Chatbots can be a fantastic way for your business to bolster its lead generation efforts, without affecting how effectively your staff work. But how exactly can chatbots help a business to generate new customers?

Instant service at any time

Having a chatbot can be really effective when it comes to engaging visitors on your website. For example, a chat window might pop up after a user has browsed for a certain amount of time, or there might be a clearly-marked chat button somewhere on the screen.

By showing a visitor that you’re able to help them right then and there, it might encourage them to start interacting with your business, hopefully leading to that person becoming a customer down the line.

Using a chatbot means service can be provided at any time, even outside of business hours. If necessary, such as for more complex queries, a member of staff can take over from the bot and provide more personal assistance.

Even if it is out of hours, a chatbot will be able to handle many simple queries on its own. Or it can collect as much information as possible, including contact information, to provide a staff member with a help ticket to follow up when they come into work for their next shift.

A constant level of service supported by a chatbot could be exactly what you need to turn a site visitor into a customer.

Using a chatbot means service can be provided at any time. Outside of business hours a chatbot will be able to handle many simple queries on its own. If a lead needs more nurturing a member of your team can follow up on the information gathered the next working day.

Wider reach

While a chatbot on your site does mean that you can directly engage with a wide range of people, including those who might still be on the fence about getting in touch, chatbots can be used through multiple platforms for far wider reach.

Consider implementing a chatbot on your social media channels. This will mean you’re generating and interacting with leads through multiple avenues. Facebook, for example, has over 2 billion active users as of 2018, while Twitter has over 350 million active users.

By implementing chatbots across your social media channels, you’re making it far easier to attract and engage with a huge number of potential leads. It also means you and your staff aren’t as pressured by having to do everything manually, letting staff focus on other vital business matters such as providing sales support to existing customers.

Collecting information

The information you can gather from the people who interact with your chatbot can be really helpful in two key ways.

Firstly, the information that a potential lead gives to your chatbot is collated and saved for future reference – especially useful when your chatbot is linked to your CRM and lead management systems.

When it’s time for the prospect to be passed from the chatbot to a member of staff, all the information will be there for the staff member to read and take in. This means that staff have no need to repeat old questions, or ask for information that’s already been given to the bot.

The way that this transforms the customer experience, providing exceptional, useful and relevant service at every step, really helps to paint your business in a positive light.

The second way that the information a chatbot collects can be useful is far broader. For example, you might get a far keener insight into the demographics of the people who are interacting with your business. Are there any trends that particularly stand out? What’s their most common query?

Looking at the data your chatbot collects and analysing it in this manner might let you tweak, optimise or alter what you offer and how you offer it. This lets you more accurately target the right kinds of people in a more effective manner going forward, such as by influencing how your marketing efforts are structured and implemented.

How Flow XO can benefit your lead generation efforts

Using a chatbot for lead generation can be a fantastic way to improve how effectively potential customers interact with your business. With the ability to reach a huge amount of people without impacting your staff’s ability to work effectively, a thorough and well-developed chatbot service can really help a business grow.

Flow XO can help you do exactly that. The powerful chatbot services we offer:

• Are business ready – Setting up Flow XO is simple, meaning you can quickly get effective chatbot software in place

• Integrate cross-platform – With over 100 integrations, we can place chatbots wherever you need them within your company

• Provide intelligent responses – Powerful workflows allow you to create logical, robust systems that meet both your business’s and customers’ needs

To find out more about how Flow XO could help your business, visit our Flow XO for Chat page.

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Chatbots are a particularly useful tool to let a business work more efficiently and effectively. But how are chatbots different to live chat provided by members of staff?

Scaling efficiency

As a business grows and expands, your teams can often find themselves handling more and more customer queries throughout the course of a regular work day.

Over time, this might start to detract from your staff’s other responsibilities and hinder their efficiency. They might handle a particularly busy period of work, which takes them away from answering customer queries and causes leads or other enquiries and tasks to fall through the cracks. In cases like this, potential customers might grow frustrated and look to a competitor to meet their needs instead.

