The Evolution of Chatbot Marketplace

Engati
9 min readDec 9, 2019

Ever wondered where do the vivid varieties of chatbots come from? One’s helping you with sales and marketing, while the other’s giving you life advice at 2 am! Who are making these bots? Where can you get one? Why do businesses use different bots?

Pretty sure, you’re baffled with these questions. But worry not, we’ll clear every dilemma in this blog!

The market is full of opportunities, giving birth to different types of businesses each day. Now, chatbots are a well-known tool for automation in the business-line, but can a simple FAQ bot be a smart choice for your huge E-commerce business? To a certain extent, yes. But to provide holistic customer experience, probably not!

Different businesses have a different set of requirements, and to keep up with those requirements chatbot technology has been improved to perform more functionalities and cover more use-cases. These multitudes of use-cases of a chatbot come in various ‘chatbot templates’, and can be categorized into different sets, specific to different industries.

Hence, in this blog, we’re going to talk about what chatbot templates are, the different categories of templates, what’s a chatbot marketplace and how has chatbot marketplace evolved to this day.

What are Chatbot templates?

Chatbots (in short, ‘bots’) are conversationalists and an artificial intelligence system. Chatbots are used across various businesses and they usually carry out automated interactions with customers, clients, visitors, employees, users, and leads. They can also be used to do several other tasks, such as lead generation, customer engagement, appointment scheduling, etc. This capability of exerting various tasks gave rise to use-case specific bot templates.

As mentioned earlier, for distinct businesses and industries, expecting just one chatbot design to perform all tasks would not be feasible. Hence, chatbot templates!

Bot templates, as the name suggests are basically different designs of chatbots that perform different functionalities and consist of a specific conversational flow to suit the diverse business demands.

Businesses make use of these ready-to-go templates to easily build their ideal chatbot. As chatbots grow widely popular among businesses, so does the demand for more chatbot templates.

Chatbot templates come in many varieties and functionalities today and are growing innovatively as new possibilities unveil in the market each day.

Chatbot templates use one code and are programmed similarly. So there are no compromises in the building of these bots. The only differentiator from one bot to another would be the use-case and various functionalities they perform.

Hence, while choosing an ideal bot template for your business, you will have to first think about what is it that you want to automate. Is it customer queries, or do you want to use it for marketing and lead generation? Or even help students select a course at your institution! Chatbot use-cases are many and there are several templates for each use-case, therefore it emerged the need for a Chatbot Marketplace.

What is a Chatbot Marketplace?

A chatbot marketplace is a bot-template store where you can select a use-case, choose from a wide range of templates, view a demo and unlock it to start building your chatbot instantly.

These chatbot templates use the best class of AI, Machine learning and NLP engines, using a single-code program throughout all the templates. The pre-built templates consist of an existing conversational flow and make use of all the features and intelligent nodes needed. However, there is space for customizations where you can edit the conversational flow, use various intelligent nodes, give your bot a theme, a name or even make it multilingual to train it as per your accordance.

Once fully trained, your chatbot is ready to deploy to whichever channel your target audience lies, reaping tremendously effective and instant results.

The evolution of Chatbot Marketplace

The heat of the ever-evolving demands of industries hasn’t spared anyone, hence to beat this heat and stand up par in the competitive chatbot market, a bigger chatbot marketplace came to place.

Starting with just 30 templates, now, our chatbot marketplace has widened into having 150+ bot templates, all with a set of special functionalities and a use-case. All the chatbot templates vary from one another and serve different purposes even if they’re categorized under a particular industry or use-case.

Well-trained bots make it easier for you to get started with the chatbot building process, leaving very little chance for customizations.

The bot templates are gathered evaluating its use-cases and are put under one category.

The bot template categories are:

1. For Customer Support:

Customer support has to be one of the initial and yet most important use-cases of chatbots. Chatbots in customer support act as a catalyst to resolve repetitive customer queries, making a business representatives’ job much easier. You can train your bot with automated responses to frequently asked queries, and even assign automatic live chat support when complex queries arise requiring human intervention, leading to holistic customer experience. These chatbots can also gather feedbacks and save customer data for future references.

Chatbots can also answer effectively to an unlimited amount of web users at the same time. They are automated, provide 24/7 support, and are a cheaper option than paying employees to monitor inquiries. Response time is instant- in any time zone. They can chat for hours without the need for human supervision.

2. For E-commerce/Shopping:

Chatbots in E-commerce has become mandatory these days. They can assist an e-commerce business in several ways, out of which some are:

  • Chatbots can boost your sales.
  • They represent your brand.
  • They can cut your operational costs and save time invested in monotony.
  • They can generate leads by enacting different engagement techniques and assisting your customers during and even after the purchase process.
  • They can market your products by engaging customers with carousels, images, videos or CTAs.
  • Chatbots collect user-data, out of which they create a personalized experience for every user and help your business provide a better customer experience.
  • They can send your customers notifications like discounts, offers, etc and make recommendations on your products based on their likes and previous purchases.
  • They manage customer queries and save you the customer support costs and mishaps.

