You’ve seen all of the posts about how easy it is now to build your own chatbot for your business. With companies like OpenAI and Anthropic becoming easier to use, it may be tempting to plug into them directly and start having AI manage your lead qualification. When you build your own chatbot you have control over the prompts. You can make highly customized automations. You aren’t dependent on yet another third party platform. Before you jump the gun on building your own chatbot, consider these hurdles that you’ll have to overcome.
Manual Replies Mess Up AI
You’re likely building these bots for a business owner and those business owners want things as easy as possible. With CloseBot if a user manually interrupts the bot by sending a message themselves, you can set up CloseBot to automatically shut off. This makes human takeover a seamless process without the need to fumble with tags or custom fields. You won’t have the ability to do this with workflow-based bots.
Bot is not Always Aware
CloseBot is always aware of conversations. Even if CloseBot is turned OFF for a contact and later turned ON, the bot will see the entire conversation history with the contact, jumping in naturally and updating custom fields. Your workflow-based bots won’t be aware of any messages to and from contacts that the bot didn’t directly respond to. This can make it super awkward when it enters a conversation midway 😅
Build Your Own Chatbot… But Never Edit It
Many of these people telling you to build your own chatbot know that you won’t have the ability to build it yourself. They usually pitch a one time fee to set things up that can range anywhere from $100 to $5,000 and then they hand it over. This finished product will likely contain workflows in GoHighLevel, Zapier or multiple sources. It may even come with some special documentation for you, explaining how your new toy works.
This all seems fine until you take it for a test drive and you want to make edits… You try to figure out how these workflows work and you end up breaking stuff. You go back to the source only to learn that it’s going to cost you $100/hour in change requests to make edits to a collection of automations that you don’t understand. These changes happen and you test it again only to find out that more changes need to be made… and there goes another $200. Then OpenAI adds a new model that you want to use… there goes another $200. In your attempt to avoid a subscription, you’ve landed yourself in a version of a subscription of continued change requests.
CloseBot’s prompt-less bot builder makes it easy for agencies to build expert-level AI lead qualification bots by themselves! And as technology changes, we make changes for you for free! You’ll always be using the latest and greatest that the industry has to offer.
Live Chat Support
Even with our prompt-less bot builder, you may encounter things that slow you down… all of our paid plans come with all-day live chat support to help you out! Without worries about costly change requests or paid support, you’ll be able to soar through changes to your bot 🤖 Is it worth a custom build of your own chatbot if you’re left all alone at the end without free support?
Conversational Booking
There isn’t a single chatbot built with automation tools like workflows or Zapier that can book conversational appointments with high accuracy. CloseBot’s backend that handles booking prompting is made up of complex logic, natural language processing and AI stages that would be much too complex to build with no-code tools. And you get access to CloseBot conversational booking even on our free plan!
Throw in the fact that CloseBot is also able to conversationally gather contact timezone prior to booking and it’s a no-brainer! If you need your bot to book appointments conversationally with contacts all over the world, we have you covered.
AI Custom Field Updates and Pipelines
Want to gather customer information throughout the conversation and update fields in your CRM? Easy with CloseBot! You can connect objectives straight to fields so the AI will update them with information as it works through the conversation. Easily make it so these field updates move your pipeline along as well. Check out this demo video showing off how CloseBot can update any contact field in your GoHighLevel CRM.
AI Trained on Uploads and Scraped Websites
A lot of bot products have a giant prompt area where you instruct the AI, put in your FAQs, etc. CloseBot allows you to upload up to 3GB of external knowledge in the form of scraped websites, PDFs, CSVs and other text files for the bot to utilize only when it’s needed. Reduce the chance of your bot getting confused or costing an arm and a leg by using our uploads on all accounts!
Aggression Detection
Sometimes you likely deal with contacts that show signs of aggression during the conversation (cold outreach especially)… With this setting, you can make sure the bot auto-disengages if a contact starts getting unruly! If you go for the custom build out instead of CloseBot, your bot will continue chatting away with angry customers… likely landing you a hefty fine when they come after you for harassment!
Back-to-Back Message Nightmare
People like to send messages back-to-back and when they do that you’ll see your AI responding in an embarrassing back-to-back manner as well 🤦♂️ CloseBot has a system of contact-based deduplication and message locking to protect against this! When back-to-back messages come in, CloseBot will respond once to both messages more like a real person. To make this even more impressive, CloseBot can break up larger sent messages into multiple messages and even include occasional typos if you want it to!
OpenAI and Anthropic Downtime
OpenAI goes down sometimes and the Zapier or workflow exponential back-off may exit before it’s back online, meaning your messages go unprocessed. CloseBot has a longer incremental retry time and will even fall back to a different available model if needed to get your message through! Rest assured we take deliverability very seriously.
In fact, you don’t even have to use OpenAI (ChatGPT) for your responses. Many of our users prefer Anthropic’s (Claude) responses. These users use Anthropic as their primary and OpenAI as their fallback. Easily test the differences between the two within your CloseBot account and switch between them with a single click. In the example below there are 4 different levels of fallbacks 😅
Dashboard Analytics
With CloseBot’s dashboard, you can see important information like the number of contact responses and the number of AI booked appointments. This means you can see how different bots drive different response rates and easily monitor your messaging costs. Search for messages in the message history per bot and click any bot message to see the entire prompt chain used to generate the bot responses. With your custom-built solution, you won’t have access to this kind of data, leaving you blind on how your bot is performing. What good is it to build your own chatbot if you can’t see how it’s doing!?
Comments are closed.