May 29, 2019 •Claire Archer-Davis
According to a survey by Oracle, 80% of businesses plan to have a chatbot in place by 2020, so why not get to grips with the technology ahead of time? A chatbot is basically automated messaging software used by artificial intelligence to have a conversation with a person. You pre-program the bot with responses to questions and tasks that it can carry out, and then you let it do its thing. Whether it’s making a phone call, searching the internet or messaging an associate, bots can do all of the tasks you don’t have time for (or just don’t want to) and Facebook Messenger is where thousands of them live; in fact, there are over 300,000 active messaging bots on Facebook right now.
Think about it, using a Facebook Messaging bot is a lot cheaper, quicker and easier than employing a team and building a mobile app – it just makes sense to use Facebook’s already well-maintained messaging platform for your business conversations and here are a few other reasons why you should consider Facebook Messenger chatbots as part of your social media strategy in the future:
- Find Leads
Depending on how you set it up, you can pre-program your bot to greet potential customers with a few choice questions which can in turn quickly find you those who may be serious contenders for using your product or service. Once you’ve used the bots to weed out those who aren’t really all that interested, the real potential customers can be redirected to your human employees who can take over from there, thus saving you time and money.
- Save Money On Customer Service
Providing good customer service is one of the most important things a company can do, but it is often time consuming and expensive paying employees to basically answer the same set of questions and queries over and over again. This is where bots come in; they’re available 24/7, can be set up to answer those annoying but important questions that people often have and they allow your workforce to focus on the really important stuff instead.
- Re-engage Potential Customers
Bots are a great way to reach out to customers who haven’t interreacting with you or used your services in a while. An un-obtrusive and friendly way of remind customers that they still haven’t bought those sunglasses they added to their cart two days ago, or that there’s a discount code they could use that’s running out soon, chatbots are definitely the future when it comes to menial tasks like this.