Complete guide on how to create effective Facebook Chatbot 2020

I am sure the Facebook Messenger Bot or the Facebook Chatbot are no longer strange terms for today’s modern online community.

Almost every business is taking advantage of Chatbot’s features to serve customer needs as well as simplify business.

However, the Facebook chatbot does not replace all tasks, but actually it is only a tool to support some jobs becoming easier and more convenient.

In this article, I will introduce to you the concept and benefits of chatbot for businesses and how to create chatbot effectively.

Facebook Chatbot Know-How:

1. What is Facebook Chatbot?

Basically, chatbot is an automated messaging software that uses AI (artificial intelligence) to chat with humans. Bots are pre-programmed to understand questions, provide answers and perform certain tasks.

For customers, chatbots are considered a time-saving, friendly and accessible method.

Instead of having to open apps, make phone calls, run searches or download websites. Now thanks to chatbots, customers only need to type messages and chat like normal friends.

In fact, chatbots have appeared in many different forms in the past, and now, they start to appear more commonly on webpages, applications and other social media, depending on users’ wishes.

The Facebook Messenger bot is a chatbot displayed in Facebook Messenger, which takes care of and responds to customer needs quickly and conveniently.

Moreover, chatbot also has the ability to scale up Facebook Messenger strategies, helping businesses save significant marketing costs.

As of the 2018 F8 conference, Facebook has 300,000 active Messenger bots, more than 3 times the number of years ago.

2. Benefits of Chatbot Facebook for businesses

There are two reasons why businesses should use the Facebook Messenger bot.

First, Facebook chatbot helps minimize communication barriers between you and your potential customers.

According to recent statistics, Facebook Messenger is the third most used application in the world, used by 68% of app users. Moreover, many of them believe that texting is the second-best way to interact with a business

On average, more than 2 billion messages are sent to businesses every month through Facebook Messenger.

In a stark contrast, with the mobile app market, in just over 90 days, more than 71% of users removed an app from their phone.

This shows that, obviously, building a Facebook Messenger bot is much cheaper and more beneficial than setting up a mobile application.

The second advantage is that Facebook Messenger bot is not highly competitive, always expanding for businesses in any field. The proof is that while Facebook has 6 million advertisers, the number of chatbots is only about 300,000.

Chatbots can also help you bypass inbox competition when email marketing click rates have not been improved over the years (only 30% of emails are opened).

Advantages of Facebook Messenger chatbot:

1. Direct access to potential customers

Headliner Labs found that the percentage of users who opened Facebook Messenger was 3.5 times higher than email. And because customers can respond to messages immediately (usually by pressing a pre-programmed CTA button), they will be easier to move down to your marketing channel.

On top of that, Facebook Messenger is also included in sponsored ads, which can be sent to anyone who has previously contacted your Page.

That is, you already have a list of subscribers, now you just combine running ads in parallel with your chatbot to target customers who are intending to buy.

2. Save time and money for customer care

Today’s customers demand a high level of customer service from businesses. They always want to be served 24/7 quickly, especially in the process of messaging through Messenger.

Another obstacle customers, for many reasons, are in the habit of asking the same questions over and over.

With the above cases, you should use Facebook chatbot now and always.

This will be the ultimate help for you to automatically respond to customer comments, messages, even track deliveries, check return policies or make appointments with partners and customers. Meanwhile, you can both save the cost of hiring customer care staff, while saving time focused on other more important tasks.

3. Exactly identifying your potential customers

When your bot reaches and welcomes potential customers, it can identify their needs by asking basic questions, such as: what is your budget, etc.

From there, the bots will collect answers and direct the customers who have high purchasing potential to the sales team for them to carry out the buying and selling process.

4. Processing e-commerce transactions

With the right response scenario, the Facebook bot can also sell.

Specifically, they help handle e-commerce orders neatly and quickly. In addition, thanks to chatbots, new users turn their attention to the business website, so the rate of page surfing also increases.

5. Interact with customers

Bots have the ability to store information to help you use it for future marketing campaigns.

Instead of paying for a series of ads, Facebook Messenger bots can reach individual customers, providing them with the right content at the right place, at the right time.

In addition, the bot also has the task of reminding visitors to continue the buying and selling process with unfinished shopping carts.

III. How do businesses use Facebook Messenger bots?

Each business will have its own way of using chatbots depending on the business line and the question and answer scenario for bots.

These can be common customer service questions, like tracking deliveries and making appointments; remind customers of old unfinished shopping carts, suggest a product or service that users may need, even tell jokes, etc.

