US-based customer messaging firm Intercom has launched a product enabling businesses to create customisable chatbots without the need for any coding.

With Custom Bots, businesses are able to develop customised bots and connect these bots with more than 100 workflow apps available on the Intercom App Store, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and others.

The technology also gives businesses the opportunity to message people in a ‘highly targeted way’ by controlling who sees different messages. This could be by having different chatbots on different pages, by triggering chatbots based on their country, by triggering chatbots based on how long someone has been on a page, and more.

With the ability to create different chatbots for different situations, businesses are able to add ‘follow up actions’ into their chatbots for integration into their existing sales and marketing tech.

Finally, Custom Bots offers reporting on how chatbots are performing. These custom bot reports show details on metrics including the number of emails collected, the number of leads created, the number of leads disqualified, and the number of meetings booked.

“A chatbot is a little bot that runs inside a messenger and can talk to people and get things done,” said Paul Adams, VP of product at Intercom, in a blog post.

As with all new successful technology, the chatbot went from obscurity, to being overhyped, to successfully coming back out the other side. Over the past two years we have learned what chatbots are good for, when they should and shouldn’t be used, and how to design them well so they benefit both customers and businesses.