Why would you build a chatbot yourself?

If chatbots become ever more important in the future, could you not just make one yourself for your company? The answer is: ‘Yes, of course you can!’ Just as you can build a house yourself, or put a car together. You will then either spend a lot of money, or a considerable amount of time will go into it ...

The Watermelon Chatbot is comparable to a house that has just been completed. Everything is there; you only have to ‘dress’ the chatbot and adapt it to the way you are going to deploy it. Watermelon makes this process as simple as possible, but it remains quite a lot of work. A chatbot is intelligent, but initially does not know all that much. By training it, it understands and answers your customers' questions better and better. After a while the chatbot pays for itself many times over, because it takes over a large part of your customer service questions, for example. With chatbot software you therefore bring a flexible, user-friendly program into the house. Watermelon has already done the hardest work – building the house – for you!

Do it yourself?

Making a chatbot yourself is possible, but requires quite a lot of technical knowledge and a lot of time. Of course you can hire a company to make a chatbot specially for your business. This is generally a good deal faster than developing one yourself, but the costs can mount up considerably: from several thousand to tens of thousands of euros. Such an own chatbot is therefore a considerable investment and the more the development costs, the longer it takes for such a project to earn itself back.

A chatbot communicates with various programs, such as the communication channels and its own database. For this, software is needed that ‘translates’ the mutual messages, the Application Programming Interface. On top of that, programming software that works with artificial intelligence is not simple. By means of Natural Language Processing a computer can learn to ‘understand’ different languages, and communicate in Dutch as well, for example. For people that is often already difficult because a language has many nuances, vaguenesses and unwritten conventions. Artificial intelligence can learn to handle this, and even understand misspelled words.

Building a chatbot (or having one built) is one thing, but you are not actually there yet. Of course the software has to be tested, developed further and maintained. You do not want to invest a lot of money in a chatbot that quickly becomes outdated! With the necessary staff you more or less start an entirely new department, alongside your core business. For most businesses this completely misses the chatbot's original purpose.

Cheap?

There are also free chatbot programs that you can tune to your own business. At first these alternatives seem attractive, but in practice they do have some crucial limitations. Unlike the Watermelon Chatbot they often only work on one channel (such as Facebook Messenger). An advantage of Watermelon is precisely that the chatbot works on several channels, and collects all conversations (via Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Twitter, and so on) in one place. Your staff can easily monitor the different messages.

Reinventing the wheel again?

The Watermelon Chatbot transfers a conversation to a member of staff independently when it cannot work it out. A customer service agent takes the conversation over, and can teach the chatbot afterwards how it should be done. That way you rescue your customer from a frustrating experience and make your chatbot smarter.

With the new conversations your chatbot is no longer entirely dependent on your customer's input. Through artificial intelligence the software can ask return questions, in order to keep a conversation going and wrap it up quickly. A well-trained chatbot can also generate sales this way.

Custom chatbot

The Watermelon Chatbot therefore offers a few important advantages. It is cheaper than your own chatbot, more versatile than a free one and you can start on its education straight away. With the extensive options you create a chatbot that matches your business precisely. Watermelon offers various packages, for large and small companies.

Want to know more?

Would you like to know more about how to deploy chatbots successfully? Download the free whitepaper by clicking the button below!