Adding more and more staff to deal with and filter an increased amount of customer queries is often too expensive to be a practical solution. Instead, a chatbot can be a cost-efficient tool for your business that can scale up really well.

Using a chatbot will mean your staff can spend more time on their other duties, while live chat will require one or more of your staff members to dedicate time out of their day to respond to customer queries.

The human element

Because chatbots are automated and can use powerful workflows to identify key trigger words and phrases for your business, many interactions can be completed without a customer having to talk to a member of staff.

When it comes to the difference between live chat and chatbots, the human element, or lack thereof, can be both a positive and a negative.

With live chat, the first point of contact is between a potential customer and a member of staff. From here, the interaction essentially starts from scratch. Staff will collect information to understand how best to handle the customer’s query. They might be able to deal with it then and there, or they could pass the customer on to the most suitable team within the business.

Chatbots collect this information by intelligently reading and analysing what a customer says, and the information can be seamlessly passed on to a member of staff if necessary.

This means that all the useful information will be in place, so that there’s no need to repeat and confirm details that have already been provided. Essentially, the first interaction with a member of staff will proceed much more smoothly, because they already have the relevant information from the potential customer.

With chatbots, there are no time limits on when someone can contact your business. Depending on the nature of their query, they might be able to solve their issue even in the late hours of the evening, such as if they need to update their details, or pay off an invoice.

However, for a really useful middle ground, it’s possible to combine elements of live chat and chatbots to create a more thorough and helpful hybrid tool.

For example, a potential customer might never have used a chatbot before and may struggle to use it effectively.  Or a query might be more complex and could be better handled by a person. In cases like this, it’s important that a member of your team can take over from the chatbot and provide human-led customer service.

Once the team member has finished helping the customer they can then seamlessly pass control back over to the chatbot. The chatbot can then carry on providing assistance to the customer – this could include completing a transaction, or confirming and finalising customer details.

This seamless transition between a chatbot and a staff member means that customers can get the support they need, when they need it without  customer service staff having to spend time on routine processes. This allows them to provide more direct assistance to your customers and work much more efficiently.

24-hour support

One key limitation of live chat support is that it’s often restricted to office hours, with out-of-hours support provided during brief windows, or not at all. Outside of these hours, anyone contacting your business may be out of luck until you re-open.

With chatbots, there are no time limits on when someone can contact your business. Depending on the nature of their query, they might be able to solve their issue even in the late hours of the evening, such as if they need to update their details, or pay off an invoice.

This level of support can be really useful over a long weekend, where your business is closed for 2-3 days. Instead of being inundated with emails and voice messages that each require following up when staff are back in the office, your chatbot can handle some of these queries for you while you’re closed, which can be helpful when it comes to easing staff workflow during the start of each day

How Flow XO’s chatbot services can benefit your business

There’s a lot to consider when thinking about how you can provide exceptional customer service every time. With the right systems in place, you can place yourself firmly above your competitors and become people’s first port of call when they need the services you provide.

To provide that exceptional customer service, a powerful and intelligent chatbot could be just what you need. This is where Flow XO come in.

We provide businesses with powerful chatbot systems that:

• Integrate cross-platform – With over 100 integrations, we can place chatbots wherever you need them within your organisation
• Provide intelligent responses – Powerful workflows allow you to create logical, robust systems that meet the needs of both your business and customers
• Are business ready – Setting up Flow XO is simple, meaning you can get effective chatbot software in place fast with zero coding required

To find out more about how Flow XO could help your business, visit our Flow XO for Chat page.

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This video shows Edsby’s web-based customer support chatbot in action. It is used as a first-line customer support tool, which adds users to Edsby’s CRM system and mailing list, and provides the opportunity to give feedback which shapes the software’s engineering roadmap.

If a question cannot be answered, the chatbot automatically sends an email to somebody who can provide further assistance. The emails are then analysed to help revise key words and improve flow logic, resulting in fewer help emails.

