Chatbot For Enterprises: Should You Build or Buy?

Most enterprises are increasingly turning to chatbots to streamline operations, enhance customer service, and gain a competitive edge. As your businesses evaluate the strategies for integrating this powerful technology, a fundamental question arises: should you buy pre-built chatbot solutions or build your own custom chatbot from scratch? 

This decision can have far-reaching implications, affecting everything from implementation time and cost to customization capabilities and long-term scalability. Let’s find out the pros and cons of these two methods!

What Is An Enterprise Chatbot?

An enterprise chatbot is a conversational software application designed for organizational use. This chatbot often employs generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) to facilitate automated and efficient interactions with users. 

The generative AI chatbot can produce original outputs, such as text, images, music, and more, that mimic human creativity and cognition. 

By leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms, generative AI chatbots can adapt their conversations based on user input and organizational knowledge, creating personalized and contextually relevant experiences with business workflow.

This way, they will understand and generate natural language responses, which will help them perform various functions such as customer support, lead generation, data retrieval, and task automation within a business context.

Why You Need Enterprise Chatbot?

Implementing a chatbot for your business offers many benefits that go beyond simply handling customer inquiries. Here are some main reasons why a business may need an enterprise chatbot:

• Improve customer engagement: Enterprises may develop a chatbot to guide customers in every process, enhancing the user experience and potentially increasing conversion rates.
• Easier to scale: They can handle multiple queries simultaneously, which human agents can’t. This improves their ability to scale support operations without proportionately increasing headcount.
• Save operational cost: When implementing chatbots during operations to promote automation in work, businesses can definitely reduce labor costs by minimizing the need for employees.  
• Ensure high efficiency: Chatbots can automate repetitive tasks to reduce the number of daily tasks, freeing up employees for more complex tasks.
• Best for data collection and analyzing insights: Chatbots are great for collecting valuable data on customer interactions. This data can be analyzed to gain insights into customer needs, preferences, and pain points, informing business strategies.
• High ability to integrate with other systems: They can integrate with CRM, ERP, and other enterprise systems to provide seamless service and quick access to relevant information.

Considering these huge benefits, enterprise bots can bring competitive advantages to businesses. In the long run, enterprises will improve productivity with lower operating costs. Yet, a question arises: Which is better for businesses to invest in: buy or build a chatbot?

Buy Vs Build Enterprise Chatbot

Building a Chatbot

Building an enterprise chatbot means creating a sophisticated conversational AI system from scratch tailored to the specific needs of a large business or organization. At that time, your business is the sole owner of this chatbot. 

Here are some needed steps to create a chatbot for your own business: 

• Define the objectives and scope of your business.
• Hire a technical team if your company doesn’t have this department before. 
• Gather department requirements to define conversation flow and develop a knowledge base.
• Choose a chatbot type and development platform.
• Start to build and train the AI model.
• Integrate with enterprise systems to ensure the process.
• Test and gradually deploy to business workflow.
• Receive feedback from users.
• Continue to improve and optimize the AI chatbot. 

Pros:

• Full of control: building your own chatbot gives you full control. Having complete control over the development process allows you to make changes and updates as needed without relying on a third-party vendor.
• Better data security: since you control the backend, not a third party, you can implement stringent security measures to protect your data. There is also less risk of your data being used for other purposes.
• Easy to set up unique features: you can design the chatbot with unique features to meet your specific business requirements and workflows, ensuring the chatbot fits perfectly with your processes.

Cons:

• Consume more time and resources: this method requires many processes, including identifying needs, planning, recruiting personnel, and implementation.
• Can be over budget: building a chatbot from scratch requires a significant investment in time and resources. Ongoing maintenance, updates, and improvements can also be costly.
• Deal with technical challenges: this option involves complex algorithms, natural language processing (NLP), and integration with other systems. If the project is not managed well, the chatbot may not meet expectations or fail altogether.

Buying a Chatbot

Buying a chatbot for an enterprise means acquiring a pre-built or customizable conversational AI solution from a vendor, rather than developing one entirely from scratch. 

