Botgate review – A personalised experience with an AI chat bot

AI is continuing to spread out in different types of products. And now it’s entering the live chat platforms. This right here is Botgate, a live chat platform which utilises AI to create the most personalised experience for your website visitors. Let’s check it out.

So this is the Botgate dashboard where we can see some information about how we are chatting. We can see some average conversations by day. We can see new conversations and then you have some date interval up here you can choose. Let’s dive right into the team inbox. So right here we have an information about a visitor which I have been chatting with.

1. Features of Botgate
2. Botgate Pricing
3. Alternatives to Botgate
4. Future of Botgate
5. Pros & Cons using Botgate
6. Last thoughts about Botgate

Features of Botgate

It is myself here that I have entered some information about. Here we can set this chat to open or closed. Over here, we have some information about the contact, some details, such as what page they are on, what browser and et cetera. We can see if we have had multiple conversations with them. And then geolocation. Here we can see our chat, and we can chat with them.

Completely normal, as you know. We can send files, we can send videos and documents. And then over here is where we have an overview of all of our chats. Now, one thing that’s important to remember here is that if you want to find a chat which is in an AI flow, then you need to click on either AI bot conversations or all conversations. So you can see right now, I have all of these different types of conversations.

And here I have also written a little, and then it has been closed down, since there’s been no activity in it. We can always open it again, and then it will pop up here. So I have two open conversations. This is the team inbox. It’s very simplified, and I would love to have some more information, especially from integrations.

Imagine we had an integration for Stripe, for instance, Some more information here would really be great. The next menu point is the contacts, where we can see some information about the specific contact. And that is just whoever it is we’re chatting with. There’s no profile page.

We can just see what it is we have here. A profile page with some history of what websites they’ve been on and with websites, I mean pages on the specific website, what they’ve been doing, what they’ve been reading and so on. That would be really helpful because we will be able to use that later on in the flows. But let’s go to what’s very exciting, the AI, bot design. Here I already have a flow which comes when you sign up called Get more leads.

And this is very simple, a drag and drop solution where you can enter the information that you want, and then the flow will move on. So the first step in this specific flow is a welcome message. And here there are 17 different types of messages that the user can say. And by user, we mean the AI chatbot. Furthermore, then they will say what brought you to the website today?

Here they have three ways of answering. I’m just browsing. Then they will just come with a simple answer, I need help. Then we will ask for the full name. Here we will ask for an email, and then we will ask for basically that they can ask the questions they have and then here we will then notify them that they have asked a question, and then it will be closed down that they will get back to the visitor as soon as possible. The last flow over here is that you’re looking for something specific you want to buy.

Again we’ll ask for the full name, and they will say thank you, what’s your company name and the email? And then we’ll say thank you again. And then we’ll basically manually figure out what it is. Here is an integration to Shopify, which they’re building would be very interesting because then we could pull data directly from the products and showcase what it is they want to buy. But the way you build these flows is very simple.

As you see, you just drag and drop over. We could also make this one very simple. So let’s say that we will delete this specific step here, and then we’ll just add that the human needs to take over. So here you can say that if we are online it will say we are connecting you with one of our teammates. Please wait.

Otherwise, we are currently offline. Let’s save that right now, and then we can pull this thread down here. So now, when, they say I need help, it will just be a human takeover. We can either test it out or we can save it. So let’s try and test it to see how this will work.

So we have the chat down here and when I click then you can see that it’s asking what brought you to our website today? And then I will press I need help because that is what we have just added now. So here it’s saying thank you for reaching out. Could I have your full name? So this is the old flow.

This means that it has not saved my changes. So let’s try and go back to the flow. I will then press Save. Now it says it’s updated. So let’s try and publish it first and then let’s try and see if we can test it out now.

So let’s try and press I need help and let’s see what happens. So it is now said that we are connecting you with one of our teammates. Please wait. So now it is working. So this means that every time you make changes before you can test it, you need to save and publish your changes.

So let’s go back to the flow. At the moment you don’t have so many things you can do. You can jump to different places, you can delay, you can call an API to get some information, you can send an email, you can send a carousel, and you can see the different options here. I would really like to have the integration options here, but before we can do that, we need to be able to have more integrations. So let me just show you the integration page because right now they have an integration to, of course, the website that I just showed you.

Then they have Instagram, WhatsApp and some different social media down here. They also have their own Botgate API, and then they have webhooks. So they have some integrations at the moment. But I would really like to see more, especially payment integrations. And I could imagine that for webshop clients, WooCommerce or a Shopify integration would be really valuable.

But I know that they’re working on that. So let’s move back here to the play book because the play book is something that is shown on a certain page when some criteria are met. So we have our AI chatbot. The AI chatbot has a play book name. It has where it is you would like to route this AI chatbot, the status of it, of course.

What is it that is targeting? Right now it’s targeting all visitors, and then it should right now show on every page load. So right now you can see that this over here, which is the preview, is what will be shown to all visitors on all the page loaders. When it is, they have been on the page for 3 seconds. Let’s try and take one of the other ones because we also have just a normal default online greeting where it says: Hi name, how can I help you?

