Can you simplify customer interactions using AI?

Your agents are tasked with the responsibility of delivering real-time and personalized customer assistance to build brand loyalty and trust. 

However, delivering such superior customer service can be challenging without the assistance of well-trained conversational AI that simplifies customer interactions.

AI continues to create a buzz in the business environment, and if you run a customer-centric business, it can redefine how you interact with customers.

In fact, according to a Deloitte report, 81% of contact center executives are investing in agent-enabling AI to improve operational efficiency. This figure indicates the pivotal place of AI in customer service.

Conversational AI solutions can help your business cut operational costs, enhance customer satisfaction, and provide round-the-clock customer service.

Looking to build a chatbot for your sales team? Check out my previous roundup of the best visual chatbot builders in 2024, for some robust options that’ll help you build enterprise grade chatbots - no coding skills required.

In this article, we’ll discuss the best conversational AI platforms that can help you streamline communications and simplify every customer interaction to supercharge your business.

Let’s get started.

Quick Summary

1. Glassix - Best overall AI platform for small businesses

2. Kustomer - Best for customer relationship management

3. Liveperson- Best platform for building AI chatbots 

4. Zoho - Best conversational assistant for sales teams

5. Richpanel - Best AI software for e-commerce stores

How to Choose a Conversational AI Platform

a) Define your business objectives

Before anything else, you need to consider what objectives you want to achieve with a conversational AI platform. For instance, do you want to automate repetitive tasks?

Clearly outlining your objectives will help you identify which features are essential for redefining how you interact with your customers.

b) Analyze customization features

Every business has unique needs and requirements, and so does yours. When selecting a conversational AI solution, it should be able to fit your business.

Consider customization features that enable you to tailor the user interface, widgets, and chatbots to reflect your brand identity.

c) Prioritize software scalability

A rigid software means that it will cause missteps along the way because it cannot adapt to your business’s growing and changing needs.

When selecting a conversational AI platform, scalability ensures the software can handle increased customer demands and data volume without compromising performance.

d) Consider integration capabilities

Conversational AI software leverages your business data to learn and provide instant and accurate responses. Therefore, select a software that integrates well with your existing systems.

Common integrations to consider include, but are not limited to, CRM and team communication channels to help facilitate streamlined customer interactions.

e) Keep in mind user-friendliness

Reviews, user interface, and the testing and debugging tools can give you a clue of the user experience the software will likely deliver.

Ensure that you also consider the user experience for both your agents and customers, when selecting a conversational AI platform.

1. Glassix 

Glassix is a complete customer support software.

It therefore provides essential tools to redefine customer support such as a unified inbox, chatbot builder, and omnichannel services.

What’s more, its features are powered by an incredible conversational AI that automates tasks and ensures 24/7 customer service. 

Glassix’s chatbots are backed by AI, enabling you to simplify customer interactions on all platforms, independently without requiring human agent intervention. This tackles a huge load of tasks, freeing your team to focus on essential issues like coming up with customer support strategies and growth.

Additionally, since it’s powered by GPT-4, it actively trains your chatbots to provide human-like responses so your customers won't even realize it’s a bot.

Key features:

• Glassix leverages Natural Language Processing to analyze customer requests and understand them even when they speak colloquially to deliver appropriate responses.
• Uses your knowledge base to build FAQ bots that empower customers to self-serve, reducing agents’ workload and allowing them to focus on customer satisfaction
• Glassix integrates seamlessly with third-party software providing the data your AI needs to simplify customer interactions.

Pricing:

• Offers a 30-day free plan
• Starting plan: $49 per user/month
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Verdict

Glassix is a complete customer support software that provides essential tools, not limited to a conversational AI platform, to take your customer service to the next level. While our starting plan has limited AI capabilities, you’ll still be able to get a feel for conversational AI capabilities before upgrading.

2. Kustomer 

Kustomer’s AI can drive efficiency for your business.

You can easily create chatbots powered by Kustomer’s AI that use your customer support content to automate support operations. 

Your chatbots can provide accurate, safe, and conversational answers that make work easier for your customer support agents. 

For customer interactions that require human agent intervention, Kustomer’s conversational AI provides a summary of the conversation. 