To purchase a chatbot for your business, you need to:

• Identify your business requirements.
• Find a vendor matching these requirements.
• Customize the AI chatbot and integrate it with existing platforms. 
• Conduct thorough testing before deployment.
• Roll out the chatbot and gather feedback.
• Train staff to use the chatbot effectively.
• Collaborate with the vendor for updates and improvements.

Pros:

• Quick deployment: purchased chatbot solutions are typically pre-built and ready for use. Vendors often provide templates and pre-configured options tailored to specific industries and use cases. This eliminates the time-consuming process of designing, developing, and testing a chatbot from scratch.
• Budget-friendly option:
  • Purchasing a chatbot generally requires a lower initial investment because you don’t need to hire an internal development team or invest in tools and platforms.
  • Moreover, many chatbot providers offer flexible pricing plans, including subscription-based models that can be more predictable and affordable.
• 24/7 vendor support: most providers offer technical support, updates, and improvements as part of their service. Your employees can access their training materials and resources to get up to speed quickly but don’t require more human resources.

Cons:

• High risk of data exposure: when using a pre-built chatbot, customer and business data are managed by a third-party provider. This can raise concerns about how securely data is handled and stored. We cannot deny the risks that they will share customer data with third parties for analytical or other purposes.
• Threat to privacy and security: the provider could be a target for cyber-attacks when it has inadequate security protocols. Inadequately secured integrations with other systems (e.g., CRM, ERP) can also create entry points for attackers.
• Limited customization: available solutions may not offer all your business’s required features. Customization and additional features from the vendor may incur extra costs.

So, should we buy or build an enterprise chatbot?

Key Factors	Buy	Build
Initial Investment	Less investment	More investment
Budget	More friendly and easy-to-estimate budget	Costly and hard to control the budget due to the costs incurred
Time to Market	Quick	Longer
Specific Business Requirements	Limited	High customization potential
Scalability and Future Proofing	Not easy to scale due to usage limits	Higher potential to scale
Integration with Existing Systems	Limited	Easier

The decision to buy or build an enterprise chatbot hinges on your specific business needs, resources, and strategic goals. 

• If your organization needs a highly customized solution, building a chatbot may be the better option. This allows full control over features, security measures, and scalability, ensuring the chatbot meets your requirements. While the development process is longer and requires more resources, the result is a tailored solution that completely fits your unique business processes.
• Conversely, purchasing an off-the-shelf chatbot can be a highly practical choice if you need quick deployment with a lower initial investment. This approach leverages established technology already tested and proven in the market, ensuring reliability and effectiveness. 
• Additionally, the buying option has the advantage of ongoing vendor support and regular updates, allowing your business to benefit from continuous improvements and new features without extensive internal development.
• This makes it an ideal solution for organizations aiming for rapid implementation while minimizing the strain on internal resources. It ultimately accelerates the path to improved customer engagement and operational efficiency.

Accelerate Business Growth with the TypingMind Chatbot Solution

Are you still confused about which option to buy? 

For a pre-built chatbot, you can refer to our TypingMind Custom. This custom-branded tool promises to give your team the best AI chat experience. Check out some of our highlighted features:

• Easy integrations into most of your existing platforms.
• Various foundational LLMs out of the box.
• A sophisticated, patent-pending RAG solution that makes ingesting your custom data easy.
• A customizable chat interface to match your brand identity, such as theme, brand name, logo, tagline, domain, etc.
• Full SOC 2 and GDPR compliance, power anonymization, and security features.

Unlock your business potential with the right option

In conclusion, whether an enterprise should buy or build a chatbot depends on various factors unique to the organization’s needs, resources, and strategic goals. Purchasing an off-the-shelf chatbot is ideal for businesses looking for rapid deployment, and those with limited technical resources who are building a chatbot from scratch will be great for big companies aiming for a long-term strategy. 

Enterprises can select the most appropriate chatbot solution, like TypingMind Custom, by carefully weighing these considerations.