10 Best AI Customer Service Chatbots in 2024: Full Guide

Today, AI customer service chatbots are every customer’s first stop. If they’re looking for help or just want to get familiar with your brand, they’ll turn to AI chatbots instead of looking up the answer themselves. And it’s not because they’re spoiled or lazy. It’s simply because the best chatbots for customer service are easy to use and equipped with knowledge with fewer clicks.

3 Best AI Customer Service Chatbots according to Graphologic.ai (Quick Summary)

A well-built AI customer service chatbot means that customers won’t even think about if it’s a bot or a human agent; the conversation will flow in such a natural and smooth way that they won’t get distracted by the chatbot technology. If they do notice a machine is handling inquiries, that usually means that the chatbot’s responses are generic, fluffy, and bland.

Customer service chatbots have grown into a powerful and diverse landscape, with quite a few chatbot industry leaders. Now, the elements that turned out to be of most significance when it comes to customer satisfaction are chatbot service recovery quality and conversational quality. These two factors were what we particularly had in mind when conducting this list of the best chatbots for customer service.

Among those who stood out by their AI chatbot technology are Graphlogic, Intercom, and Gorgias—each of them different yet innovative in their own way.

Graphlogic’s AI bots stood out with their well-thought-out chatbot design, curated plans for different client profiles, as well as their urban and artistic interface. Intercom’s AI bots are a perfect example of what usually comes to mind when you think about AI chatbots for customer service, and it is a safe choice for businesses of any size that are looking for a reliable AI partner. Lastly, Gorgias's easy-to-use chatbot platform will meet the expectations of eCommerce businesses that are dealing with a huge amount of queries.

What is an AI customer service chatbot?

Customer service is needed in every business that deals with customers, as simple as that. As the business grows, especially if it serves a global audience, its demands from the customer service department grow simultaneously. This growth can feel overwhelming to your human assistants, leading to burnout. Needless to say, after a phone call with an extremely dissatisfied customer, human agents will oftentimes feel upset or anxious. To prevent this from happening, but also to serve your customers more efficiently, businesses usually turn to customer service chatbots.

Let’s start by saying that a customer service chatbot is a computer program dedicated to holding online conversations with customers either via text or voice (text-to-speech). Based on the customer’s input, tone of voice, context, and other conversational preferences (e.g., language), these rule-based chatbots provide human-like responses to handle frequently asked questions instantly.

Most AI customer service chatbots are able to handle specific scenarios that require responses of higher value without human handoff, allowing businesses to allocate their human resources more efficiently.

In short, a customer service chatbot answers questions on demand and helps businesses in improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, while being at a lower cost than humans.

Although we’ve witnessed a wide adoption of chatbots only recently, they have actually existed since the 1960s. What changed in the meantime is the customers’ trust in these generative AI programs, as well as technology advancements that have finally enabled sophisticated automation of customer support workload. To this day, there are many synonyms for chatbots, such as smart bots, digital assistants, interactive agents, conversational AI, and more.

Top 10 AI chatbots for customer service

It might be safe to say that an average customer prefers humans over chatbot service in most cases. However, when they are met with human limitations, such as not being able to urgently answer a customer’s inquiry, they sure are thankful for a chatbot alternative.

Nowadays, time is the most valuable currency. Perhaps that’s why we enjoy AI chatbots so much—they save us time when looking for answers. However, customer service chatbots do differ among themselves, and let us explain how.

1. Graphlogic.ai

  Key features:

Graphlogic’s AI chatbot solution is ideal for beginners since it requires zero to low coding, meaning that the bot integration with your existing CRM can be fast. Once the chatbot is implemented, this customer service chatbot solution will be available to your customers 24/7, on all relevant channels such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and more. What’s more, GL AI bots are able to provide more personalized responses depending on who they’re talking to, leveraging user experiences.

In addition, this AI-powered platform provides many opportunities for performance analytics, giving you insight into the agent’s communication with an interlocutor, or exporting various statistical reports related to chatbot interactions.

  Pricing:

There are three bot subscription plans available: free, startup, and custom. The Startup tariff allows for 1.250 unique interlocutors per month, along with 100 invited companies, whereas the Custom plan is completely customizable and depends on the agreed conditions. It’s also possible to purchase a traffic boost package through support.

Free trial:

There is a free plan, to which each user is automatically assigned upon registration. This plan supports a maximum of 200 unique interlocutors monthly and includes a Telegram support channel. If a user is satisfied with the AI chatbot service, they can switch to one of the paid subscription models at any time.

