With Alive5’s Business Class SMS platform, teams can text-enable their office phone lines to send 2-way texts, bulk messages, and manage conversations with customers, patients, clients or patrons with chatbot automation.
$5
per month
ManyChat
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
ManyChat headquartered in San Francisco provides their chatbot building platform to deploy Facebook messenger chatbots for support and service.
It is well suited for communication with existing customers and prospects. It is less appropriate for people just looking to visit our website to get up to date with the latest team news or those who aren't at a computer.
I found that ManyChat is a strong tool when receiving incoming messages, being able to create a tree of potential responses based on options given to the initiator. There is also a huge potential for complex automation (as long as the environment required by Facebook in order to send outgoing messages is maintained).
Mobile compatibility - AliveChat has a dynamic user interface which makes its popup chat widget display and work perfectly on all devices - mobile and desktop. Thus web visitors get a complete experience no matter the device from which they use in accessing our website.
Analytic - AliveChat provides us with a dynamic set of website analytics that helps us in analyzing our progress or decline in a timely manner. With the analytics provided by AliveChat, we are able to monitor the number of visitors on the website at a particular time, the duration of which they have been on the website, the number of times they have been on the website in time past etc.
Feature packed - AliveChat is packed with features which makes the job of the customer care agents easier. For instance, with AliveChat it is very easy for an agent to transfer a web visitors chat to another agent that has better answers to the agent's query. We are also able to introduce short survey questions to web visitors, which they respond to before they begin chatting with a customer care rep.
Honestly, the only thing I don't like about ManyChat is their support. It seems to be almost non existent. However, that concern is negated by having a fantastic user base that helps each other out on Facebook.
ManyChat is a great tool, provides loads of features, integrations and just saves you a whole load of time once all set up. If you aren't tech-savvy or used to how digital marketing tools work, it can appear complicated. That's how I felt initially 2 years ago, and after watching tutorials online I had a better understanding of it. This is why I rated it a 7, as it's not a tool that you can just play around with and guess how it works. There's definitely a learning curve with it so I recommend doing the free training and watching video tutorials.
There is room for improvement but frankly, we haven't had the need to request for support. Everything is pretty easy to setup and there are very useful video explanation guides and walkthroughs on ManyChat's YouTube channel. The only challenge we have had was to integrate it with Zapier, it's a bit tricky because you need to do a setup workaround first, but nothing too complicated.
AliveChat really serves a different purpose than other products. Very few products offer the ability to chat through our website, so it compliments our phone, text, and email options very well.
I've worked in the past with Chatfuel. However, I decided to switch to ManyChat due to a variety of reasons. Overall, ManyChat offers much more functionality out of the box (e.g., Facebook comments tool), sequence builders are much more intuitive. Also, they provide flexible pay as you go pricing plan, which is perfect for a startup like us.
AliveChat has made it easy for us to track the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. As the real-time number of visitors on the website gives us insights into the performance of ongoing campaigns.
AliveChat also makes it possible for us to have an idea of where our web visitors are coming from i.e. via the pre-chat survey form for instance. We are able to generate important data like how a web visitor got to know about us, their expectations when visiting our website etc.
AliveChat makes it easy for web visitors to get a real-time response to their questions, with a delay of probably a few seconds.
For the intended application, we experienced a negative ROI due to the inconsistency in the ability to maintain the automation without incoming responses. Since it is a free service that was meant to lead to paid services organically, the inconsistencies prevented the desired outcome.
We did experience a higher conversion rate with basic incoming messages with questions about services or products due to the ability to have pre-created responses and direction immediately supporting the prospect.
