If you are a business owner who is losing customers because you’re shuffling between too many things and can’t respond to them quickly enough when they drop questions for you in your Facebook Messenger, then this post is for you.
Let me hurry to inform you that this article is not about to ask you to hire an extra customer care agent to fill that void in your organization. I am about to inform you of a better option.
The option is to adopt the Facebook Messenger Bot. A Facebook Messenger Chatbot is a bot that lives in Facebook Messenger.
Chatbox is the future of marketing and Facebook Chatbots or messenger chatbot is leading the bot world at present.
A Facebook messenger bot is a software application that can be incorporated into your business to become your automated virtual employee who answers your customers even while you sleep.
Helping you run and grow your business as it offers 24/7 online customer service and sales support. Chatbox doesn’t sleep, go on leave or lunch break, it doesn’t call in sick.
It can chat with people all day, all week without being tired and overworked— it can chat with thousands of people at the same time.
These and more are reasons your Facebook Messenger bots are a better option than hiring someone to respond to questions for your online business.
What is Facebook Messenger Chatbox?
Chatbots are Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications whose key purpose is to increase customer engagement, solve problems more rapidly, and minimize overhead costs.
It is an application that can chat with people automatically via Facebook Messenger. It can be used for internal operations, customer service, or troubleshooting.
Why should your business use Chatbots?
In one word, chatbots can do aggressive marketing for your business via messenger; it is a very potent tool to include in your marketing strategy toolbox.
Let us take a look at some of the benefits of chatbots and how they can help your business.
#1. 2/7 Availability
Unlike human agents, chatbots don’t have any working hours and provide customers with answers day and night. A 24/7 online presence is a must-have for any customer-focused business.
So with the Facebook Messenger chatbox, your business enjoys a customer service function. By understanding human language, chatbots can respond to customers in a manner that is both polite and highly professional. In addition, chatbots can help resolve complex questions or problems faster than traditional customer service lines.
This allows businesses to focus on their core business rather than performing administrative tasks that could be handled by a Facebook Messenger chatbot instead.
#2. Cost savings
Facebook Messenger chatbots play a crucial role in reducing customer service costs for your business. They can be employed to provide support via live chat, email, or a variety of other channels.
This not only allows customers to contact you directly with their questions and issues, but it also enables the bots to gather data about customer behavior and preferences over time.
Incorporating chatbots in your marketing strategy is an investment in itself since you no longer have to pay a hired customer care agent monthly or on whatever terms.
By investing in chatbots, you can save on the extra costs that go into hiring customer unit staff, payment of salaries, and the cost of training staff occasionally.
#3. Smoothens the customer journey
Facebook Messenger chatbots roll out a red carpet for your customers to walk through the sales funnel down to the bottom of it.
The modern consumer faces hundreds, if not thousands, of choices every day. What to read. Where to shop. What to buy. And each of those decisions takes a mental toll on them and they deserve to have it smooth when they contact your business.
Imagine that a customer finally settled to shop with you and you are not available to answer their questions immediately or forever.
Yeah! Your guess is as good as mine.
Losing a customer halfway through the sales funnel is never an ideal situation and no business would want that.
And no customer wants to be left unattended to, -ignored- if you prefer that. Customers are kings; they want to be treated as such. Your business shouldn’t keep kings waiting for a response.
Chatbots can be effective in helping brands reduce customer traffic and streamline customer travel.
#4. Better Analysis of Customer Queries
We all know that customer satisfaction is key to improving brand loyalty and creating a positive reputation that will ultimately lead to more sales opportunities.
Customers crave fast, efficient, and personalized experiences. However, customers say that most companies fall short when it comes to meeting their expectations.
To close the gap between what customers expect from customer service and the quality of support they are getting, brands will have to conduct customer service analytics and that is where the Facebook messenger chatbox comes in handy with better analysis of your customer experience.
By processing and analyzing customer queries in real-time, chatbots can improve the response time for customers who have questions about products or services.
Furthermore, by understanding the user’s context and providing relevant information based on that context, chatbots can help customers make informed decisions.
Supercharge customer experience with intelligent, powerful, and user-friendly Facebook messenger bots.