2. Intercom

 Key features:

Intercom’s AI chatbot customer service software adapted perfectly to today’s customer habits, laying out a Messenger-like design and bridging the gap between customers and AI chatbot agents. Bot’s main task is to assist in automating responses to FAQs and creating tickets for more complex queries.

Pricing:

There are three chatbot plans available: Essential, Advanced, and Expert, ranging from $29 to $132 per month per seat. The final price depends on the number of seats, and you can choose between subscriptions on a monthly or annual basis. As expected, you do save a significant amount if you opt for the latter. To make the cost estimation easier, they have included a pricing calculator, where you can also add optional AI chatbot tools, such as SMS campaigns.

 Free trial:

Intercom’s AI chatbot product includes a 14-day trial period, after which you are requested to choose the most suitable bot plan for your needs. Considering the many options Intercom has, this trial period is undoubtedly helpful to test out different chatbot tools and decide what to include in your final order.

3. Gorgias

Key features:

Gorgias AI chatbot’s objective is to automate as many tasks as possible. However, according to the bot’s responses we’ve come across, it’s evident that the customers are interacting with an AI chatbot and not a human agent. This is an advantage if you want to ensure you provide complete information on a subject, but if your priority is for your AI customer service chatbot to sound humanlike, maybe Gorgias PerfectBot.AI isn’t the right solution for you.

Pricing:

There are two premium plans available. The Grow plan stands at $99/month and includes up to a thousand monthly bot conversations, after which you will be charged $0.20 per extra conversation. If your demand is higher, you may want to consider the Expand plan, which provides double the number of bot conversations (2,000) and charges the same amount per extra conversation. This plan is charged $199 per month.

Free trial:

There is a 30-day free trial, which includes support in onboarding and represents a perfect time to address all your doubts and questions before making the final decision.

4. Zendesk

Key features:

Zendesk AI customer service chatbot will accompany the needs of most SMEs, allowing you to either integrate a third-party chatbot or create your own, using the Sunshine Conversations bot functionality. Either way, their AI customer service chatbot solution is highly customizable and will suit you if you have a distinctive brand voice. It may not be the best AI chatbot solution if you’re looking for a more neutral, straight-to-the-point bot design approach.

Pricing:

Three premium chatbot plans are available on Zendesk, all of them billed annually: Suite Team ($55/month), Suite Growth ($89/month), and Suite Professional ($115/month). Apart from these three plans, large enterprises can request a chatbot demo for a fully customized suite and contextual workspaces.

Free trial:

There is a free trial for all chatbot suites, which you can sign up for using just your work email, and it will give you a comprehensive guide to what Zendesk has to offer. It’s worth mentioning that startups can get a free trial for up to six months.

5. Freshchat

Key features:

Freshchat is a textbook example of a chatbot that relies heavily on a knowledge base to provide contextual chatbot responses. That said, it could be a perfect choice if you have an extensive database and want to ensure a smooth transition to introducing AI chatbots for customer service. Customers will notice little to no difference, whereas you’ll be able to scale up and be available at all times.

 Pricing:

There are four plans, including a free one for up to 10 agents. Premium plans are billed annually and are divided into Growth ($19 agent/month), Pro ($49 agent/month), and Enterprise ($79 agent/month). Depending on which one you choose, you’ll have access to multichannel support, routing mechanisms, and advanced security options.

 Free trial:

There is a free 14-day trial for all plans available that you can test even without a credit card. This is a great option if you want to try out a few options at the same time and decide which one is the best chatbot for customer service for your business.

6. Zoho Desk

Key features:

When designing their chatbot, Zoho Desk wanted to incorporate customer habits and fix what wasn’t working with human agents to increase user satisfaction. What’s different with this chatbot platform is that it gives you detailed insight into conversational agents’ performance and customer sentiment so that you can analyze the quality of customer service interactions between the chatbot and the customer and act proactively. 

Pricing:

If you’re interested in trying out this AI chatbot platform, you’ll be happy to learn that there’s a free plan and three premium suites. Subscriptions can be handled on a monthly or yearly basis, within a price range of €7-20 per operator per month.

Free trial:

Zoho Desk provides 15-day free trials for all of their premium plans that you can try even without a credit card. 

