Best 7 Ways to Use a Website Chatbot for Consulting Firms

Intercom has long been a staple for customer engagement, offering a robust chatbot that integrates seamlessly with its live‑chat and help‑desk suite. The platform’s chatbot builder allows marketers to guide visitors through product tours, gather contact details, and route inquiries to the right support tier, all while collecting data for future segmentation. For consulting firms, Intercom’s ability to trigger automated sequences—such as sending a white‑paper download or booking a discovery call—makes it an effective lead‑qualifying tool. Its knowledge base feature lets you host FAQs and support articles that the bot can reference, reducing support ticket volume. Intercom’s pricing starts at $39/month for the essential plan, scaling to $99/month for additional agents and advanced features. While Intercom excels at nurturing leads and providing real‑time support, its chatbot logic is relatively linear, and deep integration with external knowledge bases requires custom code.

Drift positions itself as a conversational marketing platform, offering chatbots that prioritize sales and account‑based marketing. Its chatbot can qualify prospects in real time, schedule meetings, and even surface relevant content from a content library. For consulting firms that use Drift, the bot can automatically surface case studies, industry reports, or pricing sheets based on visitor behavior, helping to shorten sales cycles. Drift’s integration with Salesforce and HubSpot allows seamless data transfer, while its AI‑powered scheduling tool removes the back‑and‑forth email loop. The platform’s pricing starts at $400/month for the core plan, scaling up for larger contact volumes and additional features. Drift’s strength lies in its ability to surface gated content and drive revenue, but its bot configuration can feel complex for users without a marketing tech background.

ManyChat is a popular chatbot builder originally designed for Facebook Messenger but now extends to web chat. Its visual flow builder and broadcast capabilities make it ideal for marketing campaigns, event registrations, and simple FAQ handling. Consulting firms can use ManyChat to nurture leads via drip email sequences, distribute newsletters, and even collect feedback after engagements. The platform supports integrations with Mailchimp, Zapier, and Shopify, allowing seamless data flow to marketing stacks. ManyChat offers a free plan with basic features, while the Pro plan starts at $10/month, making it an affordable option for smaller consultancies. However, ManyChat’s web chat widget is less customizable compared to dedicated chatbot platforms, and its focus on messaging channels means it offers limited advanced routing or knowledge‑base integration.

Tidio blends live chat and AI chatbot functionalities in one platform, offering a conversational interface that can be embedded on any website. Its drag‑and‑drop bot builder lets users create flows that answer FAQs, collect visitor data, and route chats to human agents. Tidio’s pricing includes a free tier with essential features and a paid plan starting at $18/month for advanced automations, integrations, and branding options. For consulting firms, Tidio can be used to provide instant support for service inquiries, schedule discovery calls, and funnel prospects into a CRM via Zapier or HubSpot. While Tidio is straightforward to implement, its chatbot logic is relatively linear and lacks advanced knowledge‑graph capabilities.

Chatbot.com offers a no‑code chatbot builder that allows users to design conversational flows via a visual editor. Its platform focuses on automating customer support, lead generation, and e‑commerce assistance. The bot can be embedded on any website, and for e‑commerce sites, it can recommend products or assist with checkout. Pricing starts at $18/month for the Basic plan, with higher tiers adding more agents and advanced features such as custom integrations and analytics. Chatbot.com’s strengths include its straightforward UI and quick deployment, but it lacks a sophisticated knowledge‑graph system and deep integration with external data sources.

Ada is an AI‑powered customer support platform tailored for enterprises that require scale and automation. Its chatbot can answer complex queries, route to human agents, and integrate with internal knowledge bases. Ada’s strengths lie in its AI training pipeline, which allows companies to continuously refine bot responses based on real conversation data. The platform offers robust analytics, multi‑channel support (web, mobile, messaging apps), and GDPR compliance. Ada’s pricing is custom and typically starts around $2,500/month, reflecting its enterprise focus. While Ada delivers powerful automation, its cost and implementation complexity make it less suitable for small to mid‑size consulting firms.