This eliminates the need to read a long thread, hence, expediting assistance and simplifying work for your agents.

It also has in-built intent detection that streamlines customer interactions by identifying specific keywords and phrases to guide customers to the appropriate dialogue. 

Also included is a thumbs-up and thumbs-down rating system that allows you to collect customer feedback that you can use to improve customer service.

Key features:

• AI-powered chatbots can provide instant responses, identify intent, and deliver personalized customer service to enhance brand loyalty and trust.
• Kustomer’s AI provides conversation recaps that summarize long threads with important information streamlining handoffs and assisting agents to deliver great customer support.
• Kustomer has a simple rating system that provides customer feedback to help you make improvements that can simplify customer-agent interactions.

Pricing:

• 6-month free trial for startups
• Starting plan: $89/user/month
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Verdict

Kustomer is one of the best conversational AI platforms ideal for small businesses looking to supercharge their customer relationship management. Its AI can help you automate tasks and provide customer assistance 24/7.

3. Liveperson

Liveperson is an all round conversation AI platform.

With incredible AI and large language model capabilities, Liveperson is one of the best platforms that enables you to transform conversations.

For starters, Liveperson’s conversation builder enables you to build efficient AI-powered chatbots that allow you to deliver automated customer service.

Thanks to this platform’s natural language processing capabilities, your chatbots can understand complex questions and use your business content to provide accurate answers. Additionally, you can easily create interactive chatbots using your business content such as PDFs and FAQs.

Conversational recommendations is also a useful feature that scans agent-customer interactions and suggests the best bot or content for response, reducing resolution time.

Key features:

• Liveperson integrates with your existing systems, such as payment platforms and CRM, providing you with a 360 degree view of your customer interactions.
• You’ll be able to automate repetitive tasks by creating AI chatbots that provide personalized responses to enhance customer interactions and provide assistance even when you are unavailable.
• With the help of the intent manager, Liveperson’s AI can detect customers’ intentions to help provide accurate responses and know which intents can be automated.

Pricing:

• Has a free demo
• Contact Liveperson for pricing
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Verdict

Liveperson AI is powered by powerful LLM capabilities that enable chatbots to understand complex customer interactions and provide accurate assistance. However, with no free trial like Glassix, it is hard to tell how the platform performs before commiting to a plan.

4. Zoho 

Zoho is a powerful software suite for sales teams.

It offers a proprietary AI solution, Zia, under its CRM platform to help sales teams elevate strategies and interact better with customers.

So what does Zia do?

It can take down notes as you dictate, fetch any information you need, automate repetitive tasks, and detect anomalies.

Zia makes Zoho one of the most popular conversational AIs as it can seamlessly interact with customers through text and voice.

Your agents do not have to spend hours searching for information because, with a simple search, Zia can surface everything they need. Similarly, you can call Zia, and ask a question, and she will either read out the answer or display it - talk of convenience.

Key features:

• Zia can help you make more sales by predicting the win probability of every ongoing deal enabling you to stay focused on the right targets.
• Zoho’s AI can detect anomalies and send reports in real-time to help you act quickly to prevent a drop in revenue or damage to your business.
• Zia intelligent automation analyzes and learns your agents’ usage patterns to make individualized automation suggestions that can help eliminate repetitive work.  

Pricing:

• Offers a 15-day free trial
• Starting plan: $18/user/month
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Verdict

Zoho CRM can empower your sales team to enhance performance thanks to powerful AI capabilities and integration with third-party applications. Although you will be getting great features with the starting plan, the conversation AI is only available in the enterprise and ultimate tiers.

5. Richpanel 

Do you want to convert site visitors into loyal customers?

Just like Glassix, Richpanel’s AI assistant is powered by GPT-4, which enables it to learn from previous customer interactions and content to suggest accurate responses.

Additionally, when agents are communicating with a customer, they can provide context or hints to Richpanel’s AI for it to draft a quick response for them. 

This helps save time and provide professional and quality responses.

Sometimes, when agents change shifts, they may have to go through long conversation threads to be able to provide accurate responses, which is time-consuming. 