Flow XO for Chat is a powerful automation product that allows you to quickly and simply build incredible chatbots, with zero coding skills required,  that help you to communicate and engage with your customers across a wide range of different sites, applications and social media platforms.

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We look at some of the key industries taking advantage of the benefits of a chatbot and the different ways they are using them.

Types of chatbots for different businesses

Different types of chatbots can be used for different businesses, from those that deal with simple requests, to those that handle advanced queries. This could include basic greetings to welcome people to a company website, through to more complex interactions like advanced responses to hold realistic conversations with customers.

The bots can also be integrated with different systems to help them provide additional services to customers. This includes allowing them to handle payments, give advice, or for their responses to be linked to a previous bot’s conversation with a customer. This range of additional features makes chatbots versatile enough to be used across different industries. There are many sectors that are taking full advantage of the benefits of a chatbot. Here are some examples of the different ways businesses are using the technology to benefit them.

Retail and eCommerce

Ecommerce businesses and the websites of many retailers are using chatbots to help them in many ways. This includes handling basic product queries to replace customer service phone lines. If the chatbot isn’t enough to solve a query then the system can connect to live human assistance to help before returning control back to the bot. Some companies have also used them to replace search tools and help customers find the products they want.

Beauty and fashion is a good example of a sector that is using chatbots in such a way. For instance, clothing brands use them on their sites to ask customers about their style preferences, or what items they are looking for. Meanwhile, beauty brands offer site customers tips and tutorials to match the looks they want to achieve.

Travel and hospitality

These sectors are concerned with providing a first-rate customer service, making them a great fit for a chatbot, as they provide the same professional service for each customer. They are using chatbots to speed up processes and improve their customers’ experience before and during a trip or holiday.

Hotels, for example, are using them to make it easier for people to book accommodation, as well as check in and out of their room without having to wait in reception. Some are also using the technology to provide a basic 24/7 concierge service via a mobile app. This frees up human concierge to handle more specialised and complex requests.

Travel companies are also using the bots to help people plan what they can do on a trip away. This includes booking restaurants and reserving places on excursions and activities.

Banking and financial

The transactional nature of these industries makes them ideal for a chatbot. These sectors are using them in different ways, such as to reduce customer service waiting times, and make it easier for customers to get in touch with busy banks.

For instance, bankers are using them to help solve customers’ problems with transactions and their accounts. Chatbots are also being used to do things like supply a customer with their current bank balance, and locate the nearest cash machine for them.

In addition to this, some financial service companies are using the technology to do more advanced tasks. This includes suggesting the benefits of credit cards to customers, which they might not be aware of and have been approved for, as well as asking them about their long-term money-saving goals.

Providing chatbots that are right for your business and industry

A powerful chatbot can be beneficial to many industries, from helping customers find products on an ecommerce site, to giving bank customers options of new credit. The right chatbot can help your company improve your business processes, provide a better service for your customers, and make you stand out in your industry. And this is where Flow XO can help.

We provide industries with powerful chatbot systems that:

• Are business ready – Setting up Flow XO is simple, meaning you can quickly get effective chatbot software in place
• Integrate cross-platform – With over 100 integrations, we can place chatbots wherever you need them within your company
• Provide intelligent responses – Powerful workflows allow you to create logical, robust systems that meet both your business’ and customers’ needs

If you’d like to find out more about how Flow XO could help your business, visit our features page.

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It could be the first time someone deals with you or the fortieth. Either way, your service level will dictate the impression you make on a customer, and whether or not someone sees your business in a flattering light.

Any opportunity to improve the level of service your business offers should be a major consideration. A chatbot provides a fantastic way to streamline elements of your customer service, alongside a wealth of other benefits, which helps your business to interact and engage with customers more easily.

Here are some examples of how a chatbot can help.

Time-saving

One of the key benefits of chatbots is that they can, in many instances, replace a human customer service advisor. This means initial contact and even simple queries, such as chasing up delivery statuses or arranging appointments and call-backs, can be handled autonomously.

