Build or buy Virtual Agent

Customer satisfaction is the holy grail for most businesses. Even if you crack every other aspect of your business, right from building a superior product to automation at the right touchpoints, if you fail in this area, nothing else matters. Delivering a superior customer experience can be a game-changer in every industry that you can imagine. Offering a stellar service can also get ridiculously expensive. Imagine having an army of agents working in shifts to care for your company’s support needs.

At this juncture, the use of an AI-driven virtual agent (or chatbot) becomes crucial. Available at a fraction of the cost of a human agent, virtual agents can scale as much as possible and are available 24*7 too. According to a survey by MIT Technology Review, 90% of businesses reported huge improvements in complaint resolution after they started using chatbots.

Here comes an interesting question.

It is possible to build chatbots from scratch, and there are SaaS companies that offer a fully functional chatbot, too. What do you choose?

To build or not to?

In this article, we are going to discuss whether to build or buy a virtual agent for your business.

Considerations for building vs buying a virtual agent:

Let us look at a number of points that should be considered when pondering whether to build or buy a chatbot.

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1. Project Vs Product (The No-code approach) Mindset:

Businesses buy software off the shelf because they don’t have to go through the arduous process of building one from scratch. Building software comes with a host of problems.

If you want to build a product, you need to hire experts of different capabilities.

1. You want someone from the UI/UX team to ensure that the app is accessible to everyone and is pleasant to navigate.
2. It would be best if you had developers who would build the back-end and front-end of the software.
3. Testers to ensure that the final product is smooth and devoid of bugs.
4. A product manager to handle all of this, and many more experts.

But if you buy a finished product from a vendor, you don’t have to post an ad on Monster.com and go on a hiring spree. It is as easy as buying a product, you will gain access to the software immediately.

2. Finding skilled developers:

The issue isn’t only about hiring developers who are capable of creating a powerful virtual agent. Do they have the right mindset to pull off a project of this size? Do they have the right set of skills to build a virtual agent? Hiring skilled developers is also a difficult task.

3. Innovations and Features:

Let us consider a few functionalities and features of a virtual agent and understand how different it will be if you take the product approach from the project approach.

a. Advanced NLU to power virtual agent:

If you build a virtual agent that can handle 20 use cases, you also need to manage these conversations. The virtual agent should keep improving itself with each conversation and with time. The project approach requires you to work on improving the virtual agent’s understanding of the conversations that happen in the niche. It is going to take you time to add any innovation, no matter how small it is going to be. You also need to worry about the time factor.

If you buy the virtual agent platform directly from a vendor, the onus is on them to add innovative features to their product. They will work on releasing new updates to the product to make it as attractive as possible to their potential customers.

b. Omnichannel:

When you build the virtual agent from the ground up, you will need to facilitate omnichannel conversations by yourself. It will require the effort of more developers, and that will increase the costs.

If you were to buy a virtual agent from a vendor, you do not have to worry whether omnichannel conversations are possible. It is almost a given these days, and they come in-built with the software.

c. App Integrations & App Workflows:

A virtual agent isn’t an end in itself. It is an essential cog in the wheel of your customer-facing operations. For your AI virtual agent to be highly effective, it must facilitate multiple touchpoints that will impact customer experiences. You need to integrate the virtual agent with several systems, such as CRM, inventory management, scheduling, email marketing, etc.

68% of customers like chatbots as they provide quick solutions, so it needs to be an all-encompassing solution that meets their expectations every single time. For virtual agents to be highly effective, they should have data analytics and continuous monitoring to calculate the effectiveness of integration touchpoints.

If you buy a virtual agent, they will give you ready-made integrations with a number of information systems and standardized interfaces for integration with custom applications. On the other hand, if you are creating your chatbot, you need to build integration capabilities from scratch.

d. Multi-lingual:

For those businesses who buy the chatbot from a vendor, they can safely assume that it will have multilingual capabilities. It is one less thing to worry about. But for businesses that are particular about building one from scratch, it is imperative that they work on this as well.

e.Dialog management:

The ability of a virtual agent to engage in an interactive dialogue with a human being on a particular topic is pivotal if the chatbot has to be a success. Most businesses that build virtual agents from scratch do not leverage machine learning technology and cannot self-learn, nor does it understand true intent.

