What price does a chatbot have is the main question when a company meets with developers of this technology.
It is not easy to explain that the development and proper functioning of an effective chatbot is something that it depends on many aspects. Next, some of the main ones to take into account when evaluating a chatbot will be explained.
1. Personalization
Each company has different needs that require a solvent chatbot. For this reason, when building and integrating it, it is necessary to make it clear that a chatbot that knows how to respond to the customers of a certain company, with the correct tone, in the correct context and that knows the user's intention, It is unique for each company..
It can not develop one and then replicate a thousand identical ones haphazardly. In chatbots this methodology does not work.
2 Design
The more complex the conversational tree between a company and its users, the more difficult it is to configure the virtual assistant.
If we talk about chatbots with a simple decision tree and of no more than a couple of interactions, the complexity is relatively minimal. This is increased by the number of branches that the tree contains. With the creation of each one of the branches, it is necessary to interconnect them so that all the answers have coherence.
A more complex bot that has multiple decision trees it requires a good understanding of the users and their goals, as well as the business itself and its goals. This requires a great deal of design knowledge and a certain level of expertise. These factors tend to increase the price.
3. Whether or not to use artificial intelligence (AI)
Most chatbots seen today they don't have AI implemented, but either the user interacts with the chatbot by clicking buttons (default responses) that leads to the next interaction, or there is a set of keywords that the user can use to communicate with the bot.
The bot will filter according to those given tags and keywords. CThe more keywords the bot has to understand, the more time it will take to develop, therefore the price increases.
When the purpose of the chatbot is that understand user interactions as a human agent would at least to some extent, development is much more complicated and requires AI.
We can take as an example customer service chatbots that receive questions like is the office open tomorrow? or what time do you open tomorrow? or "I want to know the opening hours", this is when the AI algorithm is used to understand user intent regardless of the words you use to ask the question.
To successfully train an algorithm a large amount of data, development and previous programming is necessary, In addition, the number of questions that must be answered correctly must be taken into account. Collect the data and train the ML algorithms to enable it adds a significant amount of time and effort to the process.
4. Platform on which it is configured
If you are an assistant without AI, created from the messaging platform in which it is going to be used, the difficulties decrease; if, on the contrary, it is a conversational chatbot with AI, can be integrated into specific messaging and CRM platforms and additional information, the price increases for obvious reasons.
When an agent is built from a platform that uses Machine Learning (ML), each integration is a process that must be developed independently.
5. Integrations in platforms and sites
We must be clear about what the client wants from the chatbot, if you want to integrate into a pre-existing messaging platform, on a web page or if we talk about a chatbot that collects data, where are we going to store emails and user information?
6. Connections to API`s and CRM
They also have to be taken into account in this step and each of them generates an increase in work and price.
7. Project management
La content insertion in the chatbot it is approximately the 40% of the work total and this depends on the amount of information you want to include.
The 60% remainder is devoted to integrations, test of usability, as well as to integrate general language and correct answer tests.
Because AI chatbots learn from interactions, revisions, changes and maintenance must be included in the price of the bot.
8. Cost of infrastructure
If it develops from third party platforms to integrate some functionalities, the price of that service must be included. The costs of storage e import and export of data should be considered as expenses.
9. Optimization and maintenance of the chatbot
It almost never happens that everything goes perfectly from the first day and that nothing has to be changed. Based on how users interact with the bot you can see and understand the things that need to be changed.
With an AI chatbot, the minimum monitoring period is four months, time during which improvements are made and training the bot to be smarter and solve more problems.
Ongoing support for conversation analysis, chatbot training, monitoring, and remediation typically generates a monthly fee.
What does the price of a chatbot depend on?
Depends. Generally, what is cheap initially tends to be expensive in the medium term.
Our recommendation is to ask all these questions before asking for a price, try to phase the project and contract with different chatbot companies.
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