We are passionate about building bots. While there are many common pitfalls in chatbot design, a well executed chatbot can greatly increase the customer experience, engagement and satisfaction and at the same time generate large returns on investment.

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A great bot to us is a bot that provides the customer with the best possible experience in getting the job that they need to do done. It must make the best use of all the features available to it in the channel in question, including voice, graphical and AI features.

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In short, the experience should be far superior to the experience of using a website, apps, phone or another mechanism to achieve the same outcome. This includes choosing the best venue to interact with the bot functionality. Should the bot be on the web, on a smart speaker, on facebook messenger, on email or slack for example?

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Aside from increasing customer engagement and satisfaction, the bot can also dramatically lower the cost of providing customer service for companies. The bot can be used to answer simple customer support questions and fall back to a human agent for more difficult questions. This can materially reduce the need for customer support staff.

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When we say experience of using the bot, we mean the full experience, including the aesthetics and personalization and the amount of friction in terms of physical effort (taps to install and sign on, taps or voice commands to use the bot) and mental effort required in completing the task (such as the precision required in using it and the discoverability of required functionality).

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In short a great bot is a great software product. No great software product was ever created without a professional process and a high level of creativity in both the design and technical departments.

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As a professional bot builder, your first consideration when setting out to build great chatbots is the framework you use.

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Botpress is already the market leader in open source chatbot frameworks and even more so for on-prem enterprise frameworks. What the tens of thousands of developers who choose Botpress understand is that Botpress ranks highly on the nine main criteria on which chatbot platforms need to be judged.

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The criteria are architecture, openness, ease of use, scope, rigour, wow factor, customizability, security and ability to collaborate.

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Companies that skip due diligence, choose a framework on the basis of price or go with less comprehensive offerings from well known names, like Google, Facebook or Microsoft Azure, will pay the price in the long term either in the quality of the bot from a security, control, extensibility or functionality point of view.

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Who uses Botpress?

Botpress has been built for and is used by professional chatbot developers. Like professional designers use photoshop, professional bot builders use Botpress.

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In 2017, in collaboration with large solution providers, Botpress started delivering highly customized and scaleable chatbot services to a large number of enterprise giants. Large enterprises normally have done research into different platforms and understand the criteria and requirements for assessing bot frameworks outlined above. Even though large enterprises have a greater need for data security and scale, the criteria for choosing a bot platform apply to small as well as large business.

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Despite being built for scale, we want Botpress to be widely adopted and want to give solution providers and developers (that don’t have the same security, support or scale requirements) the same powerful tool that enterprises use to create their bots for smaller businesses. To this end we offer a “free forever” commercial version of Botpress. This version is available with support from the community forum.

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Start-ups can also massively reduce their development costs by using the free version of Botpress to develop great bots in record time. It is critical that start ups get from idea to proof of concept to minimum viable product as quickly as possible. Start-ups want to be able to focus on implementing the custom logic and not on building all the supporting infrastructure for the bot.