ManyChat headquartered in San Francisco provides their chatbot building platform to deploy Facebook messenger chatbots for support and service.
$10
per month
Zoom Contact Center
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Zoom Contact Center helps businesses deliver prompt, accurate, and highly personalized customer experiences that drive loyalty. It includes intelligent self-service and routing, a unified communications and contact center, and video optimized high-touch engagements.
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).
Perfect for companies that have agents all over the place, e.g., different offices or WFH. Also good for companies that aren't big enough to have a "phone guy" as this platform allows IT to do the phone work as it doesn't require esoteric knowledge like other phone systems.
Fairly simple GUI designer tool to define the Contact Flows. There are only a few elements, but they aren't many Design Widgets types, but just enough to get you started to the majority to the use cases you might encounter. There are plenty of opportunities to improve and enhance, but considering how "young" the product is, I think Zoom did a good job to provide a good Contact Center solution for the entry-to-medium level customers/users without needing to have a dedicated Contact Center resident expert to take care of the solution.
The way the Queues are define, embeds in a fairly simple matter many of Call Handlings Contact Flows design like Timers, Overflow handling, Callback keeping the position in the Queue handling, etc. These things are defined directly into the queue so you don't have to build the logic for it into the Contact Flow design itself. That includes in many cases prompt handling and timers.
Their Low-Code/No-Code motto comes handy when it comes to embed Chat Engagement Channels into Web Pages, where embedding a simple "iframe little piece of XML definition to call a JavaScript Applet" into a Web Page is all that is needed.
Having the "Contact Center App" just embedded into the Existing Zoom Client App is another plus I see: Agents that are force to wear "multiple hats" handling regular phone calls and Contact Center calls, don't have to waste time switching apps, other than the productivity ones so it is one less App the Agents and Supervisor need to worry about.
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.
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.
There are options and ways to get to specific feature sets that are similar to what Zoom can offer. Many of the Zoom included features are add-ons for the RingCentral offering. So cost goes up and can also be an add-on difficulties/deployment costs as well. When we reviewed the features needed and the cost comparison, Zoom was less than half the cost with many of the features baked in as opposed to add-ons
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.
We migrated away from a telephony system that was antiquated and almost unusable for what we wanted to do, so Zoom has been a huge improvement for us!
We're continuing to roll out new channels of contact for customers -- Calls, chat, video, email, etc.
We're still getting our sea legs from a reporting perspective, and that could always be better, but so far the biggest improvement was for our staff actually using the software. They really enjoy the simplicity and robustness of the software.
