Facebook Messenger chatbots still seem like a futuristic innovation. But they're not. Chatbots are here to stay, with a large number of brands and companies building one and executing it extremely well.
Investing time and money in chatbots has brought great results for those companies in terms of audience engagement, customer service, customer experience and more. Here are ways in which a chatbot can help your business:
First-mover advantage
While current chatbots are bringing existing aspects of the brand's interaction with their audience to a new interface, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Chatbots still being a relatively new technology, there is bound to be further development and innovation. The sooner you get onto this bandwagon, the easier it will be for your teams to keep up with the technology and execute better, leading to better impact.
It's like what happened with social networks — after the skyrocketing success of Facebook, everyone started building social networks, yet it was too late. So don't lag behind.
Messaging apps on the rise
Think about how people have been communicating digitally today — teams use Slack or Skype internally, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp for communicating with everyone else, etc. These apps have offered personalization and taken our social interactions to a whole new level.
A chatbot can be built into any major chat product like Facebook Messenger or Slack. This is where people are really spending time, and you'll probably want to be where your users are.
Chatbots are more human
Basically, there are two types of chatbots — unintelligent ones that act using predefined conversation flows written by people (semi-AI) and intelligent AI chatbots that use machine learning.
No matter which kind of bot you build, it will be more personal and human than your usual app. You can fill it with your personality, your brand's identity, make it speak to your users like you would, or change its message depending on the input from the user.
Simpler interface, better interaction
Chatbots are usually text-driven, with images and unified widgets, which makes it easy for a business/brand to develop and for a user to start interacting with a bot. Just think of the messenger app you're using — it's as simple as it can possibly be, and that's exactly why we like these things so much.
Chatbots are great for keeping users engaged on the platform longer and keeping the content flowing by starting and maintaining the conversation. They make it simple, natural and fun for the consumer to engage with brands without feeling like it's an advertisement or marketing.
Great for pushing out content
It will have a great impact on customer service, allowing businesses to respond faster to consumers, enhancing each encounter with your brand. Whether using an RSS feed, images or news, it will be relatively easy to distribute content within Messenger. With a bit of personalization and some questions, brands will be able to deliver targeted content based on a user's feedback.
Quick and cheap to develop
There are a variety of bot templates, developed by Facebook, Microsoft and other IT giants you can use. You just integrate it with a messenger platform to your taste and needs, tweak some features, and the bot is ready. Building a basic chatbot is fast and as a result, inexpensive.
Chatbots will play a huge role in how consumers communicate with brands. As a marketer, it's vital to stay abreast of these trends to ensure your business is ready to take advantage of such innovations and trends to have the maximum impact on customer engagement, customer experience and thus, sales.
