When you’re a business owner, it’s hard to be everywhere at once — even though, your venture kind of demands it of you, especially if you’re a solopreneur. Luckily, there are lots of tools on the market aimed at helping you manage important parts of your business without a ton of regular leg work from you. One part of the business that’s often helpful to automate is your customer service, especially for simple, general questions your customers may have.
Below, we’ve rounded up some of the best AI chatbots for customer service. You can read more on our methodology below.
Best AI chatbots for customer service
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Offers in this section are from affiliate partners and selected based on a combination of engagement, product relevance, compensation, and consistent availability.
Annual Percentage Yield (APY)
3.46% with a daily balance of $5,000,000 or below; 4.42% with a daily balance above $5,000,000
Best for sentiment analysis
Zoho Desk
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Cost
$7/month for Express plan; $14/month for Standard plan; $23/month for Professional plan; $40/month for Enterprise plan (billed annually; monthly billing results in a slightly higher cost)
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Free trial
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Standout features
Standout features include custom reports, customer happiness ratings, intstant messaging, multilingual help center, generative AI, Zia the AI assistant, live chat feature, guided conversations and a help center, to name a few (note: some features are only available at higher pricing tiers)
Pros
- Offers 15-day free trial
- Pricing starts at $14/month and goes up to $40/month, which is a fairly affordable price point
- Offers a completely free plan with limited features focused more on email ticket resolution
- Used by 100,000+ well-known brands and corporations
- Integrates with ChatGPT (only for the Standard, Professional and Enterprise plans)
Cons
- Built-in generative AI assistant (Zia) is only available with the Enterprise plan
- Sentiment analysis is only available with the Enterprise plan
Who’s this for? Sentiment analysis allows an AI agent to analyze a customer’s responses to gauge their mood and figure out the best way to respond. It’s a step toward allowing the AI to develop human-like judgment during an interaction. Zoho Desk offers a generative AI assistant called Zia that’s equipped with sentiment analysis capabilities. At the time of this writing, it supports sentiment analysis in up to 10 languages. However, Zia, as well as the sentiment analysis capability, are only available for businesses with the Enterprise plan — the highest priced plan. The plan itself may be best for businesses that are already growing and that may have multiple brands or teams under the organization and are looking for more advanced features to optimize the processes.
Standout benefits: Zoho Desk offers customer happiness ratings through its live messaging feature. The live chat integrates with platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Instagram, and the number of channels you can connect depends on the plan you have. Zoho Desk also offers a completely free plan, however, it’s more focused on email ticket resolution than AI customer service.
Best for free trial
Guru
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Cost
$15/month per user (billed annually); custom pricing available for enterprise customers
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Free trial
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Standout features
Integrates with dozens of apps including Slack, ChatGPT, Airtable, Asana, Gitlab and more. The platform is designed to comb through information from multiple organizational sources to find the right answer to an employee or customer question or concern. The platform also allows you to write and verify content so your team always has the right answers.
Pros
- Offers a very generous 30-day free trial
- Affordable pricing that starts at $15/month; custom pricing available for enterprise customers
- Used by well-known brands and corporations
- Integrates with dozens of apps like ChatGPT and Slack
Cons
- Doesn’t offer a completely free plan
Who’s this for? Guru is known for being a platform that centralizes internal organization information and uses AI to help teams locate the information they need and get their questions answered. However, Guru also offers a solution tailored to your business’ customer support team to help find the right information to answer customer questions faster. Because of this, Guru may be best suited for larger businesses with more teams. The platform offers a generous free trial period of 30 days.
Standout benefits: Guru offers a library of explainer videos, 200+ templates for team projects, internal communications, onboarding checklists and more. It also offers a blog with additional explainer content to help you stay on top of business as an operator.
Best for no-code setup
Fin
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Cost
$0.99 per resolution (50 resolution monthly minimum)
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Free trial
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Standout features
Standout features include a no-code setup, the ability to devise answers based on the content you provide and offers live chat and supports email, phone, SMS and social media channel integrations. The customer chat bot is available 24/7.
Pros
- Offers a 14-day free trial
- Businesses pay per the number of resolutions per month
- Integrates with social media, SMS, email and phone
Cons
- Requires a minimum of 50 resolutions per month
Who’s this for? Fin allows businesses to set up their AI customer service agent without needing to know how to code. Instead, users just need to provide the platform with content like help center articles, blog posts and other information about their product or service. The platform then uses it as a “knowledge base” to answer any customer questions.
Standout benefits: Fin charges users based on the number of resolutions per month — in other words, the number of times that Fin is able to resolve a customer’s question. According to the platform’s website, Fin has a 65% resolution rate at the time of this writing. So, you pretty much only pay for the platform’s successes. However, Fin does require a minimum of 50 monthly resolutions, which means that at a rate of $0.99 per resolution, you’ll be paying nearly $50 per month for the platform.
Best free service
Zapier
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Cost
Offers a completely free plan; $13.33/month for the Pro plan; $66.67/month for the Advanced plan (billed annually)
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Free trial
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Standout features
Zapier offers up to 20 chatbots with its highest pricing tier; for more than 20 chatbots, contact them for a custom plan. The platform also offers the ability to create a custom directive (set the objective and style for your chatbots), maintains conversation transcripts for up to 30 days, depending on the plan and allows you to connect up to 50MB of knowledge data with the highest priced plan.
Pros
- Offers a 14-day free trial
- Offers a completely free plan
- Allows users to create custom AI chatbots without knowledge of coding
- Well-known platform used by over 2 million businesses and brands
Cons
- Lead collection is not available with the free plan
- The free plan doesn’t allow users to train their chatbot through document uploads or public URLs
- Pricing for higher tiers is a bit high compared to some other solutions on the market
Who’s this for? If you’re a small business that doesn’t really need advanced enterprise features or you just want to dip your toe into the world of AI chatbots without paying for a commitment, Zapier offers a free plan with features that still allow you to create functional chatbots for your business. Of course, the free plan is still limited and doesn’t have features that are as comprehensive as the more premium tiers do. The free plan lets you create two chatbots, create a custom directive to set the style and objective of your chatbots, save conversation history for up to seven days, share public links to your chatbot and a few others.
Standout benefits: Advanced plans allow users to have up to 20 chatbots.
FAQs
What is the benefit to AI customer service chatbots?
AI customer service chatbots provide 24/7 assistance to potential customers — even when you aren’t available to handle questions and comments yourself. This frees up your time so you can focus on other parts of your business.
What is a customer service chatbot?
It’s a tool that uses AI to scan customer questions and find the right answers that address their concerns.
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Our methodology
To determine the best AI chatbots for customer service, CNBC Select analyzed over a dozen services. We narrowed down our rankings and categorized them by best for sentiment analysis, best for free trial, best for no-code setup and best free service.
We considered factors like:
- Free trial period offered
- Pricing
- Resources/guidance/educational materials offered
- Ease of use
- Customer reviews where applicable
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Editorial Note: Opinions, analyses, reviews or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the Select editorial staff’s alone, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any third party.