#5. Increase Customer Engagement
Building a loyal customer base doesn’t happen overnight. Myriad theories estimate the minimum number of times a customer must engage with your brand before they make a purchase.
While the actual number of interactions needed is debatable, there’s no doubt that customer engagement is essential for moving prospects through your buying funnel.
A good strategy will be one that will allow you to collect feedback, input, and relevant customer experience data to pivot your plan accordingly.
Facebook Messenger chatbots can be an essential tool for increasing customer engagement, and they are even more powerful when it comes to marketing your business.
They allow you to interact with customers in real time via a conversational interface, which provides an immersive experience that is different from traditional forms of advertising.
#6. Improve Lead Generation
Chatbots can control multiple roles in lead generation. They help companies connect with more prospects, gather valuable contact information, and nurture prospects through the marketing funnel.
Facebook Messenger chatbots can help you to improve lead generation for your business by providing a conversational interface that is easy to use.
They can be used to gather information from customers and prospects, automate customer interactions, and create automated leads or sales opportunities.
Additionally, chatbots can act as personal assistants by responding to questions about products or services.
Examples of successful chatbot usage.
#1. Emirates Airlines have a Facebook messenger chatbot in their banner ads that has increased ad click-through rates to 87%.
#2. Whole Foods has a Facebook messenger chatbot that recommends recipes and grocery lists
#3. Many HR departments use chatbots to answer basic employee questions about PTO and company policies
#4. Customer Service Centers use chatbots to answer low-level questions and close tickets without needing to involve a human
#5, Chatbots can be used to streamline your services such as fitness, diet, health, or day-to-day activities. Every fitness goal requires a different set of workout plans and a nutrition diet.
The Dos Of Using Facebook Chatbots
#1. Give your bot a personality and Identity tag
Have you ever felt that the communication was fake and unnatural when you contacted a business? You will not love your customers to hold such an impression when they get you.
How do you ensure that?
You can start by giving your chatbot a name that will encourage clients to start the conversation. It will also make them feel more connected with your brand.
Talking to a robot is always monotonous and boring. This will not attract people, it will just create a bad experience.
To ensure that the chatbots project a personality that the user would correlate most easily too. The emotion is your chatbot and your chatbot gives the user an experience.
#2. Keep Your Interactions Short
Deploying a chatbot either on your Facebook messenger to help you to interact and engage with your customers 24*7 is a beautiful strategy in online marketing but make sure you don’t program your “office assistant” to engage in a lengthy conversation
Don’t expect users to use your chatbot with rapt attention. They can get easily distracted by the countless other apps on their phone. So, keep your interactions brief, and reestablish the context of the discussion when needed.
#3. Ensure that users know that chatbots are not humans
Chatbots have evolved with the addition of AI systems that interact with humans effortlessly however, it is also important to ensure that the users know they are talking to bots and not to live agents.
If the bot needs time to process a request, use the typing indicator (three dots) to make sure your customer knows things are still happening behind their keypads.
For example, whenever there is an artificial delay, introduce something like ”is typing…” on the screen of your user.
#4. Handoff to a human before the conversation becomes too frustrating for the user
Make it easy for human agents to take over a conversation from the bot when it is getting beyond what the bot can effectively handle.
You may not want to include all of the above into your bot from day 1. But at least give the users an option to switch from a bot to a human, to begin with.
Analyze how your users are interacting with the bot and decide when the right time to get the other two features is.
#5. Be humorous
Humor establishes rapport. Almost all people love to laugh. Jokes (non-offensive) can easily establish fondness and trust in your brand.
A good joke can disarm conflict, shed light on a negative or frustrating situation, and relationships are often built on experiences of shared humor.
People do business with people they like, and if they smile and laugh every time you are near, they associate you with happiness.
Who doesn’t love to have a good chuckle from time to time? Your customers work hard, manage projects, go to appointments, take care of their family, and deal with miscellaneous situations that pop up every day.
Humor is a great vehicle to escape reality, even if it is just for a few seconds. Humor is everywhere around us, so why not with bots?
Even when your bot is built around a non-humorous business problem, the moment users find out that they are talking to a bot, there will always be a few who would try to be naughty and start saying funny things to the bot.