7. Drift

Key features:

It seems that Drift wasn’t afraid to experiment with using its innovative approach to AI customer service chatbots as an advantage over bigger competitors in the industry. With its distinctive chatbot design, it could easily grab the attention of smaller brands who don’t want to hassle with customer service but would rather introduce chatbots from the beginning. However, according to customer reviews, it seems that Drift prioritizes large enterprises and could be pricy for budget-sensitive businesses.

Pricing:

There are three plans available: Essentials, Advanced, and Premier. Unfortunately, the pricing isn’t publicly available, but you can request a chatbot demo and receive a tailored quote.

Free trial:

There isn’t an official confirmation of a free trial option, but you can check with their reps when you request a chatbot demo.

8. Conversica

Key features:

If you want to stand out from your competition, which has already implemented chatbots for customer service, this could be an ideal way to go. That’s because Conversica tries to get ahead of scripted customer service scenarios and focuses on providing customers with chatbot responses of higher value as much as possible in order to prevent early handoffs to human agents. 

Pricing:

Similar to Drift, there isn’t publicly available pricing, but you can request a bot demo.

Free trial:

There’s no information on a free trial.

 9. Netomi

Key features:

If AI chatbots for customers support have become a must in your industry and you feel like you’re lagging behind, Netomi might be the right option for you. It allows companies to create their own chatbot while remaining intuitive and straight to the point. Still, using a less popular AI customer service chatbot platform is enabling businesses to stand out from the competition.

Pricing:

The pricing is not provided by the vendor.

Free trial:

There’s no information on a free trial.

10. ProProfs Desk

 Key features:

Popular among budget-sensitive companies, ProProfs is a great chatbot option if you are looking to reduce customer service costs but still want to find a comprehensive chatbot platform designed to support your business. It gives you access to necessary collaboration tools and provides a solid bot ticketing system. However, if you’re a large enterprise, your customer service demands might be higher than this AI chatbot platform can provide.

Pricing:

ProProfs has two plans: a (forever) free one for a single operator and a team plan if you have two or more operators. The premium plan is billed annually, starting at $239.88.

Free trial:

Apart from its free plan, ProProfs provides a 14-day free trial for its premium plan as well. 

Comparison table of 10 best AI chatbots for customer service

Here’s a side-to-side comparison of the ten best AI customer service chatbots to better understand the pros and cons of each AI-powered platform:

Benefits of deploying AI customer service chatbot

Chatbots are often judged by their human likeness, minus the flaws such as fatigue, distractions, and memory lapses. This is usually referred to as chatbot anthropomorphism, with different levels of the following features: humor, communication delays, and social presence.

However, if they resemble humans so much in interactions, customers will often turn to a negotiating mindset, which is an added challenge to these AI-enabled autonomous customer service agents.

That said, let’s deconstruct the elements that make chatbots a revolutionary upgrade to your customer support department, with a plethora of advantages compared to their human counterparts.

Always Available, Anytime, Anywhere

Nowadays, traditional customer service is facing serious challenges. For starters, human agents cannot be available 24/7, nor should they be. On the other hand, your customers should be able to receive help at any time of day. That’s how chatbots can supplement in a cost-effective way.

Cost-Effective Customer Support

It won’t take you longer than an hour working as a customer service agent to realize that customers ask pretty much the same questions. Such questions can easily be answered by chatbots, enabling human agents to focus on more complex questions or tasks.

 Enhanced Communication with Customers

With human agents, your customer is most likely to wait a couple of minutes before their query is answered. Needless to say, waiting frustrates the customers, thus seriously impacting their tone of voice. AI customer service chatbots allow for immediate assistance, which in return makes the customer feel heard and important.

Multilingual Support at Your Fingertips

Your customer service department has to answer the needs of a global audience, which is, to put it bluntly, awake at different times and speaks different languages. It turns out that chatbots are an ideal solution to this challenge, being able to respond in real-time, serve multiple customers simultaneously, and immediately adapt to a requested language, thanks to generative AI.

Seamless Integration with Your Systems

Chances are, you already dealt with customer service in the past. That’s a huge advantage since these prior human conversations are used to build and seamlessly integrate AI chatbots with your systems, narrowing down FAQs and speeding up the business processes.

Craft a Distinctive Brand Voice

In the same way as you would introduce human agents to your company culture, you can mold chatbots to reflect your distinctive brand voice. For example, customer reviews are a great insight into the user’s perspective, allowing you to curate an AI response to an opinion-related user query.