It is very simple, and then you can answer here. This looks very much like Intercom to me and Intercom is really the number one choice within chatbots. Here you can see there is an extra step to the route and that depends on what it is that they choose. So here I can choose whether I want to route it to a single teammate, to the AI bot flow, maybe round Robin with a group where it is they choose individually whoever has time, and so on. So here you can see that a play book is basically a small message shown when some criteria are met.

They do also have reports where you can see basically the same on the dashboard. But then we can also see the average conversation length and the average conversation length over here as well. We can see some reports about our contacts, we can see about our messages, our AI chatbot as well. What I’m really missing here is some statistics about how fast I am to answer whoever it is that’s writing, because that’s a metric that’s really important, and that metric can be used in order to tell the visitor when it is that they can expect an answer. But other than that, it seems great.

It’s working well. We can also work with the time zones up here, and we have some information. Hopefully we’ll have a lot more soon. We also have app settings here where if we set the name of the app here, we can set the AI bot confidence. So this is a threshold used for the AI bot, basically to figure out how confident it should be in its answers.

And here right now the bot status is just online. We can also make a persistent menu which is just a quick menu that they can access. Here we set the teammates who have access to this specific chatbot. We have conversations that should automatically close after a certain amount of time of inactivity. You can also integrate with Slack, so you can basically have it completely hooked up with your Botgate chatbot.

Then there is the conversation route. Conversation routing is basically who should get what. So right now all businesses are going through this routing where it is that it’s routed to a specific teammate and that teammate is right now me, and then I can always distribute it to someone else. There’s also company details and business hours, and business hours is important in order to show the chat as online/offline. And overall, that is Botgate.

The two most exciting module is the AI bot design where we could build the flows, and then it’s the play book which is these small marketing messages where we can say that if they’re on the pricing page then we should show something like hey, I can see you have been looking at our pricing for some time now. Do you have any questions? Then just let me know. Or we can set up a video meeting where I showcase some of our most exciting features that are just some examples of what you can use it for because there are a lot of possibilities for you. And Botgate is really a tool you need in order to not only gather leads, but also close leads and close customers who are on your websites and want to become customers.

Botgate Pricing

Now let’s discuss pricing. They have a free plan where you get one integration and 100 active contacts. This is fine for a free plan. Now when you want to upgrade to one of the three paid plans, you need to upgrade pretty far in order to get unlimited integrations. This means that the cheapest paid plans doesn’t come with so many integrations.

You need to upgrade to the scale plan which comes in at $199. Here, the alternatives are a lot cheaper, which we will discuss in just a moment. And even the webhooks, you need to upgrade all the way up to the enterprise plan in order to utilise them.

Alternatives to Botgate

Now the alternatives, as I see it, the first one being Drift and Drift is widely known as a live chat that you can use in order to service your customers. They are slowly tapping into the flow of the AI market, where it is that we can build these flows to make a personalised experience without having a person sitting behind a desk and typing with the visitor.

The other alternative is Landbot and Landbot is what I see as the closest alternative. Landbot also has a lot of flow builds. They overall just have more features and, most importantly, their pricing plan. It is a lot cheaper. You get so much more. As I see it, we can compare the pricing and the scale plan, which comes in at $199 and costs €80 at Landbot.

And even with Landbot you get power – ups, you get more integrations, you can customise with CSS and JavaScript, you can do A/B tests, and you can just do so much more. Though I will say that Botgate is a lot better on the AI side, so you really have to compare those to each other and figure out what is most important for you when you choose your live chat provider.

Future of Botgate

Now the future of Botgate seems quite exciting. First off, they’re working on an integration to Shopify, so we can pull in orders, products and so on in order to service our customers again, especially if they’re asking for stock status. When does this product come back in stock again? And so on. Then they are also working on a calendar integration and this is interesting in order to book meetings or schedule calls. So you can use Botgate in order to gather leads and already make the leads, choose a time that they want to get a call on.

Last but not least, then they’re working on making improvements to the team inbox the reporting and the contacts, so we’ll be able to get more information about the contacts in the team inbox we’ll have more opportunities to maybe start new flows, see more information about the user and make it a little easier than it is right now. Because, as you saw in the walkthrough, it is a little difficult sometimes to find the specific chats, especially if they started in an AI chat flow. Then you have to really filter it out to figure out where it is. So those improvements will really increase how we use a Botgate and make it a lot easier.

Pros & Cons using Botgate

Now, after using Botgate, I really like that I can build advanced flows and with these advanced flows they can help my visitors and I can easily personalise them by asking for information from my visitors. Another bonus is that it supports multiple languages, though I wish that they would change the pricing structure to if not make it cheaper, then add more integrations or more features into the different plans and then, overall in the platform, add more integrations, especially payment integrations like Stripe. And then last but not least, the team inbox right now is too limited, but I know that they’re working on that.

Last thoughts about Botgate

Botgate is a great way of personalising the experience on your website for your visitors. I hope they will change their pricing structure and add more integrations, especially payment integrations, so we can build out our flows even further.I want to give Botgate three stars.

I feel the team inbox was missing information and then the integrations at the moment are just not fulfilling. That’s my review.