Bot for Facebook Messenger is a great way to connect with your users across various platforms. If you use Facebook to promote your products or services or to service your customers, the chatbot can be of great help.
The chatbots for Messenger are software application powered by artificial intelligence. It has the capability to suggest relevant content based on users’ instant demand. It is still in early phases of adoption. However, many businesses have already started using chatbots to streamline their conversation with customers.
Why use Chatbot
A chatbot is an excellent tool to engage customers through automated chats. At a time when clients look for a lightening-fast response from the companies, chatbots can be a useful tool to respond instantly to users’ specific queries without any human intervention. It has a broad range of applications for all kind of businesses. From selling various types of products to providing any legit service, everything can be done using chatbots. You can use the bots to answer frequently asked questions, suggest relevant content, recommend personalized content to your users and delight your customers with proactive help. In the long run, it reduces the cost of customer service and streamlines business operations.
Irrespective of nature and size of your business, you will find the messenger chatbots useful and efficient for making your interaction with the customers more personalized, proactive and streamlined.
Here are five ways you can use chatbots to boost your business:
Personalized communication with your customers
Mass communication is not only expensive but also ineffective in generating desired response. Today, personalized communication is crucial for any business to acquire and retain customers. Currently, companies used Email or SMS to send customized messages. However, with email, you can only customize some fields of the message such as name or other dynamic fields. The content customization for individual customers is still not possible with email. The email also lacks essential elements of effective communication such as personalization and instant interaction.
Using chatbot, you can send personalized content to the customers or prospects. That means the chatbot will accept command from users deliver the relevant content. For instance, Whole Foods provides instant help to users regarding recipes. The moment you click on “Message” on its Facebook Page, you will see a “Get Started” button. After clicking it, you will get the following message:
If you type a keyword, and the bot will suggest relevant recipes regarding the keywords. If you have entered wrong keywords, it will prompt you to alternative ways to find the required information. Also, the prospects can use a menu to search and find the relevant information within Messenger itself. The chatbot also provides the link to customer support and contact us page when the users are unable to find the right information.
Chatbots can be an excellent extension of your content marketing efforts to drive traffic to your website from Facebook. Remember that you shouldn’t use it for aggressive promotion. Rather, engage with customers and increase your site traffic through proper referrals.
Make Product Purchase Processes more efficient
A lot of customers seek assistance during the purchase of a product or a service. At present, a human sales executive support them through live chat, email or telephone. Sometimes, companies lose sales due to instant unavailability of sales agents. While the chatbots can’t replace the sales agents, at least not yet, it can definitely increase the profitability of businesses by streamlining the sales processes. It assists customers instantaneously through automated response to their queries and hence provides immediate value.
The sales team can focus on more important things like pitching (to convince customers) and other complex sales activities. 1-800-flower.com uses chatbot for selling the flowers. The users can enter their delivery address, and the chatbot will provide the best possible offers and the images of the flowers along with its discounted rates. The users can select their favorite flowers or ask for more options. After selecting the desired flower, the users can make the payment and track the delivery through the bot. Thus, the bot helps in completing the entire sales process within the messenger itself.
Following tips can help you increase your sales significantly using chatbots:
- Ensure that your chatbot can answer the frequently asked questions about the products.
- Integrate payment gateway in the chatbot so that customers can complete the transaction without leaving messenger.
- Before checkout, recommend complementary goods or ask if they want to see anything else.
Answer frequently asked service questions
Despite having a list of frequently asked questions at multiple places on the website, many customers call customer service to ask these issues. The customer service executives usually answer the queries or redirect the customers to the right link where all the questions are answered.
Chatbots can also answer frequently asked questions efficiently without any human intervention. Since chatbot will be the first interaction point for the customers, it can answer the standard questions immediately and redirect the users to customer service team for complex query. This will reduce the service response time drastically and improve customer satisfaction.
The chatbot by Domino’s Pizza is an excellent example of how businesses can use the bot for Messenger to service customers. They can use the chatbot to track their order. Domino’s also has similar tracking mechanism on their website. However, mobile customers will find it useful to track their purchase order using Facebook Messenger.
Take care of following things if you want to provide customer service through chatbots:
- Inform users that they are dealing with an automated system. Don’t trick them as if they are conversing with a real human.
- If you need personal information for verification purposes, redirect users to your official site or a customer support agent. It is better to keep the verification process out of Facebook due to security reasons.
- Ensure that the customers are redirected to customer service team when chatbot don’t find the right answer.
Make new connections
A chatbot is an excellent tool to connect with the new prospects and engage them in unique ways. You can entertain the visitors through games, cartoons, interesting articles and request them to subscribe to the fun newsletter. All this will be done automatically by the chatbot. Users can stop receiving the updates at any time by unsubscribing to the newsletter.
Provide specialized offerings
Chatbots also open up new opportunities for businesses to provide specialized services to the customers within the Messenger. For instance, a hotel can use the chatbot to enable customers to see the 360-degree view of their hotel rooms, complete booking and make payment without any human intervention.
If you already have a mobile app for your business and offer automated services, you can include chatbot to provide all the services in the Facebook Messenger itself. For instance, RemitRadar uses chatbot by which customers can recharge international mobile while abroad, find money transfer locations, send money, etc., all through the Messenger itself.
You should test your services thoroughly before making it live for the customers as it is an extensive chatbot and any bug may disappoint the users.
How to create a chatbot?
You can create the chatbots either from scratch or by using various platforms and pay them as you go. If you are just starting out, it is recommended to use specialized platforms to create and customize chatbot for your business. Tools such as Botsify, Converse, and Chatfuel can help you launch full-featured chatbots quickly and without any coding knowledge. These platforms are credible enough and claim to serve many large clients. For instance, Botsify claims to have Universal Music Group and Apple in its customers’ list whereas Chatfuel serves some of the biggest names like ABC News, BuzzFeed, Adidas, etc. Using these platforms, you can create chatbot for your business in minutes.
Conclusion
The popularity of the bots for Facebook Messenger is continuously rising. Initially, companies used bots for sending automates response to users who message them on Facebook. However, as explained in the example, many firms have started utilizing it for selling and customer service. You can do a need assessment to find out the client interaction process which should be automated. Once you have a clear objective, you can get started with the chatbots in minutes.
