If your business has a Facebook page, then you’re already aware of the importance of social media and customer service. Facebook is a wonderful platform to use to interact with your customers, and one that your customers will generally be the most comfortable using. Those who do use Facebook to contact you, as a business, expect your replies to be immediate, and Facebook has recently, as of April this year, integrated a new feature to make this even easier for you to do. With both Facebook providing simple AI, as well as leaving it open to other developers and third parties to integrate into Facebook, there’s a lot of possibilities in store.
With increasing numbers of customers turning to social media to contact businesses with questions, comments and complaints, Facebook Messenger has created Chat bots to help manage the influx of messages. These chat bots allow you to automatically answer consumer messages with immediate answers. Simple questions can be answered, thanks can be given or your customers can be directed to someone who can respond to more complicated concerns. This way, your customer service team can be working on more important issues, and not answering a deluge of messages that don’t need one-on-one help.
The flexibility of Facebook chat bots also increases its usefulness to your business. There are multiple functions that can be carried out using a chat bot, not just limited to sending messages. You can also provide services such as wireless bank transactions or booking rides with Lyft. The easier you make a process for your customers, the more loyal your customers become. Customizing your chat bots to your customers’ needs is the perfect way to expand your business and increase your revenue.
We’ve set up a little list of just three of the ways that Facebook chat bots can serve your business in a beneficial way:
1. Personalized Content — For some, content and marketing is what they want their business chat bots to focus on. For this, you can customize your bots to create a relationship with your customers via messaging and provide immediate responses with very little input on the user’s side. For example, if your business deals with foods or food services, you can create a bot that will allow a customer to find a new recipe. A simple request of “salad recipes” will allow them to scroll through options, or they can answer a series of questions to further personalize their search. This is a wonderful way to provide useful, relevant content and to branch out to other social media sites. There are, however, some key points to remember when creating a content based chat bot:
- Treat the bot like content marketing. You shouldn’t be focusing on selling, but how you can use your products, and sent users to your website.
- Make sure your site is mobile-responsive; it wouldn’t due to send a customer to a site that won’t load on their device.
- Add contact information if they need additional help.
- Include browsing menus if possible, so that users can find what they want even if they aren’t sure what that is yet.
2. Answer Frequently Asked Questions —Regardless of whether or not you have certain information on your website, your will always have some customers asking the same questions over and over. A chat bot is a great way to get those answers to your asking customers quickly and efficiently. Once the bot is programmed, it can recognize the query and answer the question to the way you’ve specified. Key points in creating a FAQ bot:
- Include customer service contacts, just in case the question cannot be answered by your bot or website.
- Always let the users know that they’re talking with an automated response system. This is especially important for customer service issues.
- If personal information is needed from the customer, always direct to your website or phone number. An FAQ bot should never handle information dealing with a user’s identity or money.
3. Money Management Streamlining — While you can’t replace a salesperson, chat bots can be programmed to sell products. This allows more customers to use your services at a time, increasing your sells and revenues. You can have the chat bot show the products, process simple sales and handle shipping information. The process for the user is usually rather simple, depending on how you decide to program the bot. Generally, you’ll want to prompt the customer into choosing a specific category of products, and then select an item from that category. The chat bot will then ask for the relevant shipping and billing information, much like the “shopping cart” and “check out” on your website. It’s a simple process that is likely going to be easier than trying to navigate your website on a mobile device. Key points to remember:
- Have the bot capable of answering some FAQs, as this will drive up sales due to an increase in customer. satisfaction.
- Use a chat bot that is capable of accepting payments; not all of them can, so its important to know which ones are which.
- Always ask if the customers would like to add anything to their purchase before checking out.
With so many uses (even more that we haven’t listed here) Facebook chat bots are becoming increasingly popular among business owners. If you have a Facebook page for your business, you should highly consider adding some chat bots to help boost your sales and revenues and garner more customer loyalty. If you have any questions regarding Facebook chat bots, feel free to contact us, and we’ll help you get your answers