Why you need to build a messenger bot for your business right now

Considering the buzz App Ecosystem created and its steady evolution since then, people have begun to approach brands via messaging platforms. According to Twilio global research- 66% of people prefer to talk to brands on messaging platforms.

Now, giving the task of customer service, which requires creating a ‘human’ connection – to a chatbot sounds risky- “what if it responds incorrectly??”. Businesses are worried that implementing chatbot to talk to their customers can ruin the brand reputation.

Thing is though, they do not have to worry about that. Chatbot developers have already eliminated most of those worries. A bot will always say what is written in the script.

Chatbot technology is evolving and Facebook is one of the crucial players in the messaging services. It is investing time and effort to make the conversation experience in between a chatbot and human (user) more effectively and seamless.

If you want to be ahead of the game, enhance your user experience across social networking websites like Facebook, chatbots are the answer and here is why.

First, what is a chatbot and what do they do?

Generally speaking, a “bot” is any software that does an automated task, however, what we are interested in are the type of bots that live in chat platforms- making them “chatbots”.

Chatbots offer a lot of possibilities. One definition of a chatbot is customer support chatbot. But there is so much more to it than that.

For example, it can collect vital information on your customers (via surveys, conversations) and establish a personalized relationship where they engage the customer with one-to-one meaningful conversations. Over time, this can increase customer’s satisfaction with the service, as well as loyalty- earning you brownie points in conversion rates and sales.

The more helpful the chatbot is, the faster it will engage with the customer and gain their trust and loyalty towards the business. Chatbots are based on Artificial Intelligence technology use machine learning (a subset of AI) to understand customer needs.

Summing up, chatbots may understand your customers better than a human could- which is very beneficial for the business.

Chatbot drives customer engagement

Facebook states “2 billion messages are sent between people and businesses monthly”. That’s an incredible amount. As many companies do, we’d venture a guess that your company receives a lot of messages too.

Herein lies the problem. Customers expect good customer service on social media- so naturally, they expect a good timely response to their query.

To manage that you need chatbots. With chatbots you can- a. Respond quickly to customer’s questions b. Resolve custom problems c. Give your customers detailed, satisfactory answers rapidly.

More importantly, Facebook’s users are interacting more and more with bots to avoid human interaction and gets direct answers. Plus, stats confirm that Facebook Messenger has 1.2 billion active users per month. This all proves that the market of chatbots is booming.

User engagement is the key. If you are a business operating in the US, it will take you half a day to respond to a customer in India. Since the business, as well as chatbots, are “always-on”- immediate response is possible.

Sarah Gower, managing editor at Adidas explains how knowing their customers helped them engage their users–

“Our target consumers are early adopters of social innovation so a chatbot is a perfect vehicle for us to communicate with them. The Adidas women’s chatbot is an extension of the physical space, which also helps to ensure that all information within it is timely and relevant.”

In fact, Adidas, in just two weeks alone experienced registration of more than 2000 people and 80% repeat use. Retention rate after just one week was 60%- which the brand claims are far more than what could have been achieved with an app.

Bots lead to a higher conversion rate

Chatbots can contribute significantly to higher conversion rates. Imagine you have a sale that you want people to talk about. Normally, you would run an email campaign and pay for a FB ad. These methods are fine, but FB ads generally need a lot of exhaustive and costly split testing and email open rates are less than optimal least to say.

Stats confirm that email open rates in the UK (across the industries) were 24.79% and CTC rates 4.19%. Not bad- but there is a way to improve both the KPIs.

Here is where Chatbots come in. They have an open rate of 98%. In fact, Just Eat, the UK based online food order and delivery service experienced a 266% increase in conversion rate when they started using chatbots. The technology encouraged repeat orders- 13.5% and improved awareness of the brand’s 27600+ partner restaurants.

Ben Carter, UK marketing director at Just Eat explained the appeal of the bot – “We have tapped into is a real insight that people are passionate and emotional about food but they like to get food inspiration and understand what food is available in their area… (The chatbot is) a key part of our armory to engage with our customers on a daily basis”.

