Azure AI Bot Service vs. MobileMonkey

From personal experience, I can recommend the Azure AI service to reduce the burden on your customer service team, as we did. We created a customer service bot and automated our Frequently Asked Questions section, as well as an interactive platform for registering other complaints that the bot cannot handle, which are later addressed by our customer service team.

Incentivized

MobileMonkey would be great if you have a really strong social media presence and want to capitalize on people visiting your pages. It's great if you have a tech friendly audience who is not afraid to talk to a chatbot. If you have an audience where they might be uncomfortable or more of an "uptight" audience then it might not be fore you. It's also not great for heavy B2B if your focus is on high level targets as they're likely not logged in to Facebook at work. B2C is probably the best function for MobileMonkey, although it could be used to help field support messages.

Incentivized

• Assembles conversational AI encounters for our clients
• Adds regular language, discourse, and vision
• Sends to well known channels with insignificant code changes

• For small businesses on zero budget - provides a free.
• A Facebook group community with peers and experts helping each other.

Incentivized

• Limited Natural Language Understanding, especially in entertainment contexts where slang, humor
• Works only with Azure platform only not compatible with other platforms
• Complex customization as per organization need

Incentivized

• Terrible marketing ethics!
• 6am phone calls to my cell trying to up-sell me
• Spam galore! I have replied more than 5 times to be unsubscribed, yet they still spam me

Azure AI Bot Service comes with an Integrated Development Environment and Bot Framework SDK that simplifies development. Having a single codebase for multiple channels, such as MS Teams, Facebook, and Slack, makes it easier to target multiple platforms without requiring redevelopment. LUIS and OpenAI can be easily integrated with your Chatbot to provide a seammless chat bot expereince to customers.

Incentivized

Microsoft's customer service staff is friendly and extremely knowledgeable. They are always available to assist you with bot framework-related issues that you may be experiencing. They provide training sessions, manuals, and support personnel, among other things. Bugs were easily spotted and patched, which was one of my pet peeves about patching.

Incentivized

MobileMonkey support is second to none when you have a paid plan. Always willing to help and make your life a lot easier when you're facing any technical difficulties or frustrations. When I was on the free plan, I found plenty of useful resources that helped me solve my problems, and I could still contact support for help.

Incentivized

Microsoft Bot Framework is much better and well more established without a lot of proprietary software/coding language. Lex is very limited with integration with standard hardware and network configurations. Lex has performance issues and was too slow to meet near real-time collaboration requirements. Bot Framework complements many other Microsoft communication products and this was key to implementing without a lot of new training required.

Incentivized

MobileMonkey is a lot less expensive than both Olark and Drift. We chose MobileMonkey because we were hoping the familiar interface and integration between social and the website would drive more interest which would lead to conversion and revenue. It's more of a chatbot than Intercom in that Intercom is really good for customer support, but MM is a nice way to get people interested by sharing high level data through a conversation that doesn't require a real person. However, Olark, Drift, and Intercom all integrate with the major CRMs and marketing automation platforms which gives them a real edge over MobileMonkey at this time.

Incentivized

• Azure Bot will only deliver according to the granularity of the FAQ it is feed. Otherwise, it has been a cost optimization tool for our organization.

• It has become a quick sunk-cost due to the amount of time I had to spend ignoring/blocking their unsolicited marketing/communication attempts.