyalty to a great extent.
But when you employ a chatbot that has been designed to answer to the customer requirement in the off hours when your customer rep is not available, you make them more receptive towards your business, altering your brand image 180 degrees.
Better resource allocation
When the customer representative doesn’t have a list of customers to attend to and knows that even in their absence their customers will be handled with equal attentiveness through a chatbot, they are able to concentrate on devising strategies on keeping the users hooked and finding ways to help chatbot close more leads.
This way, chatbots prevent sales reps from falling into the cycle of mundane work and monotonous job cycle, giving them the opportunity to keep learning.
Greater revenue
There are a number of businesses that have been using Chatbots for lead conversion and greater sales. Through chatbots, you can keep alerting your customers of the discount opportunities and increase the engagement and upsell count.
Along with making a business a sales conversion magnet, chatbots help create a strong brand awareness when integrated with social media messenger platforms.
Increased customer engagement
It’s vital to keep your clients involved with your brand. As indicated by companies, organizations that involve with their customers through social media were able to increase the user spend by 20% to 40%. While social media is doing its work, chatbots can contribute by making customer engagement interactive and easy.
Monitoring consumer data & gaining insights
As you already know that chatbots are great devices and tools to chat with customers. With the input they gather through basic inquiries, you can make improvements on your administrations/products and even upgrade your website by adjusting low converting pages. For instance, if your landing page creates a decent measure of organic traffic but doesn’t convert well, your chatbot can contact customers visiting the page with a study to gather more data on why they are leaving the page without buying or making action and so forth.
The chatbot benefits are equal among all the different types of bots. No matter what type your chatbot gets categorized the benefits mentioned above will hold true for them all.
Speaking of types, let us look at the different Chatbot types that are most commonly employed by businesses across the world.
Type of chatbots
When we look into the types of chatbots, we have to look at both – the Superset and the Subset wise demarcation of Chatbot development type, having elements that goes into interactive chatbot development.
The supersets
There are two categories of chatbots that you can invest in.
Bots Implemented in Own App – These chatbots work inside a mobile app which performs a specific function for the sake of automating the interaction happening between the app and the user.
Bots which Function Within Messenger – These chatbots stay in messengers which support bot interaction. These work best for businesses that do not have a standalone app or wish to keep social media at the center of the business model.
The Subsets
Within the prime categories of the chatbot mentioned above, there are a number of chatbot types that you can get made –
FAQ chatbot – A basic QnA or FAQ Bot provides its users with automated responses to frequently asked questions in a natural, intuitive question-and-answer conversational style.
Conversational chatbot – The chatbot type uses language understanding services to have easy flowing conversations with the end users. They are usually made to A. collect the basic information about the users and B. keep them engaged till a human customer care executive is online.
Transactional chatbot – These are the chatbots that help the app users to inquire into and buy something off the app without ever talking to a human customer care representative.
Predictive Chatbot – These chatbots are the most advanced ones in the market at this time. They are developed and designed on a case by case scenario. By incorporating heavy machine learning in them, businesses use predictive chatbots to analyze how users might react next.
Irrespective of what type your chatbot belongs to, the elements that go into it are all the same. Something we will be attending to, next.
MVP Chatbot Features
Conversation
Conversation, one of the primary needs and features of chatbot should be based on a fundamental principle. In the basic principle, the request for messages ought to be logical and comprehensive for each customer. For example, when a customer asks about the contact number of your organization, the chatbot should tell the user just a number. If it informs about the address, it implies that the entire rationale is broken.
What’s more is that, ensure that your chatbot doesn’t commit grammatical errors and follows the overall pace of the discussion. Keep an official discussion tone in case you’re focusing on business people. If the task is somewhat hard for you, it’s smarter to hire a freelancer to produce content for the messages.
Payment system
This feature suits e-commerce chatbots. If your bot’s main goal is to boost sales and create new distribution channels, you should take care of at least one payment method. This is the point for you to choose between the third-party system or a custom payment solution.
A well-designed payment system eases the flow of the payment security and allows to analyze the payment and customer behavior. What’s more is that you don’t need to stress over expenses that are generally charged by third-party systems. Regardless of advantages, the expense of a custom payment framework is excessively high. That is the reason why most of the small organizations execute services such as PayPal, Braintree, Stripe, and others.
Geolocation
Online mapping is another helpful feature for a chatbot to attract new customers by pinpointing the area of your business on the map. For instance, users can request the bot to help them navigate to the restaurant or street they’ve never been to. Google Maps Platform permits you to make this feature with zero effort. All things considered, it draws customers to visit your place.
If we take an example of food delivery, then this feature is the best. All that your users need to do is to place an order using the chatbot, make payment through an integrated payment gateway, share the location with the delivery personnel, and enjoy the food after arrival.
Personal touch
The personal touch is more about the personality and character than the technologies. Mentioning users by their name rather than pronouns, elevates their feelings and emotions. The personal mentality to every customer ensures increased brand loyalty and positive input about your chatbot.
To make a remarkable and unique chatbot, you can utilize the knowledge of a brand expert. In case you’re on a tight budget, you can always bring into play your imagination and creativity.
Account synchronization
The first use case of account synchronization that rings a bell is redeeming rewards. If there is a promo system, then the users have some awards or bonuses from the past purchases, which users can spend during further purchase. Nonetheless, if the chatbot isn’t synchronized with the website, it doesn’t display the rewards. Thus, you need to ensure that your platforms have a typical database that continually shares data with one another.
