How Messenger Bots Can Work For Your Business

Chatbots have been around for a long time now and maybe you’ve even tried some of them (if not, talk to Sauco’s Bot, Avery). But it is only recently that bots or more specifically, chatbots have started being more notorious. The way that customers communicate with a business or brand is changing and Messenger Bots are a direct reflection of how the market is adapting to this.

But, what are Messenger Bots anyway?

The simplest answer to this would be: Messenger Bots are a form of automated service. They are part of the newish Messenger Marketing service that has been booming for the past 5 years.

When building a Messenger Bot for any business, we set of defined rules and parameters for the Bot to interact with the user, this can usually be done on Social Media or on your website. Then we integrate it with any Facebook Messenger account. Facebook is one of the key players in messaging services: it’s working hard to make the messaging experience between chatbots and customers more seamless. Nowadays, we can also advertise on Messenger and interact with leads with a click on a button!

How does a Messenger Bot work?

A chatbot works much like a customer service representative (CSR). If a customer starts a chat for help, the chatbot will respond. For example, the request could be “What’s your business’s hours tomorrow?” Then the Messenger Bot answers based on the information available to him available for this purpose: “Our business opens tomorrow from 9 am to 5 pm.”

Have you ever Siri or Alexa asked about the weather in your area? These are also bots and they can give a natural sounding answer to us humans.

You might say that chatbots have a slightly smaller knowledge base and limited abilities, yet they are very powerful for any business because as I mentioned, it acts as a CSR and is able to answer any question that has been already defined by rules.

Making your Shopping Experience a breeze – retail and apparel industries

Not sure if you know but 1-800-Flowers was one of the first to hop on the chatbot bandwagon when the technology first publicly debuted on Facebook Messenger this past spring.

Tommy Hilfiger is also another company finding success with its Facebook Messenger bot. The fashion empire developed an experience where they used a bot for Messenger to help people buy fashion directly from the runway during Fashion Week in NYC. There was an 87 percent return rate for people coming back again to use the Messenger experience, with over 60,000 messages being exchanged. The company noted that 3.5 times more was spent through Messenger than any other digital channels.

Here is one of the beauties of having a Messenger Bot: instead of requiring a customer to download a company’s mobile app in order to place and pay for an order, companies like Pizza Hut, Taco Bell or Burger King let users visit their Facebook pages and directly message a chatbot to begin the order process. 

Messenger Bots for the Quick Service Restaurant industry

Quick service restaurant chains have found much success in enabling customers to place orders through their Facebook Messenger chatbots as we just mentioned above. Just to give you an example, here’s what you can do with a bot on your Facebook Messenger account if you are in the QSR:

• consumers can answer the bot’s yes or no questions to complete their orders and add on any side dishes.

• The Messenger Bot will ask them to confirm the restaurant location for pick-up before seamlessly bringing users to a third-party site to input payment details (or you can collect payments with the Facebook payment system too)

• Messenger Bots for QSR chains could be well-trained to drive impulse purchases, for example when customers are thinking of throw a party or when they are thinking of making plans with friends via Messenger and become inspired to order some food within the same app.

Messenger Bots for the Travel Industry

Some airlines such as KLM and Icelandair, now allow Facebook Messenger users to chat with their Bots receive suggestions for stopovers, also they can book their flights directly with the Bots, simply by answering several questions, such as type of flight, departure and arrival cities, and desired travel dates.

Real Estate

Buyers could ask a chatbot for properties around a specific city area, a price range the listings are around there, or if the Facebook page offers a mortgage calculator. Are you planning to sell? Ask the bot for an estimate of the property value or to put you in contact with the broker, all of these without checking its website or contact app on your phone.

Wellness industry

While technology could stress us out, there are good tools that can help us remain healthy. For example, if you run a yoga studio, you could send meditation tips and techniques to your followers. Meditation is a proven health technique and helps practitioners to remain mindful throughout the day, reducing stress and conflict.

Facebook Advertisement and Messenger Marketing

As part of the Messenger features, you can integrate them with Facebook Ads in order to automate your marketing with Messenger Bots and Facebook Ads. By allowing Messenger as a destination for your news feed ads, you have now unlimited potential communicate instantly with prospective customers.

There are a variety of techniques you can use with your Messenger Bot to create a powerful lead generation campaign. 

Improving your shopping experience and customer satisfaction with Messenger Bots

Gone are the days of consumers encountering tediously long checkout experiences on a mobile site or app and having to manually enter in all credit card and personal information. The rapidly evolving commerce sector has given way to the newest darling of chatbots, making shopping on smartphones easier than ever.

And at the end, mobile shopping capabilities will only continue to become more optimized and streamlined, not to mention faster. Although it may not be feasible for every brand to introduce a chatbot on Facebook Messenger, it still on us designers and marketers to new ways in which we can remove some friction and steps from their mobile checkout processes. But for now, we could say that Messenger Bots are giving us a big opportunity to improve the shopping process and increase the customer satisfaction.

If you are looking to get a Done for You Messenger Bot simply let us know.