Equip Agents with Context for Faster Resolutions

Especially in e-commerce, newly built customer service chatbots take advantage of product descriptions on your website, as well as customer reviews, which enables them to give more specific answers of higher value.

AI customer service chatbot examples

Chatbots for customer service are mostly deployed in high-data industries, where answer capacity and response time are of the highest value, such as healthcare, insurance, banking, manufacturing, retail, and others. They are known to increase sales and conversion rates, help in gathering customer data, enhance shopping experience, and more. Moreover, some of the most popular global brands managed to break the glass ceiling and introduce new ways for customers to engage thanks to chatbots.

Bank of America

Bank of America introduced the so-called first-party chatbot, meaning that it was developed for a large enterprise in a consumer-driven industry, such as banking, to reduce customer service costs and improve overall quality. The chatbot’s objective is very clear: to help customers navigate their banking problems according to the banking policy. Responses based chatbot is usually programmed to be straight to the point, with minimal chitchat with the customer.

H&M

On the other hand, H&M uses a third-party chatbot, based on an open-source building block, which allows the customer-bot interaction to be more customizable and natural. As their name suggests, these chatbots use third-party data available publicly, meaning that the shopping customers experiences are more cohesive, interconnected, and personalized. The main customer service chatbot objective here is to navigate customers through H&M’s product catalog.

Domino's Pizza

Domino’s Pizza is a brand that allows for a higher brand personalization, and it’s a good example for businesses that would like to experiment with a distinctive tone of voice. Although the bot needs to ensure the customer follows a strict goal-oriented scenario in order to take a specific target action, it leaves room for order AI personalization, which increases customer engagements. You can even design additional, optional steps to motivate the customer to order even more than initially planned.

Trends in Chatbots for Customer Service

First and foremost, data privacy has become a serious concern for most customers, making them more cautious and even suspicious when using online customer services. In fact, many AI companies are now turning from feeding chatbot engines with previous conversations within a company to publicly available data.

That said, you should always be transparent about the fact that you use customer service bots and in what way customers' data is handled with privacy and care. When choosing an AI customer service chatbot partner, check if they can be deployed on-premise to ensure the data privacy of your customers.

Furthermore, recent research has shown that giving a name or voice to AI-powered chatbots helps with customers experiencing human-like querying. In other words, assigning your chatbot with a human name is known to establish a more direct relationship with the customer, enhancing their expectations when it comes to the reliability and speed of inquiry processing. Moreover, customers describe these chatbots as “easy to connect with and bond”.

In addition, studies about the success of chatbot customer service vs human service agents suggest that most successful businesses actually combine the two. When servicing customers, they opt for a balanced combination of chatbots and a light touch of human intervention. In the long run, regardless of the initial AI investment, this option is still less costly than a human-only customer support department.

Although new trends emerge in every industry, the sole purpose of chatbots has remained the same: customers enjoy bots because they’re synonymous with speed and efficiency. However, for this to happen, businesses have to overcome customers’ potential mistrust of chatbot services. In fact, trust holds a crucial role in every automation process acceptance.

What are the features to look for in AI customer support bots?

When it comes to customers’ motivation for using customer service bots, you’d be surprised to learn that the most frequent motive is productivity. To ensure that the end goal is reached, you have to keep in mind the following features.

User-Friendly AI Bot Creation Tools

Customer service chatbot design framework differs from company to company, but they usually stick to the same steps along the way. The priority should always be to create a knowledge base and use this data to feed the chatbot engine. After you decide which communication channels the chatbot will be available on, you can easily deploy it and keep analyzing customer behavior to improve the chatbot’s accuracy.

Seamless Multichannel Support

To be able to seamlessly deploy your AI customer service bot agent to various channels, you first need to properly train and test it, so don’t underestimate the importance of these steps and spend as much time as you need until you’re perfectly satisfied with the bot result. Only then can you deploy your AI customer service chatbot agent and begin conversational experiences with customers, either directly through messaging platforms or within an omnichannel platform. 

Versatile Integration Capabilities

For better AI customer service bot integration, you can add your knowledge base and connect your website or other context-enriched documents. This will help in providing personalized responses to the chatbot about how to behave according to a specific industry or individual brand. Moreover, check if you can integrate custom chatbot learning models from other AI vendors in the backend, such as OpenAI.

Intelligent Query Routing

Your knowledge base will help a lot with customer service chatbot query classification, but there are still cases that require answers of a higher value that only a human could handle. That said, make sure to choose an AI customer service chatbot partner who will provide options for complex query routing so that you can better allocate your human resources if needed. 

