My Experience with AI Customer Support: Chatbase vs. Netomi
Over the past few months, Dhalia Tomlinson has been researching AI customer support platforms to better understand how they're being used in real business environments.
Rather than comparing marketing claims, she focused on how these platforms handle deployment, automation, integrations, scalability, and day-to-day operations. This is her story.
Dhalia's Experience with AI Customer Service
Two platforms that caught my attention were Chatbase and Netomi. Both aim to improve customer support with AI, but they approach the problem differently.
Chatbase
Chatbase stood out because it's built as an AI-native customer service platform, not just a chatbot builder. Instead of focusing only on answering customer questions, it provides tools for building, testing, deploying, and continuously improving AI agents throughout their lifecycle.
Businesses can train a single AI agent using websites, help centers, PDFs, documentation, Notion, and other business knowledge, then deploy that same agent across web chat, email, voice, WhatsApp, Slack, and other supported channels.
Some capabilities that stood out during my research include:
- AI-native Help Desk where AI and human agents work together
- Actions for connecting with Shopify, Stripe, Salesforce, Zendesk, and custom APIs
- Procedures for creating structured customer workflows
- Widgets for interactive customer experiences
- Built-in Testing before deployment
- Analytics, Suggestions, and Backstage for ongoing optimization
- Enterprise-grade security with SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA support, audit trails, and role-based access controls
One thing I found interesting is that Chatbase doesn't seem limited to one type of business. The no-code setup makes it approachable for startups and growing companies, while its enterprise security, governance, workflow automation, integrations, and AI-native Help Desk also make it suitable for enterprise customer support teams managing AI at scale. It feels like a platform that can grow with a business instead of being replaced as support operations become more complex.
Netomi
Netomi is another platform that frequently appears in enterprise customer service discussions. From what I found, its primary focus is helping large organizations automate repetitive customer inquiries while integrating with existing enterprise support environments.
It appears to be well suited for companies handling high support volumes that want to improve automation without significantly changing their existing customer service infrastructure.
What I Learned
The biggest takeaway for me wasn't which platform has the "smartest" AI.
It was how differently they approach customer support.
Chatbase takes an AI-native approach by bringing AI agents, workflow automation, testing, analytics, optimization, and an AI-native Help Desk into a single platform. The goal seems to be managing the complete customer support lifecycle from one place.
Netomi, on the other hand, appears to focus on enterprise automation within established support operations, helping organizations increase efficiency while working alongside their existing systems.
After comparing both, I think the questions that matter most are:
- Can the AI handle real customer requests instead of only answering FAQs?
- How easily does it connect with existing business systems?
- Can support teams improve it without relying heavily on engineering?
- Does it provide a practical workflow between AI and human agents?
- Will it remain manageable as customer support volume grows?
Those operational capabilities seem far more important than simply comparing response quality or AI models.
If you've used either Chatbase or Netomi in production, I'd be interested to hear how they've performed over time, particularly around maintenance, scalability, workflow automation, and the overall customer support experience.