Shopify businesses commonly use a tool like NovoChat to build chatbots on their website and engage with their visitors.
But if you’re looking for NovoChat alternatives before you make the final decision, your search ends here!
We’ve tried several dozen shared inbox tools and shortlisted the top 9 alternatives for NovoChat that you can consider for your customer support needs.
Before we dive in, let’s learn a bit about NovoChat and what are the features that make it good for ecommerce businesses.
What is NovoChat?
NovoChat is a marketing solution built for e-commerce businesses. It allows you to connect multiple messaging channels — WhatsApp Business, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and LINE — in a single app.
It provides WhatsApp automation, broadcast messages, a multi-channel inbox, and a multi-channel website widget. It can be integrated with Shopify & EasyStore. They plan to launch segmentation features soon.
Price: There are 4 pricing plans — The Solo plan for $7/month gives you 750 messages per month. The Starter plan for $20 per month gives you 3,000 messages. The Pro plan for $60/month gives you 9000 messages per month and the Business plan for $200/month gives you 40,000 messages per month. The number of features you get also changes with each plan.
You can get a 7-day free trial. No credit card is required.
Pros:
- You can create auto-responses, set business hours, and invite multiple agents to your workspace.
- It gives you advanced campaign and automation metrics to see the impact your messages are making on your revenue.
- You can personalize bulk messages by uploading a CSV. file with a custom message for each individual contact.
- With some providers, you’ll have to register a new WhatsApp Business number. But with NovoChat, you can keep your current WhatsApp Business number.
Cons:
- Customer support can be tricky to access as they don't have their email or phone clearly displayed anywhere.
- Novochat doesn't have integration with many apps except Shopify and EasySend. This can be limiting if you need to transfer data between apps or need to automate workflows.
A better option to NovoChat is a platform that supports omnichannel support inbox, WhatsApp broadcasts and automated messages that's affordable. Let’s look at some of the Novochat alternatives.
DelightChat
DelightChat is an Omnichannel Helpdesk + WhatsApp Marketing Software built for SME brands that enables them to deliver out-of-the-box customer service. It’s designed with a conversation-first approach that enables you to manage your store’s support & painlessly resolve customer queries - all from a single screen.
Pros:
- Omnichannel inbox that helps you manage WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Emails & Live Chat.
- Complete WhatsApp Marketing suite - Send WhatsApp Broadcasts to your customer lists using Official API.
- Get Official WhatsApp API access with free Green Tick application.
- Automated WhatsApp notifications such as Abandoned Cart, Order Confirmation, Delivery Notifications & Cash on Delivery Order Verification.
- DelightChat enables you to respond to customer queries & collaborate with your team, all from a single screen. No need to toggle between tabs, which leads to a loss in productivity & loss of work hours.
Cons:
- For now, DelightChat only integrates with Shopify that allows it to access your Shopify admin dashboard data. However, it will soon be available for other ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce.
Interakt
Interakt is one of the most affordable official WhatsApp Business solution providers (BSP) on the list.
It offers a shared inbox for WhatsApp so your entire team can get online to assist with customer support. It also supports automated order notifications to users and good contact management on your admin dashboard.
Pricing:
INR 999/month or $15/month for unlimited logins
Pros:
- Very affordable pricing compared to other providers
- Shared team inbox and a live chat widget that directly connects customers over WhatsApp
- Supports automated message templates and canned responses
- Integrates with Shopify and Woocommerce to pull order details and display it on the chat screen
Cons:
- Lack of support for other channels can be a deal breaker
If you are looking for alternatives to Interakt, checkout this post.
Respond
Respond.io is a web-based messaging platform that connects customers from any channel to multiple teams — marketing, sales, support & engineering. The company is based in Hong Kong.
Pricing: They have a forever-free plan that allows you to send messages to up to 100 contacts and send 4 broadcasts per month and gives all the basic features. You can choose this when evaluating if this platform works for you or not. Paid plan starts from $29 a month (Pro). If you need advanced features & analytics for multi-team workflows you can choose Business Plan that starts from $79 per month. The highest plan is 399/month for enterprise clients.