Facebook chatbot examples you can learn to apply to your own business:

1. Marriott Rewards

Marriott is the pioneer in using chatbots because they are well known for their outstanding customer service.

They created the first Facebook Messenger chatbot in 2016 to help guests link their Marriott accounts to rewards from the Starwood Group after the two companies merged.

The chatbot was so widely used that Marriott later turned it into a booking bot: customers tell their date and city, then the bot will provide some suggestions about the hotel that are closest to surnames.

This bot also has the task of highlighting content from Marriott magazines, tourists, and integrating useful local information and news for upcoming visits.

Not to mention last year, Marriott created a career chatbot aimed at young people who are looking for work to help them find suitable jobs in the right city and also provide information about values ​​and the history of Marriott.

This is a meaningful job from a large corporation that shows how great they are to treat their employees and customers.

2. Sephora

Sephora allows shoppers to redeem free items at their stores, and the Sephora chatbot used has removed five steps from the ordering process.

The application of chatbots led to an 11% higher order rate.

3. Bud Light

During the 2017 national rugby season in the United States, Bud Light promoted cans of branded team cans by creating a facebook chatbot that could be ordered and delivered within one hours on contest days.

The interesting point here is that Bud Light has created a rhythmic combination of personalization (customers can choose their favorite team), local links (targeting by geographic location allows the bot to choose best distribution partner in each region) and timeliness (bot reminds users to place an order every day the competition takes place.)

As a result, through chatbot, the customer participation rate is up to 83%.

This is an impressive number!

4. Whole Foods

This bot acts as an extension of Whole Food’s content marketing campaign, by acting as a guide to discover new recipes based on available ingredients.

Bots can also help you narrow down your ideas by food classification or dietary restrictions.

5. UNICEF

The UNICEF reporting bot was built to collect ideas and data from young people around the world on important issues in society, with the goal of amplifying their voices to make a difference on practical policy. The bot has attracted over 2 million registered users.

Why businesses use Facebook Chatbot:

Should your business use Chatbot Facebook?

Building a bot for Facebook Messenger is like building a marketing campaign, you need a certain amount of resources – mainly the time and expertise of employees. However, the results may not be as expected.

In order to know if the Facebook Messenger Bot will benefit your business, the sincere advice is to clearly identify the cases where chatbot will be used.

One of the biggest reasons many companies make the mistake of building mobile applications for their businesses is because they consider this is simply another version of the company’s website.

They did not spend time researching through mobile applications, customers wished to interact with businesses in any form, how to link together conveniently.

To avoid the same situation with the facebook messenger bot, make sure you are prepared to use chatbots and operate them from the perspective of your customers or users, not from the company’s perspective.

Here are a few examples of use cases you might consider for the Facebook Messenger bot:

1. Nurturing potential customers

Are you having trouble moving your potential customers from a part of the buying journey to the next stages?

Then, use chatbot to nurture the interest of customers after first exploring the company website or fanpage content and be interested to come back to learn more.

2. Share basic information

Typically, the introductory information section is considered the core of a website, including all the resources and information that customers will need to properly understand and solve products or services that are provided by the company.

In case the basic information is too cumbersome or difficult to find, Facebook Messenger Bot will be an effective solution to help explain more thoroughly the customer’s questions.

3. Diversifying product or service lines

If the customer support team has too many requests to handle, even beyond their control, then the company should set up more live chat bots to help staff balance many questions at once.

4. Share questions between customer care staff together

In the event that the customer service staff needs to share questions to support the service process more effectively, the Facebook Messenger bot has the ability to aggregate and find employees to solve problems in accordance with their ability.

5. Retaining e-commerce buyers during checkout

You have probably heard the phrase “abandoned cart” on e-commerce websites. Those are unfinished shopping carts, not yet reached the payment step

The bottom line here is that we need to find ways to keep shoppers in trouble during the checkout process.

Do your customers have a lot of activity on Facebook?

This question is often considered by business as Facebook as a normal social networking platform, not too necessary for business, quickly removed.

But I find that with such companies, they should begin to reconsider the marketing potential of Facebook for business needs.

Conversely, if your customers use Facebook regularly every day, they will probably choose Messenger as the main communication tool, even more than using Facebook.

Today, the use of messaging apps is showing signs of growth that surpasses the use of social networking systems.

At that time, your task is to make sure you can support requests from those applications, especially with Facebook Messenger.

In automating chatbot, you need to take time to do the following three important things:

1. Advertising chatbot
2. Follow up and try to solve any questions that your bot can’t answer
3. Maintain the customer experience tabs you have for the bot

How to install Facebookchatbot:

1. How does Facebook chatbot work?

One of the questions we get the most is how does a chatbot work?