Buying a chatbot from a SaaS vendor will be fine as they consider all of this in their product. It would have handled hundreds of customer requests and trained across millions of interactions.

4. Cost / Affordability:

If you are taking the project route, then the business should invest in procuring development tools, a cloud-hosting environment, software licensing, and storage infrastructure and pay maintenance fees to manage these tools. All of this will break your bank.

When you are buying the virtual agent directly from a vendor, the cost is going to be nominal as there are SaaS products that let you pay a little price monthly. There is no fee for hosting as everything is included in it.

The vendors will distribute the cost of maintenance and operations to their clients, where economies of scale kick in. That’s why the charges will be less when compared to building it by yourself.

5. Easy of deployment:

Deploying a virtual agent on your private hosting platform will be a complex and cumbersome process, given how feature-heavy the end product will be.

When it is a SaaS product, there is no installation equipment updates or traditional licensing management required. Deploying the software is easy, and there will be zero downtime, too.

6. Ease of Maintenance:

In the case of virtual agents, maintenance also implies maintaining the conversations. If you buy the virtual agent from a SaaS company, they will take care of it. You do not have to worry about maintaining the product at all.

If you take the project approach, you must maintain the code, the project, and the conversations. It won’t be easy, developers will find it incredibly complex to retain it. If there is any change in the environment, then the team should go back to the drawing board and constantly monitor to see if the product is working correctly.

7. Need for data for continuous training:

For a virtual agent to be potent, it needs to be trained. When you buy a chatbot, the SaaS vendor trains the bot by making it ‘read’ several conversations. It will have all the necessary features that train the bot automatically without any external help. Since these businesses have conversations with several businesses, they would also be following the best practices to give you the bot pre-trained.

If you were to choose Workativ, we have a marketplace where we offer prebuilt conversations where you can make edits. You can add or delete the conversations based on what you want to suit your business goals.

8. Core competencies:

If your core competency is not building virtual agent chatbots, buying them from a vendor is the most sensible thing to do. Otherwise, you need to allocate extra resources to it and do many other activities, too. It might also involve making your employees avoid doing their most meaningful work.

Imagine this: you are a new-age startup building software to connect specialized doctors and patients. Your developers were excited to join an organization whose product will help people. If you separate them from this vision and ask them to build a virtual agent, it might seriously affect their morale and productivity.

9. Time-to-market vs Time-to-value:

If you were to build a virtual agent from scratch, the time-to-market would be at least a minimum of 6 months, depending on the number of people involved in the project. For businesses that want an immediate chatbot solution, going the product route by buying it from a company is the best option.

Apart from not realizing your time-to-value immediately when you build it from scratch, there are several other considerations too that we have discussed in this article:

1. The need to hire

2. Costs involved, both to build the product and maintain it

3. Lack of data to train the bot, and so on.

One more thing that you need to think about when building virtual agents from scratch is the opportunity cost. What else could have been made with the time and resources that you dedicated to building a virtual agent? Also, you always need to keep your technical team on standby if you want to add more features or fix bugs.

Build vs Buy Virtual agent: What’s the verdict?

Chatbots have revolutionized the way we communicate with brands. They are cost-effective, scalable, flexible, easy to deploy, and can take your communication systems to the next level. The above points will give you an idea about the prospects of building or buying a virtual agent.

Businesses with a lot of cash to burn, that is, most enterprises, might favor building a virtual agent from scratch. But it is more complex than it is touted, even if you have the budget. While an enterprise-level chatbot should be able to understand your requirements and customize them for you entirely, that’s still possible to get from a SaaS chatbot vendor.

When you are looking to buy a highly functional and feature-rich chatbot, ask for product tours and detailed demos. Do your due diligence before investing in a virtual agent. Ensure that the product you buy is scalable for the future.

If you don’t want to go through the hassle of building a virtual agent from scratch, Workativ’s solution will take care of it. Chatbots are going to define your customers’ digital experience. Let us help you with the right solution according to your needs.

Disclaimer: This article was initially published here.