Allowing a chatbot to handle basic queries and customer service issues means that the volume of issues your business can deal with suddenly increases. It also eliminates the need for your staff to check a delivery status or process a return, as these can be handled by a chatbot.

This means that your customer service department has more time to spend on specific or larger issues. In turn, this gives staff more time to dedicate to customers and provide a more personalised service.

Consistency

Chatbots can be integrated across different channels, including:

• Websites
• Social media platforms
• Apps
• Email
• SMS messaging

With a huge number of different platforms, there are many ways that customers can interact with your business. What a chatbot allows is for you to control that initial contact. This ensures that no matter how many different platforms and how many interactions that take place, your brand is represented consistently.

Every interaction should be polite and helpful, and designed to get as much information about a customer’s needs as possible. This can then be referred to a member of your customer service team who can then take over, if need be.

Providing a level of consistency is crucial as it means your customer service department is presented as a cohesive and unified part of your business. It also means that regardless of the platform, customers receive the same level of service and get the same first impression of your brand.

Availability

Chatbots can serve as a 24/7 frontline for your customer service department.

This means that customers can engage with a business and seek answers to specific questions and queries at any time, even when customer service staff aren’t present. This can be a fantastic way to improve your service offering, as it means your business is always on hand to provide help and support.

With the right workflows in place, a chatbot can process enquires and questions from customers. In situations where human intervention is needed, and the enquiry is made outside of working hours, the chatbot can arrange a follow-up call.

Doing this means that even though that customer might not have their issue solved right away, they know that it has been logged, and that the next step in their customer service journey is underway.

How Flow XO can help with your customer service

The right customer service can be a great way to help elevate your business above your competitors and ensure people continue to make use of your services. A powerful chatbot can be a cornerstone to build your customer services around, and this is where Flow XO can help.

We provide businesses with powerful chatbot systems that:

• Integrate cross-platform – With over 100 integrations, we can place chatbots wherever you need them within your organisation
• Provide intelligent responses – Powerful workflows allow you to create logical, robust systems that meet the needs of both your business and customers
• Are business ready – Setting up Flow XO is simple, meaning you can get effective chatbot software in place fast

To find out more about how Flow XO could help your business, visit our features page.

The post How can a chatbot improve your customer service? appeared first on Flow XO.

Online customers don’t have the ability to talk to a team member face to face, which is where chatbots can help. These intelligent systems allow customers to communicate with a business, find out the information they need, and ask questions. From a business standpoint, this allows you to open lines of communication and begin providing great customer service.

But what else are chatbots capable of, and why should you think about using them?

What is a chatbot?

Chatbots are programs designed to simulate human interaction and conversation. This is normally with a view to advancing a customer enquiry and providing information that helps users find what they need.

By using workflows and recognising key terms and phrases, chatbots are able to automate large parts of the initial interaction with a customer. This allows them to chase up order enquiries, provide information about products, process payments, or arrange appointments with customer service team members.

A chatbot is in some cases the first contact a customer will have with your business. So it creates an opportunity to make a great first impression, and support your customers as much as possible, helping them to form a more positive image of your company.

How it helps a business and its customers

Chatbots have a variety of uses and can be incredibly versatile in what they are capable of doing. From acting as a greeter on your website to responding to customer complaints, there are lots of ways a chatbot can benefit a business.

Some of these benefits include:

24/7 point of contact

Chatbots don’t need downtime, or breaks. This means having one for your site or social media channels allows you to maintain 24/7 customer service support.

Workflows allow you to record a query or request that would normally require a human response. Chatbots can then arrange a call back or contact when customer support staff are back at work.

This means that customers can feel a constant connection to your business, helping them and you to feel supported.

Time-saving responses

Chatbots look for key phrases and responses to help move conversations along. In some instances, such as checking up on an order status, or checking if an item is in stock, a chatbot can deal with a customer enquiry ­– without ever involving a member of the customer service team.

