Chatbot in South Africa: Top 7 Vendors

Customers prefer interactive and immediate responses when engaging with businesses. The complication arises when customers want real-time assistance 24/7, a complicated task for human support teams. The statistics show that most customers value immediate responses and might turn to competitors if they don’t get timely help.

Many chatbot companies in South Africa are focusing on this problem to help businesses automate most of their customer interactions. In this article, we explain how and where a business chatbot can be used by businesses and we provide 7 vendors that help businesses to get a chatbot in South Africa.

Top 7 Vendors of Chatbot in South Africa

Below we gathered the top 7 chatbot companies that provide chatbot for businesses in the South Africa market. We provide both a comparative table and a review of each vendor. While forming the table, we divided the vendors into 3 categories:

• Global conversational AI tech providers with offices in South Africa (we selected 2 biggest enterprises in terms of their company size and global influence)
• Regional conversational AI tech providers serving for South Africa
• South Africa-based conversational AI agencies/chatbot providers

Other then these categorizations, we used the criteria below to narrow down the vendor list:

• The number of each vendor’s (and their solution’s) total reviews on the reputed B2B review websites such as G2, Capterra, TrustRadius
• The number of employees on LinkedIn platform
• Integration capabilities with popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger
• The capability of offering conversational ads, which functions as redirecting the users from the ads on social media to the chatbot for more personalized marketing & sales

Global conversational AI/chatbot providers

1- IBM Watson Assistant

IBM Watson Assistant is one of the premier chatbot vendors around the world.

Pros

• Watson Assistant can be deployed across various messaging platforms, channels, and devices, providing a consistent user experience wherever your customers interact with your brand.
• A unique offering of IBM Watson Assistant is its voice interaction capabilities. It can be integrated with telephony systems or digital voice channels, providing the same level of sophistication in voice interactions as in text.

• Watson Assistant’s pre-trained content for various industries means it’s ready to provide industry-specific answers right out of the box, saving valuable time during the setup process.
• Watson Assistant is easy to implement and use.

• Watson Assistant places a strong emphasis on user data privacy and provides robust controls for data handling, meeting high standards for data security.

Cons

• While Watson Assistant provides significant value, its pricing may be high for small businesses or startups with limited budgets.

• While Watson Assistant can be integrated with a variety of other systems, this process can sometimes be complex and require a significant amount of development work.

2- Microsoft Azure Bot Service

Azure Bot Service offers a unified development platform for creating bots. Its compatibility with Power Virtual Agents, a fully managed platform with low-code requirements, allows developers of various skill levels to construct AI-powered chatbots.

Pros

• Bots created using the Azure Bot Service can be integrated and deployed across a wide range of popular mobile apps like Teams, Skype, Facebook Messenger, Slack, and others.
• Azure Bot Service supports the Direct Line Speech Channel, enabling streamlined integration for speech-enabled experiences.
• For those who prefer a no-code/low-code approach, Azure Bot Service can be integrated with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, allowing for easy bot creation.

Cons

• Depending on the scale of usage, Azure Bot Service could be more expensive than other bot platforms, particularly for small businesses or startups.
• Some users state that the customization and integration with other apps (e.g., Facebook) can create problems sometimes.

Regional conversational AI/chatbot providers

3- Haptik

Sponsored:

Haptik is a conversational commerce company with the capability to create business chatbots that can:

• Streamline customer communications
• Conduct sales
• Gather potential customer information
• Send custom notifications, which can include:
  • Suggestions for products 
  • Details of transactions 
  • Information on shipping

It can assist businesses in quickly gaining access to the WhatsApp API and developing a ChatGPT-powered WhatsApp API chatbot that can understand user intent.

Pros

• Satisfactory customer support
• High ROI for long-term digital transformation strategies
• AI chatbot with satisfactory analytics and monthly reports (see Figure 2)
  Figure 2

  

  Source: Capterra

Cons

• The pricing can be expensive compared to other vendors.
• Users state that there can be integration problems occasionally.

Figure 3. Pros and Cons of Haptik according to users

Source: Capterra

4- Proto

Proto is a regional customer experience and contact center automation platform serving both for businesses and governments. The company has operations in Africa and Southeast Asia. With its own AI technology, the company helps businesses in creating chatbots in local languages. 

Proto’s chatbot offers:

• Agent takeover
• Flexibility to include media, links, surveys and other elements directly in conversational flows
• Proactive chats with website visitors

We cannot provide user-based pros and cons of Proto as the company doesn’t have a review on the popular tech review websites.

Local conversational AI/chatbot providers

5- Botlhale AI

Botlhale AI is a voice-enabled, multilingual, no-code chatbot builder leveraging conversational AI. It offers businesses chatbot solutions in various industries such as:

• Retail
• Banking
• Insurance
• Airlines

Botlhale AI offers their services in 9 African languages at the moment, namely: English, IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, Sepedi, Swahili, Afrikaans, Sesotho, Setswana, Swahili.