In short – if you are having a sale or any big announcement for that matter- the best thing to do is chatbot implementation on Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype, Slack, and other popular messaging services.

Chatbots onboarding for increasing retention rates

The first step to increasing chatbot retention is chatbot onboarding. The onboarding is essential because it is basically the first impression of your chatbot with a new user. Not only does it need to teach the user how to use the bot but it must also ideally demonstrate why the chatbot is worth their time. If the chatbot doesn’t adequately manage to fulfill customer expectations up-front- the retention rate will inevitably plummet.

The chatbot must not put pressure on the user to do much work – they must walk the user through the process to demonstrate the product value. It must be optimized to reduce friction and anticipate the user’s laziness.

For keeping the chatbot interactive, making the conversation as personalized as possible is also important. They must be conversational, and when needed entertaining as well.

Furthermore, the key to maintaining retention rate is keeping track of old users as well as new users when harnessing chatbot analytics – to make sure all targeted groups are paid attention. Thus, when adopting a chatbot, it is necessary to keep the user’s journey in mind from the start right to the end.

Is Chatbot part of your marketing strategy?

Chatbot marketing has come a long way since Facebook Messenger launched in 2010. Now with chatbots businesses can not only use them for advertisement, but also for automatically responding to customer inquiries, recommend products, announcing sales, discounts, etc.

Microsoft AI Chatbot on Messenger, Skype & Slack: How a stock simulation platform achieved higher customer engagement and unified experience

The app novelty has worn off- it is exhaustive and going to different websites and combing through lists every time you need to find your stock information, sucks.

Enter, the chatbot – “Professor’.

Researchbytes, promoter of brand Moneypot.in, in partnership with Intelegain Technologies, a Mumbai based technology solutions created the Artificial Intelligence chatbot ‘Professor” which assists users of the Money pot.in (the stock trading simulation platform) to understand the nuances of trading on the said platform.

It is intended to help novice traders to learn stock trading, therefore it is incorporated with real-time stock information.

Although the Professor was intended to be only a virtual assistant to Money pot users, the project bloomed into an independent trading bot which can be integrated with any of the popular messaging services you use (Skype, Slack, etc.) to get a unified stock trading experience.

This Chatbot has proved to be successful in three big ways –

Personalization drives engagement.

The ‘Professor’ is designed to segment and engage customers throughout the entire conversation. As the first action that users take is that of free-entry text, which provides a clear idea of what it is; lowers the initial communication friction, present in erstwhile options.

From the very beginning the intent is help-related and in a form of casual text entry, so “what is the stock price of Infosys today” is much simple and user-centric approach.

Simple Workflow eliminates complexity

The Professor is developed to provide a shorter and simpler workflow. Trading websites are dime a dozen, but they all offer a very complex view of the trading market, which a novice may not be able to understand. Professor offers a way for beginners to learn about stock trading through a simple interactive method.

Continuing in the same vein, its simplicity is the prime reason for Professor being the go-to solution for academic institutions, corporate and individual apprentice investors to use, while trading on Money pot- the stock trading simulation platform used for training purposes.

AI and human intelligence combination – the master tool

The Professor is the perfect amalgamation of an automated trading system and a human trader. It allows minimization of emotions throughout the trading process and presents you with an unemotional view of the markets. However, unlike the automated trading system, the user acts as the final decision maker, having the final say.

What will it become?

The Professor is in its initial stage and is therefore currently trained to show investors only the real-time stock prices of diverse companies they are interested to invest in or those they have invested. Professor creators, however, explain that the roadmap to train the bot to allow portfolio management, asset allocation, stock intelligence, information and trading (buying/selling stocks) is already underway.

In short, it’s a work-in-progress solution.

Author Bio –

Nikita Deshpande is a Content Developer at Intelegain Technologies, a software development company based in Mumbai, India. As a thought leader, she likes to pen down her thoughts on various subjects including Enterprise Cloud Solutions, App Development, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and more in blogs and articles.