Well, that doesn't have to be the case with Richpanel as the AI can provide summaries that save time and provide the information you need.

Key features:

• AI can auto-translate agents’ and customers’ messages in real-time allowing your agents to provide support assistance in multiple languages.
• Richpanel’s Sidekick AI can be trained on your own data by pointing it to your website, CRM software, and data respiratory to help provide personalized responses.
• You can prompt Sidekick AI to draft responses for you by providing a hint. This helps save time and deliver superior customer experience.

Pricing:

• Offers a free trial
• Starting plan: $29/user/month
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Verdict

Richpanel’s AI is constantly learning from your content and previous customer interactions making it a great tool for redefining customer support. However, Richpanels Self-Service and Help Desk are separate pricing plans, meaning you’ll have to pay for two different subscriptions if you want both.

6. Customerly

Customerly’s AI works better than traditional chatbots.

While typical chatbots depending on pre-configured responses are great, Custormerly outperforms them with its ability to constantly learn and simplify customer interactions.

But how?

Being among the top rated conversational AI platforms, Customerly’s AI leverages your knowledge base, conversation history, and canned responses to actively learn. 

This humanizes your AI enabling it to deliver personalized responses that make customers feel seen and heard.

Furthermore, unlike traditional chatbots, Customerly AI breaks down language barriers by providing multi-lingual support. This enables your business to easily interact with customers around the world.

You can also align your AI to your mission, instructing it on what to gather from each customer interaction. For instance, work email, intent, and name.

Key features:

• Smart escalation enables you to seamlessly transfer conversations to a human agent when they require specialized human attention.
• Customerly’s AI is constantly learning from chat history, knowledge base, and canned responses, enabling it to provide accurate responses.
• It also offers multilingual support, breaking language barriers and enabling your agents to interact with customers all over the world.

Pricing:

• Offers a free trial
• Starting plan: $7/month
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Verdict

Customerly is affordable for small teams looking for customer support software. For conversational AI features, though, you must upgrade to the Startup tier. Still, Glassix offers more features alongside AI capabilities such as a unified inbox and omnichannel services.

7. Cognigy

Cognigy is powered by generative and conversational AI.

What sets this software as one of the must have conversational AI platforms is that it is solely designed to provide AI assistance to retail businesses.

Right off the bat, Cognigy AI provides your customer support representatives with essential tools and knowledge at their fingertips to improve user satisfaction and enhance every customer interaction across all channels.

Contextual handover, real-time knowledge lookup, and emotional intelligence empower your agents to pick up cross-channel communication from anywhere.

This can save time and frustration as it eliminates the need for customers to re-explain themselves when seeking for help - which can be quite annoying.

Additionally, Cognigy AI supports bidirectional and real-time translation, empowering you to interact with customers in their native language.

Key features:

• Cognigy alleviates the strain on your workforce by automating post-call busy work, such as feedback collection enabling them to focus on enhancing customer interactions. 
• It supports bidirectional and real-time translation, eliminating language barriers and enabling you to provide support assistance to all your customers.
• Simplifies customer interactions by automatically fetching knowledge articles and answers that your agents need to deliver superior customer service.

Pricing:

• Offers a free plan
• Contact Cognigy for pricing
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Verdict

Cognigy is great for its vertical architecture. Unlike most conversational AI platforms provided as part of a customer support software, Cognigy delivers a complete AI solution to simplify customer interactions. 

8. Verloop.io

How can Verloop empower your customers and agents?

This software delivers multiple conversational tools powered by Natural Language Processing to make quick touchpoints with customers, provide context to agents, and engage customers.

Whenever a customer visits your site, Verloop.io collects important information, such as email ID after greeting and welcoming them appropriately. 

It can also maintain the conversation, provide recommendations, collect feedback, and store collected data for future reference.

Verloop.io’s conversation AI can understand voice conversation, enabling it to identify context and adapt depending on customers' sentiments and changes in use case. 

Through this, it is possible for your AI to personalize responses and be as natural as possible without relying on scripts, which is key to delivering personalized support.

