Chatbots were the worst in the early days.
Common practice was ignoring the auto responses and just typing “speak with a representative” over and over until the robot finally relented.
Today, it’s a different story. Business-level software solutions can now equip websites and mobile apps with chatbots powered by built-in artificial intelligence. These busy computer bees go to work connecting customers to the resources they need with automated but actually helpful dialogue.
Tiledesk is one such solution. Sure, it has its limitations—but they’re hardly worth fussing over. The software offers some of the most advanced AI integration we’ve encountered from a live chat business application.
Best of all, it has a free trial version, so businesses can see whether it has anything to offer them without risking a thing.
Tiledesk: The Good and the Bad
Tiledesk is a live chat widget for websites and mobile apps. It integrates with cloud and open-source AI platforms to bring advanced chat tools to the well-tread concept of business chatbots.
Overall, we love the seamlessness of its multichannel conversations. Its interactions are immersive and helpful, with only a few minor quibbles holding it back from perfection.
What Tiledesk Is Good At
Multichannel web and mobile chats: If you have any sort of customer outreach sections on your site, mobile app, social media platform, or existing chat service, all of them can be seamlessly integrated with Tiledesk.
And integration here is more than just a cool feature—it will actually make your agents’ jobs much, much easier. With the ability to see all your chats flowing into the same place, your agents will be able to stay on top of each conversation without juggling between 10 different applications.
On the customer side, the exact opposite happens. The “multichannel” feature isn’t just a buzzword used by apps to increase their sales. It helps businesses accomplish the real goal of customer outreach in the 21st century: communicating with potential customers on their preferred channels.
With this support, your company’s chatbot can access customers no matter where they’re coming from, offering assistance itself or connecting them with human representatives using their preferred methods.
Here are some of the platforms that Tiledesk integrates with:
- WordPress
- Shopify
- PrestaShop
- Drupal Commerce
- Joomla
- Stripe
- Rasa
- DialogFlow
Once these platforms are connected in a dialogue with an app like Tiledesk, your business can start communicating with customers the way they want you to.
Integration with AI: Since “AI” is a bit of a buzzword these days, it’s important to clarify that not all business chatbots offer this level of AI integration so seamlessly. Tiledesk offers 24/7 chat functions amplified by AI features, which makes it smarter than the average chatbot.
In the realm of automated customer engagement, people get turned off by chatting with robots. The difference with AI is that businesses can keep the automation while taking some of the load off their human representatives with more believable interactions. While these live chats won’t always pass for human, they offer customers engaging conversations. We found them very efficient yet personable.
This immersion naturally helps your business pick up customer contact info, and we liked that Tiledesk has a form builder built into the conversation. Usually, chatbots try to collect this information before the conversation.
It’s the difference between chatting with someone you’ve been introduced to versus being asked for your credentials off the street before you’ve even said hello. This is so much more pleasant, and it helps Tiledesk generate more leads than the old chatbots ever could.
Lead generation: Tiledesk advertises higher conversion rates, more customer engagement, and more qualified leads than ordinary live chat applications. It accomplishes this using the multichannel approach we mentioned—but customization is the real key when adapting its features to businesses.
Different web pages or applications can be given different messages depending on the site topic, a specific offer you want to push, or the type of customer most likely to visit them. The chatbot is proactive too, offering a customizable lead-in to conversations with initial messages, such as, “Hello, I’m Sarah. Would you like to hear about a promotion?”
We liked the options for personalized product cards, widgets, and other design elements. The simple touches of personality worked into a custom conversation starter is a great asset for a tool like this. It helps set Tiledesk apart from the average robots out there. You’ll get organic leads that actually live up to their name: they lead somewhere… and hopefully it’s to a sale.
Custom plugins: Tiledesk has an easy-to-use system that lets you create and add custom plugins right on top of its application. These can be simple product displays or action-oriented applications that offer contextual user interactions. The scope of these plugins is refreshingly wide. What they can do depends on your business’s intentions.
For example, if you run an ecommerce site and your goal is to convert a certain category of visitors into buyers, your custom plugin might be geared toward giving promotions to those visitors, thereby encouraging more participation from them.
The customizable nature of plugins can also help you hook potential buyers in the first place. When customers are online, they’re shopping, they’re texting in that massive group chat, they’re on social media—they’re all over the place at once. But from your point-of-view as a business, you have a much narrower view of the interaction than customers do. For you, it’s only point A to point B—site click to conversion—and you usually only get one chance.
The customization potential of Tiledesk’s plugins can be a really handy way to tailor the directions you give your customers, guiding them toward the specific destinations you want them to reach.
Chat tools: Tiledesk comes equipped with tons of chat tools that just make the experience more seamless and useful.
These include:
- Typing indicator, showing when the bot or person is typing a reply
- Delivery receipts, showing that a message was delivered and seen
- Contact lists
- Conversation history
- Off-line access
In addition to these tools, Tiledesk offers chatbot templates so you can customize and demo different designs, such as those tailored for lead generation or others that focus on gathering customer feedback. This is huge for smaller businesses that may need initial direction to get started in the chatbot world.