Pros:
- It's easy to use, & has a user-friendly interface.
- Customer support is fast and responsive.
- You can create customer profiles with all messaging, web chat, SMS, and email interactions merged into a single place. This helps save the full context of a customer, irrespective of their mode of communication every time they messaged you.
- Respond.io has easy automation like tagging, assigning or auto-responding to messages.
Cons:
- The tools is aimed at enterprise clients so pricing can be a pinch in the pocket.
- When prospects are added twice, it doesn't recognize them as duplicates. This can lead to loss of context and reporting issues.
- The number of features provided has led to complexity of the system. This can be a bit overwhelming if all you want to do is stay connected to your audience via a few channels.
Read on: Learn about the best Respond.io alternatives for your business.
WATI
WATI is a WhatsApp Business Solutions Provider (BSP) and customer support tool owned by Clare.ai.
Customers can apply for the WhatsApp Business API through them and use their shared inbox tool for customer support.
It also offers a no-code chatbot builder to automate customer responses and to create conversation flows.
Built for B2C businesses of all sizes, WATI is a great customer support tool if you only need to respond to customers on WhatsApp.
Pricing:
$40/month billed yearly for 5 agents. No free trial.
Pros:
- Minimal initial setup: After getting access to the WhatsApp API, the support team handles the complete integration
- Great support: The support team assists in each step of the onboarding process
- Team structure management: You can create team structures within WATI with its team and user management features
- Chatbots and conversation flows: Create chatbots and conversation flows to speed up responses to common questions and offer solutions instantaneously
Cons:
- Works only with WhatsApp: If you support customers on any other platform, you’d still need to purchase an additional CRM tool.
- Default chatbot is basic: It responds based on keywords and cannot continue conversations. For the flow builder, you need to pay an additional $49 monthly fee
If you are looking for WATI alternatives, we've listed 10 of them in this post.
Kapture CRM
Kapture CRM is a tool for customer service & sales teams to help them keep in touch with customers & resolve their queries. Main features include auto assigning tickets, chat history, call recording, custom permissions, and an analytic dashboard. It also provides a self-service portal & AI-based chat.
Pricing:
Cheapest pricing plan is $35 per user/month & has limited features. The second plan is for $50 per user/month and gives you features like custom API, reports, chats, and 24/7 support. The Enterprise plan starts from $90 per user/month.
Kapture CRM offers a 30-day free trial. No credit card is required.
Pros:
- There's a 24/7 support team to help you get unstuck and overcome any issues you might be facing.
- You can create custom reports and configure your analytics dashboard to show the metrics that matter to you.
- You can integrate the tool with your logistics partners to see the product status (in transit/delivered) without leaving the Kapture CRM tool.
Cons:
- It can get pretty expensive for small and medium-sized companies that don't need complicated features.
- The UI/UX is not very intuitive making the tool difficult to use without demos.
- It lacks chat templates and workflow templates that would be useful to get started.
Zoko
Zoko is a shared WhatsApp inbox that lets you share your WhatsApp Business number with your entire team. With Zoko, you receive fairly basic functionality but if that’s all the features you need to get your customer support going, it might be the best fit for you.
Pricing:
$34.99/month plus per conversation charge.
Pros:
- Pricing structure is affordable if you stay within their conversation limits
- Supports in-chat buttons with easy configuration
- Customer support messages can be assigned to other team members depending on the type of query
- Can create WhatsApp chatbots where users can respond to bot messages with specific numbers of keywords to get the desired information
Cons:
- Very basic in terms of functionality as it focuses completely on WhatsApp
- No integrations are available with other tools that you may need for your business
- Costs can go higher if you have too many back-and-forth messages with your customers
Read on: Learn about the best Zoko alternatives for your business.
Callbell
Callbell is a web-based solution that helps businesses manage multiple communication channels, such as Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp all in a single platform. It also provides a website widget that allows your customers to choose their preferred messaging app to communicate with your business. It also has a mobile app (Android & iOS) to help you answer any messages on the go.