A synchronized record permits you to carry out efficient marketing campaigns. Whenever there’s a discount or sale on a product from the customer’s wish list, the chatbot sends a warning about it. This methodology is more successful than promotional e-mails and messages.
The Composition Required to Build a Chatbot
There are a number of components and chatbot design strategies that come together to develop a chatbot that goes on to revolutionize the customer experience that a business offers, all coming as an addition in the breakdown of chatbot pricing models.
Before acquiring the knowledge of building a chatbot, let’s have a look at the image that describes the working of it.
As a business who is looking to partner with an agency that excels in chatbot development services, you should look at their approach in the context of all these components before making any decision.
Backend
Chatbots need a backend to manage messages coming in from different channels and to process them with NLP offerings like Api.ai, LUIS, or Wit.ai. The backend also holds business logic and integration within the current systems and is used to develop conversational intelligence on the basis of which conversation happens with the end users.
Channels
After your backend is set up, you will have to create the endpoints for the integration with every specific channel. While every single channel integration is different, they mostly follow the same method of endpoint set up in the backend for the purpose of sending and getting messages which rely on the access token authorization. Also, you will have to implement the channel-specific user interface in places like quick reply, visual cards which guide users during a conversation.
NLP
The moment you receive messages from a specific channel, you are going to use NLP services like Luis, Api.ai, and Wit.ai for extracting the entities and intents out of the user message. While the set up of NLP service and processing of messages with the help of SDK is pretty direct, training the NLP entities and entities which might be present in an external system is not an easy task. You will have to understand the entities which map to specific objects which exist in systems like Contacts, Products, or Employees. You will also have to implement business logic validation on the extracted data which can range from simple validation to custom.
Conversational intelligence
This is the most complicated component of the whole chatbot development process. You will have to design intelligent conversations on the basis of NLP entities and intents – something that is not easy. To achieve a stage where you build an intelligent chatbot, you will have to create an algorithm for every single conversation and navigation so that users can start from scratch. You will have to make use of decision trees, slot based algos, state workflows, or other deep learning methodologies for controlling the conversation.
Integration
Because of prime purpose of your chatbot is the execution of processes like booking appointments, buying products, ordering items, etc. you will have to integrate the chatbot in an existing mobile application. Integration here will involve factors like business logic rules and validations, the persistence of data which would be required as a part of the business process.
Now that we have looked at the different components that come together to make a chatbot, it is time to attend to the things that matter to you on a more intricate level – the time it would take to develop a chatbot and the cost of chatbot development, in accordance with the different metrics that chatbots are evaluated on.
The time it takes to develop a Chatbot from scratch
A very important part of the whole chatbot app development process for businesses and an answer to the cost of chatbot development is knowing how much time it is going to take for chatbot app development company to develop them so that they get a rough idea of when to start witnessing unprecedented customer satisfaction graphs.
Well, here’s an answer to the hours it would take to develop a bot, something that will have a direct impact on your chatbot cost –
Integration with an app – the duration of it depends on the chatbot complexity, but usually it takes up 40-56 hours. Development of communication interface
Command language user interpreter takes up somewhere around 40-56 hours.
Natural language user interface takes somewhere around 120-160 hours.
Business logic
Adaptation of an existing business logic, takes up 120-160 hours, depending on the amount of logic.
Development of business logic from scratch takes around 160-192 hours.
Since you now know the approximate hours it would take to attend to different parts of chatbot development, it is time to translate those hours into the cost of chatbot development.
Decreasing the Chatbot development Cost
There are a number of aspects that increase the price of chatbot development. But there are also the option to stabilize the financial impact like the chatbot development tools that save time for developers and decrease the eventual final cost.
Third-party platforms
Developing a chatbot from the scratch without any preparation is quite expensive. Thus, to solve this people generally use third party platforms. With the assistance of these popular platforms, you can make a chatbot with less efforts and time.
Despite the fact that these platforms guarantee rapid development, they also provide flexibility and adaptability which lets the developer use them often.
Some of the common and popular chatbot platforms are:
Chatfuel
Botsify
Dialogflow
BotPress
Mobile Monkey
How Much Does It Cost To Develop a Chatbot? – The Exact Chatbot Development Cost
Now that we have seen all – The market of chatbots, benefits that they have to offer, types of chatbots that are presently ruling the world, and the components that come together to develop them along with the time it takes to develop chatbots, it is now time to look at how much it is going to cost you.
Seeing the work that goes into developing a chatbot, the approximate chatbot cost that comes for development of your bot is in the range of $25,000 to $30,000.The cost range includes the design, development, and integration part of the whole chatbot development framework.
With this, we have now seen all – the benefits of chatbots, features and components that helps to devise a well-structured chatbot, the market size, the type and the cost you will have to pay to get your chatbot developed, the only thing left for you to do here is to get in touch with our chatbot developers and avail the best chatbot app development company in USA.
The most challenging part for me was designing to handle the human-machine interaction. Each user is different. Unlike in websites/apps, where users can simply browse and leave, the chatbot users open the chat window to interact. They come with all sorts of questions- vague /smart /genuine /rogue /irrelevant and (sometimes) absurd. When they type a query, they expect the conversational UI to adapt to their needs–digest questions and construct intelligent answers/follow up questions.
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