Simple backend interface: In the present day, we’ve gotten to a great point with these types of technologies. Consumer-grade tools like Tiledesk offer easy-to-use interfaces that turn normal business owners into bona fide website designers. Customizing features is intuitive for even the least tech-savvy, and adding plugins is as easy as dragging and dropping.
The days of needing coding experience to get so much as a widget on a webpage are long gone with tools like Tiledesk.
Team organization: In addition to these chat tools, Tiledesk offers an impressive array of team organization tools. They make it much easier to manage multiple projects, get SLAs out there, and assign queues efficiently to avoid costly delays.
This goes hand-in-hand with its efficient ticket management system—on the customer side—which enables you to get the right help to the right customers with minimal hiccups.
Analytics dashboard: For businesses putting their products or services out there, an analytics dashboard can help take things to that next level. It’s one thing to organize conversational apps and get the campaign out there—it’s another thing to be able to track in real time how it performs and the changes you should make.
We really like the clean way the data is displayed on Tiledesk’s all-in-one analytics dashboard. With the right sort of long-term use, it will seriously help businesses refine their campaigns in real time based on what works and what doesn’t.
Free trial: Never take a free trial for granted—you’d be surprised how many software solutions don’t have them. Not only does Tiledesk offer a limited-time free trial, it also has a permanently free version that can help businesses experiment with some entry-level features to see if the application actually works within their framework.
Tiledesk’s Potential Drawbacks
Incomplete integration: There are a lot of applications and programs out there that a utility like Tiledesk will be expected to integrate with. While it successfully connects to many common apps, allowing customer support to jump between conversations, it can’t cover all of them.
If integrating with a specific tool or chat platform is vital to your business’s intentions with Tiledesk, definitely make sure to ask their customer service whether the platform supports it before pulling the trigger.
Potential lag: We didn’t experience noticeable lag with the chat functions, but many customers online have reported this as an occasional issue. To be fair, it could be an issue with businesses that need to manage heavy loads on insufficient internet, or it could be something that was a problem in the past that Tiledesk has now fixed.
Either way, it’s an issue worth mentioning since a slower system means potentially sluggish customer interactions—and that’s never a good look.
Tiledesk Plans and Pricing
Tiledesk offers four plans in total, ranging from a free bare-bones version to a customizable premium suite. Overall, the options are versatile—but they may be a little more expensive than other options out there, depending on the plan you choose.
Free Forever Plan
The Free Forever plan costs nothing and gives you access to the live chat, chatbot, notifications, and mobile app integration. This plan gives you 500 conversations per month and two seats, meaning a maximum of two agents can be logged on at the same time.
It’s a huge bonus that Tiledesk offers a fully free version, since if this is enough for your business, you can use the services and never pay a cent. But we can’t imagine any but the smallest businesses would go for this plan. More often, it’s used to test the waters of the system in a free setting before committing to one of the paid plans.
Basic Plan
The basic plan costs €25—around $27—per month. It includes four agent seats and 800 conversations per month. It includes everything from the Free Forever plan, plus canned responses, private notes, CRM, unlimited chat history, user ratings, webhooks, and email ticketing.
This plan also offers a two-week free trial so businesses can see if it has everything they need. Small businesses with only four agents on call at a time can make great use of this plan, as it’s not too expensive and has most of the practical features.
Premium Plan
The Premium plan costs €89—around $96—per month. It includes everything in the Free Forever and Basic plans, plus widget unbranding, Facebook Messenger, insights, WhatsApp Business, unlimited groups and departments, data export, knowledge base, and team inbox.
The Premium plan offers 15 seats and 3,000 conversations per month. Like the Basic plan, it also has a two-week free trial.
Custom Plan
The last Tiledesk plan is a unique one. It offers businesses the chance to pay only for what they need with a plan personalized for their workflow. You can add a custom number of seats and a custom number of monthly conversations for a, fittingly, custom monthly price.
In addition, businesses get access to every feature mentioned up until now, plus the truly premium content that Tiledesk has to offer, including:
- Chatbot design assistance
- Onboarding and training
- Dedicated customer manager
- Premium customer support
- Visitor bans
- IP filters
- Activities log
- Email templates
If that wasn’t enough, Tiledesk offers its Custom plan users the ability to request brand-new custom features that can be built to your specifications and delivered to your applications by Tiledesk staff. That’s pretty wild.
Final Thoughts
Tiledesk offers advanced chat features for businesses that want to take their automatic lead generation to the next level. The integration across multiple customer channels and the organic conversations with AI are undoubtedly the highlights.
The plan you choose really comes down to your specific needs as a business. But with a two-week free trial on the various paid plans, there’s absolutely no risk in taking Tiledesk out for a spin and seeing if it can help you connect with more customers.