You may not want to go overboard with handling every possibility in the universe but having humorous responses to some funny statements from the users will make your bot stand out.
Don’ts of Setting Up Facebook Messenger Chatbots
#1. Don’t Leave Users Unattended
If you leave any user hanging without a response, you are providing a very poor customer experience and eventually drive them away.
So, make sure that your bot is always available to respond to each and everything and at every time.
#2. Don’t be Monotonous
Make sure that your chatbot doesn’t do all the talking. Map out every interaction, and create multiple variations of each interaction with different prompts and responses.
This will help you prepare your bot appropriately for a variety of responses from users.
#3. Don’t Ever Disguise Your Facebook Messenger Chatbot
Your customers will trust you more if you’re authentic and admit that customers are interacting with a chatbot.
Tools For Building Effective Facebook Chatbots
#1. Mobile Monkey
If you are looking for the best chatbot platform to connect with your customers, then you must MobileMonkey. Yes!! You heard it right.
MobileMonkey is the best chatbot platform to grow your marketing and increase your sales.
Many online marketers praise this platform as the best marketing bot solution. You can use Mobile Monkey to perform the following functions: to generate sales, get leads, get signups and get unlimited contact using this tool
#2. Chatfuel
Chatfuel is a Facebook messenger bot builder with a visual development environment, so you can click and add blocks of functionality like “Text Card” to send a text response and other blocks to send images.
How to use Chatfuel on Facebook?
#1. Add a Messenger flow in Automation → Flows.
#2. Select an Entry Point. It’s where users enter and start a conversation with your bot.
#3. Add more blocks, fill them in with content and connect them to build a conversational flow.
#4. Activate your Entry Point. Now users can enter and interact with your bot.
#3. Creator Studio
You use the Creator Studio to perform the following functions:
#1. Create, publish and engage
#2. Manage content and interactions across all of your Pages.
#3. Monitor video performance
#4. Explore video insights across all of your Pages.
#5. Earn more
Creator Studio is Facebook’s free dashboard that social media marketers and content creators can use to manage Facebook Pages.
Facebook Creator Studio does allow you to set up some basic automated responses to common requests and events in Messenger.
For example, you can set up an away message, provide contact information, or set up a list of FAQs and answers.
There’s no artificial intelligence happening here to enable conversation or sales, but you can get some auto responder functionality to keep Messenger working at a basic level when you’re away from your desk.
#4. Stream chat
Stream Chat is a tool that provides chat API and SDKs for custom messaging applications, thus enabling the user to build real-time chat quickly.
The chat SDK feature allows the users to build live-chat applications or even their Slack alternative. The tool provides dynamic slash commands, file attachments, direct and group chats, Giphy integration, multi-tenancy, threads to keep the discussion organized, and even previews to help users share information.
Stream Chat allows the users to add a live chat solution to Livestream. The tool’s AI-based auto-moderation will monitor the conversation and keep it civil.
There is no limit to the number of live chat participants. Reactions and threads will enable the user to keep the conversation organized.
Using Stream Chat’s react components, SDKs, and UI kits, users can create a powerful web-chat experience or even a mobile application using just a few code lines.
#5. The Bot Platform
The Bot Platform is an enterprise solution for building bots on Messenger and Workplace by Facebook.
The Bot Platform Features include:
#1. Workplace by Facebook bots
#2. Facebook Messenger bots
#3. Automation tools
#6. chattypeople
Chattypeople is the best chatbot platform tool for creating a chatbot on Facebook with integrated F-commerce. With Chattypeople you can create a Facebook message both quickly and easily, no coding required. Chattypeople is 100% free to get started.
It enables you to create, test, deploy, measure, and manage your bots creating a personalized, native conversational experience within the messaging app of choice.
Conclusion
Conquer the Chaos in Your Social Inbox.
Equip yourself with everything needed to easily manage all your incoming messages from one place. Facebook Messenger chatbots are great ways to engage with your audience and provide instantaneous support.
However, don’t see them as a replacement for your customer care team. Scenarios that can’t be handled effectively by a chatbot will arise occasionally.
So, leave your customers the option to contact your regular support team, too.