There are no user reviews for Botlhale AI on the reputable tech review websites. So, we cannot provide an experience-based pros and cons comparison.

6- Gotbot

GotBot is a firm specializing in chatbot technology, utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to aid businesses in handling customer interactions. The primary targets for GotBot’s services are enterprises within: 

• Retail
• Finance
• Insurance 

The company helps businesses to engage in dialogues with their existing customers for opportunities in upselling and cross-selling various products and services.

We cannot provide an pros and cons of the company’s chatbot solution due to the absence of user reviews on popular software review platforms.

7- Hi.guru

Hi.guru assists companies in creating both process chatbots and more sophisticated chatbots with Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, tailored to their specific business needs. These chatbots can be managed and controlled by a human through Hi.guru’s agent user interface. Or, they can be configured to manage conversations entirely on their own.

Hi.guru also provides third party bot support within its interface.

Pros & cons

User reviews for Hi.guru indicate the pros and cons according to the users:

South Africa chatbot examples/case studies

– Digify Africa, an EdTech company, acknowledged the urgent need for digital skills among young people in Africa, especially given the challenges of limited access to:

• tutors
• computers
• internet connectivity
• financial resources 

To address this, the company developed a low-cost solution by creating a chatbot named Lesedi, accessible via WhatsApp, which is a popular messaging platform in South Africa. The chatbot delivered snackable micro-lessons, interactive quizzes, push notifications, and a gamified tracking system to promote self-paced learning and engagement. The results were very successful, as¹:

• 14,300 students registered
• 3.4 million messages were sent
• 37,300 topics were completed

– During the pandemic, a South African insurance firm sought to automate routine tasks and allow its staff to focus on more complex servicing-related tasks. To achieve this, the company partnered with a conversational AI platform to implement a chatbot solution across multiple self-service channels, such as the web, WhatsApp, and Facebook. This chatbot enabled the insurance company to rapidly adapt to market and environmental shifts, particularly those affecting client needs and circumstances. The insurance company has yielded the following benefits with the chatbot²:

• More than 100,000 users were connected through the social self-service channels
• 1.8 million conversations were handled in a year with more than 95% accuracy
• More than 40,000 tax certificates and insurance policy statements have been downloaded through WhatsApp

Use cases of business chatbots in South Africa

There are various use cases of business chatbots, depending on the business needs. However, most common use cases are:

Benefits of business chatbots

Chatbots offer several benefits for businesses. Here are a few of them:

1. Enhanced customer service: Chatbots can provide instant responses to common customer queries, reducing wait times and improving overall customer experience. They can also operate 24/7, ensuring constant customer support without a human agent.
2. Increased efficiency: By automating routine tasks, task oriented chatbots can free up human resources to handle more complex issues. This improves overall business efficiency and can lead to cost savings.
3. Scalability: A single bot can handle multiple conversations simultaneously. This means a business can scale up its customer service operations without a corresponding increase in human resources.
4. Feedback and data collection: Businesses can use chatbots to collect customer feedback and gain valuable insights. The data collected can be used to improve products and services, and to make more informed business decisions with advanced machine learning methods.

Also, WhatsApp chatbots offer additional benefits for businesses. If your business aims for one or some of these benefits specifically, then it might be a better decision to choose a WhatsApp chatbot or include one into your other chatbot solutions.

1. Customer engagement: A WhatsApp bot can be programmed to send personalized messages and offer tailored product recommendations. This can help to increase customer engagement and loyalty.
2. Lead generation and conversion: WhatsApp chatbots can play a key role in the sales funnel. These predictive chatbots can qualify leads through initial interactions, follow up on potential customers, and even complete sales transactions.
3. Reach: WhatsApp has over 2 billion users globally, so using a WhatsApp chatbot opens up a large potential audience for businesses. 
4. End-to-end encrypted conversations: WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption for all its messages, making it a secure platform for sensitive business communication. While this doesn’t mean other platforms aren’t secure, WhatsApp’s universally applied encryption is a distinct feature.
5. Delivery of rich media content: While many chatbot platforms support rich media, the familiarity and ease of use of WhatsApp’s interface might make it particularly effective for delivering media content to customers through the mobile device. This could include product images, videos, audio messages, or documents.

If you have questions or need help in finding vendors, don’t hesitate to contact us:

Find the Right Vendors

1. “WhatsApp Bot Case Studies.pptx.” Digify Africa, https://digifyafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/WhatsApp-Bot-Case-Studies.pdf. Accessed 10 July 2023.
2. “Momentum Metropolitan Life Embraces Chatbots for Better CX.” Tata Consultancy Services, https://www.tcs.com/what-we-do/industries/insurance/case-study/reimagining-client-experience-conversational-ai. Accessed 10 July 2023.

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 55% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem’s work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE and NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and resources that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised enterprises on their technology decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem’s work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch like Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.