This is a great way to save time and ensure that staff are dealing with more involved requests instead of simple tasks. Automating some of your customer service in this way also means that a lot of queries, which cause delays and keep customers waiting around for help, can be handled much more quickly. This can improve the overall efficiency of your customer service.

Consistency

Chatbots can be used across social media, mobile sites, email, websites and more. They provide businesses with an ability to control the initial introduction to a customer, and provide a level of consistency in communication across a brand.

If you run a business that gives customers a number of options for getting in touch, this level of consistency is important as it guarantees a certain level of control. It also lets you predefine the quality of interaction when it comes to communicating with your customers.

This broad integration also allows you to update any key information, such as offers, your company policy, or details which customers should be aware of. This helps to ensure you provide customers with accurate information at all times.

Links services together

Chatbots are able to integrate with a number of different systems within your business. This can be a huge benefit to your internal organisation. For instance, a customer gets in touch to arrange an appointment to speak with a financial advisor in your business. This appointment is arranged via a chatbot, but it uses information gained from internal diary programs and calendars to work out when the advisor is available.

This helps to not only provide impeccable levels of service which can benefit the client, but also helps to keep staff organised within your business.

How Flow XO can help with your customer service

Providing your customers with a high-quality and consistent level of service is a crucial part of ensuring they continue to make use of your business. A powerful chatbot can be a cornerstone to build this customer service around, and this is where Flow XO can help.

We provide businesses with powerful chatbot systems that:

• Integrate cross-platform – With over 100 integrations, we can place chatbots wherever you need them within your organisation
• Provide intelligent responses – Powerful workflows allow you to create logical, robust systems that meet the needs of both your business and customers
• Are business ready – Setting up Flow XO is simple, meaning you can get effective chatbot software in place fast

To find out more about how Flow XO could help your business, visit our features page.

The post What is a chatbot and why do you need one? appeared first on Flow XO.

With our laptops, tablets, phones and even smartwatches always close to us at all times, we have access to whatever we want, whenever we want.

For businesses, this means that there’s literally no time to waste when it comes to answering questions from potential customers.

Why? Because if they don’t get an answer to their question in the time they desire, then they’ll find another company that’s quicker – which means that a lack of time loses you money.

Realistically, not all businesses have the resources to put into 24/7 customer support, which is why the reliance on online chatbots has risen sky high in the last few years.

Continue reading this article on businessblogshub.com

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Customer service bots interact with the customer on behalf of your business, enabling customers to self-serve online by drawing on specific business rules and a knowledge bank to answer common questions and requests.

Customers can reach out to your company by sending a message to your customer service chatbot via a messaging platform like Facebook. Using the rules you give it, it will decide whether it can resolve the issue or if it should redirect the query to a human agent. The bot will pass on all the relevant information it has collected to the customer service representative.

A chatbot’s autoresponder function enables it to give immediate answers to questions like:

• What time do you open today?
• What is your refund policy?
• Is product X in stock?

Depending on the complexity and capability of the bot, it may not be able to answer more complex inquiries such as ‘How do I exchange one of the items in a bulk purchase?‘ This is where your human team steps in to help.

Why use bots for customer service?

Chatbots make initial customer contact and ongoing relationship maintenance easier for organizations to handle while enhancing the experience for the customer at the same time. These days, most consumers expect organizations to be available to respond to queries 24/7 – they no longer want to be put on hold or receive an email response for basic information requests on your product or service. Chatting in real time with your company’s customer service bot should be an easy, enjoyable experience for your customers.

In addition to answering FAQs, you could also give your chatbot the capability to:

• Recommend new products
• Perform simple transactions
• Conduct customer surveys

Automating a significant amount of your customer service function means you can reduce the amount of employees completing manual tasks and focus them on complex tasks your bot can’t handle. Your employees become the escalation point rather than first contact, increasing your return on investment as labor costs drop. Customer service bots can also help you streamline your sales and engagement processes.

In addition to performing basic transactions, they also collect a significant amount of customer data, which you can use to inform your overall business strategy as well as specific functions including customer service and marketing.

