What is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is an artificial intelligence (AI) software that can simulate a conversation or a chat with a user through messaging and mobile apps or websites through the mobile phone. Chatbots can be found in messaging apps on smartphones for personal use or on company websites for business. An optimized chatbot can be a great addition to a company’s website as it can help in boosting your conversion rates. Facebook Messenger has brought chatbots further into the spotlight due to the fact that Facebook has successfully made it possible to integrate chatbots into it's platform. Often described as one of the most advanced form of interaction between humans and machines, the chatbot has definitely evolved in technology over the years.
Why using Facebook Messenger Chatbots will help boost your business:
Chatbot applications streamline interactions between people and services, which in turn, enhances the customer experience. At the same time, they offer companies new opportunities to improve the customer's engagement process and operational efficiency by reducing the typical cost of customer service.
There are two major advantages to using a Facebook Messenger bot.
1. There is a low barrier to entry for both you and your target audience. Used by 68 percent of app users, this makes Facebook Messenger the third most-used app in the world. And it’s not just for group chats among friends and family. People exchange 2 billion messages regarding business over Facebook Messenger every month.
2. Building a Facebook Messenger bot is much cheaper than building a mobile app if you want to communicate with your customers be it for queries about your services/products or company contact information. The field is still open to exploration, hence making this an advantage. Even though Facebook has 6 million advertisers, there are only 300,000 chatbots. That’s a lot less competition.
What are the Benefits of a Messenger chatbot?
Chatbots have potential.
The modern chatbot is still young technology despite it greatly increasing in usage. With the continued development of AI, the potential for bots in business and personal lives is unlimited with so much more room to explore.
They can be easy to build.
It depends on what you want to attain, of course, but you can design a simple chatbot based on the Facebook Messenger without any programming experience.
Chatbots emphasize the company's brand and image.
The chatbot represents the company when it’s communicating with the customer, so, from a marketing point of view, it is an ideal embodiment of building your brand.
They offer straightforward services.
A well-optimized chatbot communicates only the essentials and does not overwhelm the user. Chatbots automate processes. Bots are able to take on human work for generally communicating or basic analytic tasks.
Which chatbot application is right for you?
There are different approaches and tools that you can use to develop a chatbot. Depending on what you'd want to address, some chatbot technologies are more applicable than others. The combination of different AI forms such as natural language processing, machine learning and semantic understanding could also be the most effective choice so as to attain the required and desired results.
Conclusion
The difficulty of creating a chatbot is not within the implementation but however, in the design itself. You would first need to figure out what you aim to use the chatbot for as well as what the purpose of a single function will be before moving on to planning the conversation in detail. Not only do you have to control the conversation, you also have to keep an eye on what happens when someone leaves it. With a little patience and some basic tools, you'll be on your way to setting up your very own chatbot to boost your business.