Microsoft offers the Azure Bot Service (replacing the former Microsoft Bot Framework), a managed bot building platform, which provides an integrated environment that is purpose-built for bot development, enabling you to build, connect, test, deploy, and manage intelligent bots, all from one place.
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Conversica
Score 4.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Conversica provides lead management software for marketing, inside sales and sales groups.
$1,499
per installation
Pricing
Azure AI Bot Service
Conversica
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starter Edition
$1,499
per installation
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure AI Bot Service
Conversica
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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A Conversica subscription includes an unlimited number of seats for marketers, sales reps and managers. Different editions include different levels of functionality to match your needs. The service is a monthly subscription with an annual commitment.
Azure AI Bot service works well if you need to support multiple channels like MS Teams, Slack, Facebook Messenger, etc., using the same code base. It also provides built-in connectors to LUIS and Azure OpenAI for natural language understanding and intelligence. Scenarios such as a low-cost chatbot without the need for LUIS or AI are the ones where Azure AI bot service might not be most appropriate.
Conversica is an excellent tool if you have a large database of potential students, sales leads, or other forms of potential customers/users. It does not replace human interaction, but instead supplements it - allowing your admissions/sales/retention team to spend their time with those individuals that are in most need of assistance - whether that be because they are "hot leads" for a sale, students with a sincere interest, or customers needing assistance beyond the capabilities of an automatic system.
Conversica is great at working low level leads and surfacing those that are in fact interested in your product or service.
Conversica is also useful in weeding out leads that are not strong.
Since Conversica is sending emails to various prospects, customers and opportunities, it allows sales, account managers, service etc, to focus on other activities, thereby saving time and freeing up resources.
The method of standing up campaigns can be a little tedious for administrators because it uses copy/paste of Salesforce Campaign ID instead of just searching for active Salesforce campaigns.
Understanding the conversation path options that the AI could take is improving greatly, but can still use some improvements for admin awareness when standing up a new conversation.
Understanding what conversation types exist and how they differ from one another is sometimes difficult to self-serv, but the Conversica team is always very good about helping out explaining these.
Tool is extremely powerful but comes with a heavy price tag. As long as we close more than 30 deals with year with Conversica's assistance it will be an easy choice to renew. If we don't we will have to figure out if these funds are best spent in other lead generation places.
Azure Bot Service provides an integrated environment for bot development. Microsoft Azure Cloud is fully compatible and its security features. It's more important to pay attention to the logic of business than the specifics of each messenger. We don't have any issues using the bot framework because the implementation is excellent.
Microsoft offers robust support without a high amount of extra cost to add this product on into our existing support contract. No new onsite personnel as required and training sessions and manuals were included. Very fast response and problem resolution were made available. Detailed configuration guidance was provided at no extra cost. Patching was a bit too frequent.
Our account manager and support rep have been extremely helpful in helping us get the system where we wanted it. Given our original use case as a lead qualifier, a lot of the conversations needed to be altered or exceptions created in order to provide the customization we needed. Our AM and support rep were able to accommodate most of our requests and were extremely helpful in working with us on a solution.
The implementation went smoothly. The only advice I would give for anybody looking to integrate Conversica with Salesforce is to ensure that either you or somebody within your organization has experience with process builder as you'll need to create some processes to force your leads into Salesforce campaigns for the Conversica system to pick them up.
I haven't looked into many other conversational ai products - we received a solid recommendation about using this and have been happy with the process and experience. Price was also pretty good, so we didn't feel a need to shop around on that front. If things change I'll do that homework, but we're happy for now
Interfaces with the SQL data set, tracks down plans/replies, and tests them with the SDK.
Utilizing the system is made conceivable by the Bot Dev gateway. We can interface our bot in excess of ten channels, including Twilio Facebook, Twilio, Twilio, and Slack, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
We have found that each conversation type has a different ROI. Some are very hard to report off of, whereas others are easy. this is because some are more built around building awareness of what we offer where they may not purchase it for months down the line.
Has helped us to save on salaries. If staff were to try to do the same thing our AI Assistant does, it would take them many hours to be as successful.