Comprehensive Analytics and Reporting

After the customer service chatbot launches, it begins the analytics and evaluation phase. This is where you should carefully monitor user behavior, ask for feedback, and regularly update your knowledge base bot so that it remains relevant and up-to-date. There’s a fair possibility that you will need to adjust certain chatbot conversational scenarios, which is very common at this stage, so don’t take it as a mistake in customer service chatbot design.

Questions for Picking the Best AI Chatbot Software for Customer Service that Suits You

So far, the main challenge in implementing customer service chatbots was the lack of knowledge and skilled staff. Luckily, there are more than enough AI chatbot companies on the market to help you navigate the landscape.

However, even though you may be a novice at conversational AI, don’t let good marketing swift you into settling with a customer service chatbot partner who may not be the best chatbot for customer service for your business. Keep the following questions in mind to make sure you don’t miss any important details before making a decision.

What specific tasks and functions do I need the AI chatbot to handle?

Customer service bots will help you with handling increasing customer inquiries with a wider range of inputs, including scenario-specific ones. Most frequently, these will include FAQs and troubleshooting step-to-step guides. Sometimes, you’ll come across the term “linear scenarios”, which refers to processes like interviews, surveys, and data collection – all commonly handled by customer service chatbots.

Think of AI chatbots as your company’s reps who are supposed to improve your customer service teams performance by providing assistance online and solving customer issues. Depending on your industry, your chatbot may be required to assist customers with navigation of the product catalog or similar goods.

Last but not least, even though chatbots are mainly used for mimicking human conversations, that’s not the only thing they’re built for, so make sure to discuss with your chosen AI partner what the possibilities are for your business in particular. 

What objectives will the AI chatbot help my business accomplish?

Customer service chatbots will allow for better human resource allocation and scaling up your business, considering that you will be able to serve more customers at once. Moreover, this chat software personalizes interactions and allows businesses to reduce their response times, paving the way to a more effective customer relationship management (CRM) strategy.

Most of today’s best-rated bots are fully equipped to provide natural responses, creating conversational and engaging interactions between AI chatbots and customers. However, the main objective that customer service bots will help you accomplish is customer satisfaction, visible through their positive attitude, loyalty, and successful purchase intentions.

How well does this AI chatbot integrate with my existing business systems?

Quality chatbot design is only half of the work. The second half refers to how seamlessly will it fit into your customer support team since only together can they represent the overall quality of interactions between your company and customers.

Inadequate bot integration can result in customer dissatisfaction with the chatbot’s performance, potentially leading to unwanted chatbot behavior like non-compliance. That’s why it’s important to integrate AI customer service bots with existing knowledge bases to ensure suitable responses and meet customers’ expectations.

Moreover, make sure to check with your potential AI partners about the way in which your payment services can be integrated into the messaging system so that it’s safe and reliable.

When done properly, the customer service chatbot’s responses seem tailored to an individual customer even though they research the same data when handling complex queries.

Which communication channels should the AI chatbot be available on?

Before deciding on an AI customer service chatbot platform, you should check if it includes all of your preferred channels—and more, if possible. You’d want to expand your customer support department, not vice versa. When we speak about chatbot communication channels, we usually refer to messengers, website widgets, social networks, and others.

Is the AI chatbot solution simple to implement, use, and train?

If you choose a chatbot partner with AI experience who’s most suitable for your business, then the implementation and use of chatbots will be intuitive and, in a way, relieving for your business.

Chatbots should be designed in a way to supplement customer service areas that were the most overwhelming to your human support agents so far and to help you serve more customers at once. You’ll feel the benefits of introducing AI chatbots instantly, but keep in mind that you’ll still need to refine them after receiving user feedback and learning more about how your customer service chatbot can be improved.

That said, make sure to check in advance if future iterations can be handled in a fast and uncomplicated manner so that your custom chatbot solution can meet your expectations as the demand grows.

Conclusion

The customer service department is by far the most resource-intensive one. Confiding this important role to chatbots, or at least a significant part of it, is a strategic yet rewarding decision. What's more, chatbots have become a must when it comes to market requirements.

As with any new technology, chatbots’ aim is to provide a helping hand to humans and make their jobs easier so that they can focus on other tasks that cannot be automated. Keep this in mind when choosing a chatbot partner, and don’t settle until you find the best AI chatbot for customer service for your distinctive brand needs.