How do customer service bots work?

You can host the customer service bot on your website or integrate it into popular applications like Facebook Messenger or SMS. The latter approach is becoming more and more popular as organizations recognize the potential of bringing their product/service into the space where people are spending the most time, rather than expecting them to seek you out.

Basic customer service bots are easy to build – they function on rules and respond to specific commands, but they don’t learn any more than you teach them, and the user experience can be a bit awkward as they have trouble accommodating the nuances of natural language. Bots that use machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) get smarter as they interact with more customers. These complex chatbots can be more difficult to create, but if you have the right software partner to guide you, it’s definitely worth the investment.

How do I build a customer service bot?

You can choose a personable avatar to interact with customers or just host a basic chat window. Bringing in third party expertise during the planning stage will help you create a bot that fits your audience and functions fluidly from the outset. They’ll work with you to define the message templates, including text, images and call-to-action bubbles, based on your knowledge of your customer base.

To ensure your chatbot uses natural conversation, and is as ‘human’ as possible you should invest in an experienced chatbot developer. They will show you how to train your chatbot properly and update its knowledge bank regularly as you gather more insight from customer interaction. There’s nothing worse than a chatbot that continues to give the wrong answer or can’t understand a question.

Good chatbots aren’t really noticed by customers, as they streamline the experience so well that customers don’t register any issues. On the other hand, bad chatbots can infuriate customers and quickly undo all of your efforts to drive engagement and build strong relationships.

When building a customer service bot, make sure you understand the processes and resources that sit around it. What platform do you want to use, where does the knowledge bank sit and how will it escalate issues to human resources? An experienced bot developer should be able to devise a solution that best meets your business requirements and provides a superior user experience to your customers.

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Sites like Facebook can do far more than allow business owners to communicate directly with their customers. When properly used, these social media platforms can automate huge portions of the business, reducing operating costs and helping companies compete more effectively in a changing world.

If your company is not taking advantage of Facebook bots, you are missing out on a prime opportunity. Facebook bots can automate your customer service and marketing efforts and help you engage more effectively with both current and prospective buyers. Even better, Facebook bots are relatively easy to build and maintain, as long as you have the right tools at your disposal.

What are Facebook bots?

Even if you are not familiar with bots and how they work, chances are you have interacted with a bot at some point in your online life. From chat programs designed to augment teams of human customer service operators to bots that answer common questions and recommend product, these tiny bits of code are all over the Internet. Companies of all sizes are already using bots to boost their bottom lines and serve their customers, and your firm can do the same.

In the simplest terms, a bot is a small application that works inside popular messaging program, in this case Facebook Messenger. Once it is built and installed, the Facebook bot can automatically interact with users, allowing website visitors to access a wide range of services.

What are bots used for?

The range of services accessible to users of these Facebook chatbots is limited only by the talent of the bot writers and the needs of the company. Facebook bots are often used for customer service applications, with the bot programmed to recognize common inquiries and provide the necessary answers.

Facebook bots can also be used to aid your marketing efforts, augmenting and enhancing the human marketing team and boosting their productivity in the process. From recommending new products based on past purchases to serving up suggestions based on search queries, these Facebook apps can be valuable marketing tools for companies of all sizes.

One of the great things about a Facebook bot is that they have gotten so good that many users may not even realize they are talking to a machine. These tiny programs are great at answering questions, suggesting products and solving problems, and that is one of the things that makes them so useful

Easy to use and accessible

Another thing that makes Facebook bots and similar programs so powerful is their ease of use. Many companies publish specialized apps that make customer service easier and augment their marketing efforts, but those apps require active intervention on the part of the user.

In order to use these specialized apps, the user must find the app, wait for it to download and learn how to use it. While some customers may be willing to take those steps, others may simply abandon their efforts and look for answers elsewhere.

Facebook bots are a much different story, and much easier for both current and potential customers to use. Instead of downloading an app and learning how to use it, those customers can simply chat with the bot, creating a seamless conversation that is nearly indistinguishable from human-based marketing or customer service.