Key features:

• Verloop.io’s conversational AI is easy to deploy thanks to the plug-and-play feature, enabling you to enhance customer interactions on all platforms.
• It is built on machine learning, Natural language processing, and Natural Language Understanding, enabling it to understand what customers are saying.
• This platform supports over 20 languages allowing you to interact with your customers in their native language, making them feel inclusive.

Pricing:

• Offers a free demo
• Contact Verloop.io for pricing
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Verdict

Verloop.io is an excellent conversational AI built on advanced technologies like ML, NLU, and NLP to enhance its ability to provide human-like responses. Without a free plan, however, it is difficult to know how its AI capabilities function before purchasing.

9. Sprinklr

Sprinklr offers a suite of support solutions.

Its conversational AI platform is provided under Sprinklr Service, purchased separately from the other products— Sprinklr Insight, Marketing, and Social

Sprinklr’s AI is designed to empower customers to self-serve through chat and voice bots, allowing your agents to focus on enhancing customer experience.

Unlike rigid traditional chatbots, Sprinklr’s AI enables chatbots to detect customer intent in order to provide appropriate responses. Other than that, its chatbots can juggle between contexts simplifying customer interactions.

Anyone from your team can build and deploy these AI chatbots to all platforms without prior experience thanks to the Sprinklr drag-and-drop editor. 

Additionally, Sprinklr’s AI chatbots support and understand over 100 languages, so your agents will never have trouble communicating with customers.

Key features:

• Sprinklr’s AI collects and passes information to agents empowering them with context to deliver seamless and unparalleled customer service.
• Easily create and deploy multi-lingual AI chatbots to multiple platforms breaking the language barrier and allowing them to interact with customers from all over the world.
• Sprinklr’sAI can identify customer intent to provide appropriate responses and offer personalized suggestions to boost sales.

Pricing:

• Offers 30-day free trial
• Starting plan: $249 per seat/month
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Verdict

Your business can benefit from Sprinklr AI capabilities, automation, and custom reporting to optimize agent performance and simplify customer interactions. However, compared to Glassix, Sprinklr is expensive and will be a disadvantage especially if you are investing in it for the conversational AI platform.

10. Tidio

Want to reclaim back time?

Tidio is one of the best conversational AI platforms, thanks to rich AI capabilities that supercharge customer service and enables you to answer most customer inquiries without human intervention.

Its proprietary AI, Lyro reduces response by minutes allowing your customer service agents to focus on solving complex issues.

Lyro has the ability to understand customer intent and context, remember previous replies, and provide accurate answers. 

In addition to that, it can simultaneously attend to multiple customers, which proves very useful during peak season.

If you are using a separate help desk and customer support system, there is no need to worry as Lyro seamlessly integrates with other software through Lyro Connect to simplify customer interactions.

Key features:

• FAQ Wizard uses machine learning to detect what your customers ask about and suggest chatbots that can answer those questions freeing your team from repetitive work.
• Know what to prioritize thanks to Tidio’s Smart Views which analyze your conversations and organize them based on customer intent.
• Lyro can integrate with your help desk through Lyro Connect, allowing you to leverage customer data to simplify customer interactions and enhance satisfaction.

Pricing:

• Offers 7-day free trial
• Starting: 39/month
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Verdict

In my experience, Tidio’s conversational AI platform is affordable considering that it offers unlimited seats compared to other platforms. This makes it ideal for small and medium-sized businesses. However, it only offers a 7-day free trial which may not be enough to explore its AI capabilities completely.

Conclusion

Conversational AI can unlock your team's superpower.

If your business grapples with the relentless quest to improve customer experience, you can shift towards leveraging advanced AI platforms.

By investing in conversational AI platforms, your businesses can witness reduced costs, streamlined communication, and happy customers.

What’s more, according to a report by 8x8, 52% of surveyed organizations have already invested in conversational AI capabilities for the contact center, highlighting the significant place of AI.

If you are looking for the best conversational AI platform for simplified customer interactions, consider Glassix, Kustomer, and Happyfox, which offer great AI capabilities.

However, Glassix stands out as the best overall solution as it empowers your team with excellent self-service tools and enables you to build powerful chatbots.

Sign up for Glassix’s 30-day free trial today and take the software for a spin to learn how its AI capabilities can help simplify customer interactions.