ManyChat headquartered in San Francisco provides their chatbot building platform to deploy Facebook messenger chatbots for support and service.
$10
per month
Verint Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA)
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
The Verint Intelligent Virtual Assistant (formerly Verint Self-Service solutions) is a customer-oriented knowledge management solution including technology acquired by Verint from Next IT in 2017. The platform includes voice self-service IVR, a virtual AI-guided assistant (Next IT), and Verint's own knowledge management system for self-service.
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).
The IVA is very well suited to handle routine questions and basic actions that would typically require customer support. It may be a little more challenged handling edge cases but in those instances we have found it provides an easy transfer to a live agent
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.
While I enjoy the IVA product, there is still some fine-tuning of the platform that can be done. There are some nuances to the Verint platform, which can make it difficult to start quickly. We thought business users would be able to easily manage the work needed within the IVA platform for our business; however, with how complex we want to make the experience, that was not possible. We quickly realized we needed more support than just our business users, who were not familiar with how to add API information into a conversation flow. This is why we expanded to others within our business to support the tool.
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.
Based on my experience. Once the client is familiarize with the AI and of course the AI company solution has been implemented correctly. We able to offer the customer a best service.
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.
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.
Verint Intelligent Virtual Assistant had more features and functionality than the Genesys product as well as customization and further options for internal system integration to our existing on-prem systems. In addition, we also had a rapport with other Verint products and were more familiar with their AI capabilities, making them the obvious choice.
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.