Feels more human

From the point of view of the customer, chatting with a Facebook bot is largely the same as chatting with a human operator on a marketing or customer service line. The user simply types a question in normal language, and the Facebook bot provides the needed answers. All the programming happens behind the scenes, with the Facebook chat bot interpreting the inquiry, searching its database for the answer and providing the information to the user on the other end of the computer.

Create a Facebook bot for your business

Adding Facebook chat bots to your marketing toolkit can have valuable implications for your company and its profitability. With marketing budgets shrinking and companies being asked to do more with less, automating your efforts has never been more important. If you are not yet incorporating Facebook bots into your marketing efforts, now is the time to take a look.

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They make customer interactions with your business quicker, easier and more efficient because the customer no longer has to download and open a separate app, make an email inquiry or phone call to find out more about your product or service. They can simply chat in real time with your messenger bot, which uses natural language to respond to their queries. An example of a messenger bot is the ever-popular Siri, which is featured on Apple’s iPhone.

There are more than 11,000 messenger bots already out there providing information and services for a wide range of businesses. Facebook Messenger users can send a text to a bot to get the weather, order an uber, book a hotel room, or buy a pair of jeans.

More and more businesses are choosing to develop messenger bots instead of apps because bots enable them to streamline their sales process while increasing the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Bots accomplish this by automating simple transactions while collecting and learning from this customer data.

Why does my business need a messenger bot?

Messenger bots are the future. Over 65% of Americans use social media and recent studies show that these users now spend the majority of their time within messaging apps.

The big tech players such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Skype, along with savvy businesses, understand that it’s no longer enough to build a mobile application that brings the user to you – you have to go to them, and operate within their favorite places such as chat apps like Facebook Messenger – if you want to drive engagement and increase sales.

Your messenger bot will be specially designed to fit your business’ needs. It will tell your customers everything they want to know about your product or service in real time. Your messenger bot will have many more capabilities than just answering FAQs. Here are some other ways in which bots can help you reach your target:

• Recommending new products
• Performing simple transactions
• Conducting customer surveys

The beauty of messenger bots is that they act as a personal assistant for your customer AND your marketing team.

The increased automation makes your business more productive by reducing your marketing costs. You’ll need fewer resources to maintain your social media presence as the majority of inquiries can be fielded by the bot. While it’s unlikely that bots will completely replace your customer service team (some interactions require a more human touch), it’s becoming harder and harder for customers to tell humans and bots apart.

Another benefit is that bots are very good at identifying other bots and can help your customer service and marketing teams hone in on legitimate questions and complaints and address them in a timely manner.

How do messenger bots work?

To get into the messenger bot scene, you only need one bot. That bot will then operate on any platform that carries Facebook Messenger – across iOs, Android, and the web. Employing an experienced messenger bot developer will help ensure that your bot is a success and that its interactions are as ‘human’ as possible. You get to define the message templates, including text, images, and call to action bubbles based on your knowledge of your customer base.

You can train your bot by feeding it questions and responses. The more interaction it has with your customers, the more enhanced their experience will be, as it is able to learn and adapt to incoming data. Because messenger bots rely on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), they don’t take much time to set up, however perfecting the responses of your bot can take time and dedication. Bringing in third party expertise in the early stages helps to create a bot that functions smoothly from the outset, ensuring that your customers won’t be scared off by a negative interaction.

When building a messenger bot, make sure you understand what ongoing maintenance and resources are required. Do you want a hybrid model that integrates automated and human responses? Are you looking for a fully automated solution that redirects the more complex inquiries to a manual channel? An experienced bot developer will be able to advise you on the best setup for your business requirements.

Create a messenger bot for your business

Adding Facebook chat bots to your marketing toolkit can have valuable implications for your company and its profitability. With marketing budgets shrinking and companies being asked to do more with less, automating your efforts has never been more important. If you are not yet incorporating Facebook bots into your marketing efforts, now is the time to take a look.

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