Pricing:
It has two pricing plans — Chat management for 14€ per user / per month and Chat management Plus for 18€ per user / per month. You can connect to Instagram for an additional € 20 / month & WhatsApp for € 35 / month.
You can take a 7-day free trial to see all the features of the platform.
Pros:
- You can save contacts directly without having to have a contact list on your phone and those are shared with all agents.
- You can use unlimited agents and transfer chats between agents instantly. Context of conversation can be added via notes.
Cons:
- Notifications & syncing of web apps & mobile apps are not perfect. Sometimes you receive the notification but you don't see the message until you click on the contact list or refresh the webpage.
- The design of the app can seem old and uninteresting.
- It doesn't allow you to send voice messages, or files or see if the messages were delivered or not.
Yellow AI
Yellow Messenger is a platform that allows you to build chatbots to respond to customer queries via human-like chatbots across voice and text communication channels. It integrates with the most popular tools like SalesForce, SAP, AEM, Zendesk, and channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, Google Assistant, Emails, etc.
Pricing:
Yellow AI provides bespoke pricing based on multiple parameters — Volume of the conversations, channels to be connected & integrations required. When you sign up for a 12-month chatbot contract, you can get 3 months of chatbot free.
Pros:
- You can train the chatbots in one language and launch them in 100+ languages without translation and re-training.
- It integrates with the most popular tools like SalesForce, SAP, AEM, Zendesk, and channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, Google Assistant, Emails, etc.
- The majority of the incoming messages are handled by the bot itself. Interactions that absolutely require human interactions are routed to the support team.
- Customer segmentation can be done easily.
Cons:
- They make it tough to migrate to other tools as they hold your WhatsApp number.
- Past customers have reported outages in the system very often. That can ruin your SLAs.
- Design can be improved for better usability and aesthetics, especially on the report, and mobile app side.
Verloop
Verloop is an automation platform that offers customer support and engagement. It provides omnichannel support on the website, in-app, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Viber, and more.
Main features include acquiring leads through chatbots, engaging customers with conversation AI, multilingual bots, syncing data and automated workflows, a dashboard for detailed insights, automated flows such as abandoned cart sequence, & much more.
Pricing:
Pricing information is not available on their website & hence you'll need to contact them directly to talk about it.
Pros:
- It allows you to integrate your own inbuilt CRM with Verloop which helps in generating more leads. Integration with Zapier and CRMs make it easy to get the leads' info from your chats to other tools.
- You can design a bot to automatically greet website visitors and qualify them as a lead, and if needed design triggers for your team to take over the conversation.
Cons:
- Adding quick response and configuring chat transfer based on the agents' regions can take some time.
- Analytics are basic and not enough to drive key marketing insights.
- The user interface has a learning curve and it's not aesthetically very pleasing that can make customer support a tad bit boring.
- There's no mobile app to stay connected to customers on the go.
- Pricing is not displayed upfront.
We hope our research helped you find the best NovoChat alternative for your business.
Read on: Learn about the bulk WhatsApp sender software to help grow your business.
DelightChat: Manage WhatsApp Support + Marketing
Does it feel overwhelming to add one more channel of communication to your business? Well, you don't have to feel that way because of the tools like DelightChat that help manage all support channels & customer queries from one dashboard.
To scale your customer service using WhatsApp, give DelightChat a try. It is a customer service tool tailor-made for ecommerce brands. We also help brands grow their revenues profitably via WhatsApp Marketing!
With DelightChat, you get:
- Shared inbox to manage WhatsApp, Instagram, FB, Email & Live Chat queries
- Smart automations, ability to reply quickly using templates, easy team collaboration on support queries
- Official WhatsApp Business API
- WhatsApp Marketing features like sending broadcasts to customer lists
- Marketing automation like abandoned cart, order notifications, upsell & cross-sell, more
Sign up today to get a personalized demo!
