When Facebook rolled out its Messenger API in 2016, it paved the way for brands around the world to build AI-powered chatbots on top of their messenger platform. Today, there are more than 300,000 chatbots on Facebook and for good reason.
They are helping brands to not only upgrade their customer experience, but also achieve their social commerce goals. Continue reading this blog to learn more about what a Facebook chatbot is and how can it benefit your business?
What is a Facebook messenger bot?
A Facebook chatbot is a conversational AI tool that helps businesses connect with their customers, resolve their issues, promote and sell their products or services on the Facebook messenger platform. Also known as the messenger bot, it can parse and understand natural language to deliver human-like support to the customers.
A lot of businesses do not have the resources to offer round-the-clock customer support. Luckily for them, messenger bots can make sure that their business stays accessible to the users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Let’s look at some more features that are a must-have for your Facebook bots.
Features of a Facebook messenger chatbot
1. Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis is an advanced chatbot feature that works by analyzing the emotion beneath a customer’s message. It’s all about understanding verbal cues and extracting intents, thoughts, or opinions from text/audio to enhance and influence customer satisfaction.
2. Cross-channel integration
One of the most beneficial features of Messenger API is that it allows easy integration with other Meta applications which include Instagram and WhatsApp. All three platforms integrate well with each other, enabling businesses to deliver seamless omnichannel experiences to their customers.
3. Live-chat handover
Your chatbots should be able to read the room and know when to transfer the chat to a live agent. Intelligent messenger bots come with the ability to understand customer intent so that they escalate the conversation to the right person at the right time.
4. Self-learning
The new generation of chatbots are AI-powered assistants that get smarter with every conversation. They require little training data and can train themselves using data from previous interactions.
5. Payment integration
Why just leave the conversations at engagement when you can improve sales by enabling instant payments. Intelligent bots come with pre-integrated payment gateways like PayPal, RazorPay, Setu and more to allow customers to make a purchase right from the chat interface.
6. Proactive messaging
Businesses need to move beyond a reactive approach towards customer service and be more proactive in how they engage with customers. This is where Facebook bots can help.
You can specify a trigger for your chatbot to send a message after a certain amount of time has passed. For example, when a customer has been on your page for three to ten seconds, your chatbot may send a welcome message in the chat.
7. Natural language
Messenger bots must be backed by a robust NLP-engine. This makes sure that they not only understand natural language but also converse in a more human-like manner. Program your bots to use a mix of rich media like images, gifs and text to make the conversations more interactive.
8. Predictive analytics
AI-powered chatbots are capable of observing and analyzing the ongoing as well as past customer data to make the conversations more personalized in real-time. The data collected by messenger bots can also be used to gain insights about chatbot performance and customer experience.
9. Internal systems connectivity
Your chatbot must be easy to integrate with your existing internal and external systems. This will enable the bot to extract and modify customer data in real-time, eliminating the need for manual and time-consuming data transfers.
Benefits of Facebook chatbot
1. Improves customer engagement
There are more than 1.3 billion active users on Facebook Messenger. The messenger bot enables you to break the ice with new customers, engage them with rich content and build confidence in your brand.
Facebook AI chatbot has also been proven to increase customer spending for businesses. It acts as a personal shopper for your customers and assists them throughout their journey.
2. Reduces support calls
People find it easier to engage with chatbots than with human agents. Infact, they prefer to use chatbots to resolve their queries instead of contacting your customer support team for every little problem. This significantly reduces the number of customer service calls and emails you receive on a daily basis.
3. Increases access to global markets
Another significant benefit of deploying Facebook chatbots is that they enable businesses to overcome language barriers. Facebook chatbots offer a great opportunity for brands to go global.
Messenger bots with multilingual capabilities enable brands to cater to a wider audience, allowing for new markets and opportunities to emerge.
4. Enhances customer support
Chatbots on Facebook have a significant edge over traditional customer service channels. They meet customers where they are, making it simple and quick to provide assistance. Also, unlike human agents, bots can offer consistent, round-the-clock support to the customers.
This ultimately gives customers the freedom to interact with your brand whenever they want, wherever they want. Using Facebook chatbots has been shown to increase customer satisfaction by up to ten times.
5. Simplifies scalability
One of the obvious benefits of Facebook chatbots is their scalability. With a simple setup process and minimal upfront expenditure, you can extend your support operations across borders and languages.
Businesses that have expanded the reach of their business using Facebook chatbots have experienced rapid growth with a conservative use of resources.
6. Increases brand loyalty
Brands that offer 24×7 customer support and have a strong social media presence generally have more credibility. Customers trust them more and see them as legitimate businesses.
It has also been demonstrated that brands who respond quickly to customer complaints enjoy higher brand loyalty than those with slower resolutions. Using Facebook chatbots makes sure you stay on top of customer problems and offer proactive support to your clients.
7. Optimizes costs
As previously said, Facebook chatbots allow you to scale your business while utilizing minimal resources. As a result, incorporating Facebook chatbots to your customer service strategy can save your company a lot of money in operational expenditures.
You reap the benefits of increased customer satisfaction as well as lower customer support expenditures. It’s definitely a win-win!
8. Improves agent productivity
Contrary to popular belief, chatbots are not here to replace human agents, rather to assist them and help them do their jobs more efficiently. For example, before escalating a conversation to an agent, a chatbot can collect all the relevant information about the customer.
This way, the agent will have all the information they need beforehand and would not have to ask a lot of questions from the customer. Chatbots can also handle up to 80% of repetitive queries single-handedly, allowing agents to focus on more critical customer issues.
9. Offers deeper insights into customer behavior
Facebook chatbots, while conversing with users, keep systematic records of their data in real time. You can use this data to learn more about your customers, their problems, and their requirements.
Chatbots can also help with ad distribution, which is beneficial if you utilize Facebook ads for your business. The more client data your company has, the better it can tune its operations.
10. Shortens your customer journeys
Facebook chatbots make it possible for customers to inquire and buy in one smooth conversation. Customers can use Facebook bots to learn more about a company’s product or service, and also make payments, and complete their purchase right from the chat interface.
This saves customer effort as they don’t have to navigate through different channels and makes sure goal completions happen sooner.
How to build a Facebook messenger chatbot?
The first and most crucial step in deploying a Facebook chatbot is to find the right service provider. With a next-gen chatbot building platform like Yellow.ai, you can build a chatbot in under 10 clicks and the best part is, there is no coding required!
So, to create a Facebook messenger chatbot, sign up with Yellow.ai for free. Now, go to our bot-building platform and use our pre-built marketplace templates, integrations, and nodes to process your bot.
Now that the framework is ready, you can design conversation flows. You can also power your bot with multilingual and omnichannel capabilities, and deploy it to 35+ channels, including Facebook, with a single click. Just make sure you already have a Facebook page connected to your Facebook account to deploy the bot on messenger.
This is how easy it is to build, integrate and deploy a bot with Yellow.ai. Our bots start delivering from the get-go with one of the best speed-to-market value realizations in the industry. To know more about how you can create your first AI-powered messenger bot, get in touch with our experts.