3. For Education:

Chatbots in education has a lot of potential to grow and become bigger in its functionalities and advancement. But it’s current holdings in the education is not of any less significance. Chatbots have helped the education industry in two subdivisions- the administration section and for the students. In the administrative section, chatbots do what they do best! They automate repetitive tasks, set reminders, schedule meetings, manage student data entry and helps teachers by allowing them to send notes through images, files, and videos to the students.

Now for the students, chatbots can be the ideal course selector during the admission process. A chatbot today can help a student browse through the college website, answer FAQs, help with the application, course fee and many more details, along with the option to browse through the courses available at the university/school. Once the course is selected, the chatbot can further assist the student to apply at the school/college website.

4. For Entertainment:

Chatbots for entertainment? Why not! Find all sorts of chatbot templates under this section, ranging from cinema bot to Harry Potter chatbot template! Let your customers’ book events, movie tickets, Go-karting race, and DJs through your chatbot now. You can also let your customers have a little fun through quiz bots, music band bot, news chatbot, playlist chatbot or even fair guide chatbot!

5. For Marketing:

Chatbots in marketing can be used to create a great marketing strategy for your brand. Simply put, chatbot marketing is the practice of using bots to engage your prospects and customers, either on your website or in your app. Just like how you can use chatbots to answer support questions, you can use chatbots to start conversations with website visitors, qualify leads, and even upsell customers.

Chatbots are a great tool for marketing. They can be used to conduct market researches through quizzes and surveys, helps in social media marketing and markets your product/services seamlessly among your online customers. You can find a vivid range of marketing chatbot templates in this section, procuring to different specified sectors and purposes of the present industries.

6. For Travel:

Chatbots have taken over the travel industry. Travel agencies and Airlines have found the right automation tool that constructs the perfect, smooth customer experience for their fellow travelers. Travel chatbot templates can assist your customer book flights, hotels, vehicle rentals, and even a yacht!

They can also help your agents plan an ideal trip end-to-end for your customers based on their preferences and also act as a tour guide, recommending places to visit and nearby events throughout your customer’s journey.

7. For Finance:

Bot templates in finance help your customers manage their finances, select the ideal insurance, assist with the banking process, calculate loan and simplify business payments.

8. For Games

Engage your customers with gaming chatbots. This section includes a few games bot templates and a template that books an adventure!

9. For HR

HR bot templates are the most significant as they’re helping HR recruiters with the recruitment process and also helping build better connectivity within the organization and the employees. HR bots help recruiters by collecting candidates, their applications, filter for the most eligible one out of all the candidates, schedule interviews, send emails and follow-through the selected candidates. This makes HR’s job really easy and they can invest more time in an effective hiring employee strategy.

Within the organization, an HR chatbot can act as a mediator between the employee and the HR team. The chatbot can provide the employee with all the necessary details and be easily accessible for any queries at all times. They can also manage employee leaves, check salary statements, schedule meetings, etc. They act as an HR assistant, automating repetitive tasks and bringing in more efficiency to all HR processes.

10. For Lifestyle

This chatbot template category comes in with the various aspects of our daily-lives that requires automation. Right from healthcare — to real estate- to furniture- to complete homes, lifestyle chatbot templates consist of everything that surrounds us. They hold a bunch of use-cases, stemming from different industries but with a common ground of being inclusive in one’s lifestyle.

11. For News

For those news-lovers, news channels can now spread their message faster with news and media chatbot template. This bot template allows people to subscribe to a genre, and receive regular news updates and notifications on their preferred device, directly from your news website.

12. Personal

The personal section consists of a great variety of personal-development, promotional and advertising chatbot templates. This section includes- Birthday Invitation Chatbot Template, Mobile App Onboarding template, New Mobile Development, Pitch Deck, Photographer’s Assistant template, Therapist Assistant, Church Template, Roommate Finder, Grooming Training, Love Match, Pick and Drop, and About Me chatbot template.

13. For Productivity and Utilities

Bots are awesome for productivity. They can help your customers through various services like hiring a photographer, booking slots, dental clinic, renting a vehicle, laundry services, etc. Automation in such areas can make life easier and help you sell your services to a wider target audience. For the customers, bots also relieve you of app fatigue. Instead of downloading yet another app to do specific work-related tasks for you — and ending up with the requisite new set of notifications — you can boost the utility of your existing apps with bots.

14. For Sports

This section helps sports media outlets provide faster sports news and updates to their subscribers. They can send out the scores in the form of notifications, remind the subscriber about the near sport event or match timings. Your customer can also create fan-club and meet sports fans all over the world.

15. Others

This section is the black sheep of the chatbot template familia. Just kidding. This section is categorized as other since it includes a bunch of chatbot templates that belong to different sectors of the industries, serving a significant purpose. To be specific, this section mainly includes- User Onboarding template, Service Scheduler, and Wedding Planner Chatbot Template.

In the entertainment section, it includes- Halloween Invite Chatbot Template, Halloween Information template, and Birds Sanctuary Template. The rest of the chatbot templates include- Government Policy Feedback Chatbot Template, Donation Template, Defence Recruitment, Co-working space, E-challan Template, Hire Freelancer, and Digital Data Storage Chatbot Template.

Wrapping up

Visit Engati to build and customize your own bot.

Also to know more about chatbots, read some of our previous blogs here.

We hope you found this blog helpful.

Thanks for reading!

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