This is understandable because advances in chatbot technology are constantly changing day by day and do not have any limits.

In fact, there are three core types of chatbots that most consumers are very fond of. Each type has different ways of operation:

2. How “Chatbots based on rules” works

The chatbot software is based on rules that perform predefined actions based on pre-set playbooks on the back of the user interface.

Like a virtual assistant, the rules-based chatbot technology depends on click actions, such as “Yes” or “No”, or by recognizing a specific keyword or keyword group.

For example, you can set up a chatbot to answer if someone chooses “red” or “blue”, but if they answer “I like a pair of red shoes” then the keyword of the item to target here is “red shoes”.

Here is a specific example of how “rule-based chatbot” works:

3. How does Chatbot AI work (artificial intelligence)?

Chatbot AI uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to understand sentence structure, then processes information and gradually becomes more professional in answering questions.

Instead of relying on a human-designed scenario, chatbot AIs first need to understand what your question is:

Then, once they understand your intentions, they will give an answer that they deem most appropriate based on existing data.

Over time and by observing right and wrong answers, the machine will better understand what the correct answer is (similar to the way Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa works).

This is why AI chatbots, though convenient, are not always suitable for everyone because they need training time and often require more effort to get started.

However, once you have a good understanding of your business, they can exert an incredibly powerful effect.

We often see the application of AI chatbots for businesses, however, there are exceptions such as e-commerce and other large volume industries that require larger scale.

4. How Live Chat works

Live Chat is a form of communication technology located on a company’s website or product and operates in the form of a pop-up window that sends automatic messages to customers.

Live Chat software has some features built in so that online chats coincide with real time.

That is, when a customer wants to chat with a company employee and at the same time when the staff is also online, Live Chat will immediately connect with any employees to help customers solve the problem.

The differences between Chatbots, AI chatbots and Live Chat can be summarized through the following picture:

   VI. Top 3 most popular chatbot tools today

After the question of how Facebook Chatbot works, the issue of selecting the bot platform that best suits the needs of each business is the next concern that needs to be considered.

According to my research over the years, I suggest you the top 3 free platforms to help create Chatbot on Facebook Messenger in the simplest and fastest way, including Harafunnel, Chatfuel and ManyChat.

Characteristics of each Facebook Chatbot tool:

1. Harafunnel

Developed by Haravan, Chatbot Harafunnel plays the role of caring and interacting 24/7 with customers that businesses have previously accessed through sales channels right on Facebook Messenger.

As of June 2018, more than 15,000 businesses and brands use Harafunnel, with more than 35,000 Facebook Messenger Bots created.

Advantages that make Harafunnel stand out:

• Vietnamese interface
• All free
• Create a vending funnel and take care of potential customers
• Enthusiastic support team throughout 24/7
• Manage comments and messages effectively
• There are various tools and support features

2. Chatfuel

If you are looking for a reputable Chatbot platform, Chatfunnel would be the perfect choice with a unit serving more than 145 million users worldwide, including 200,000 chatbots created (as of June 2018).

The factors that create the highlight for Chatfuel include:

• Support more than 50 languages ​​worldwide
• All free
• Easy bot setup with blocks, no code required
• Easily connect to other social networks and services such as Fanpage, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, … with plugins
• Integrating all kinds of APIs into the same chatbot, helping developers easily upgrade and improve your chatbot
• Diverse templates for your reference

3. ManyChat

Only for chatbot platforms, ManyChat is considered a formidable opponent of Chatfuel, in terms of features and the level of technology development.

The advantages of ManyChat’s competitiveness that Chatfunnel and other platforms and users need to consider:

• Completely free and requires no code
• Easy to install on Facebook Fanpage without creating an app or waiting for approval
• Create unlimited chatbots
• Quickly script chatbots and install other handy options

Step by step guide to creating and using chatbot effectively

The Facebook Messenger bot not only actively supports the business and communication with customers but also helps to save significant costs.

Therefore, there is no reason you would overlook such a powerful assistant, right?

Understanding this desire, right in this next section, we will guide you in detail step by step creating and using effective chatbots:

1. Define goals and use cases of Chatbot

With so many diverse use cases, it is really hard to pick the best ones. Accordingly, setting operational goals for chatbots also becomes more difficult.

Instead, why not try doing the opposite, identifying the goal first, and then starting to selectively use it later?

First, think about what your goal is: to solve customer problems? Promote a new product? Or create potential customers?

To know the exact direction, discuss further with the media team and the website management team.

If the media team reports that they can’t keep up with the number of messages on social networking sites, take advantage of the bots to help them manage them.

If the website management team notices a sudden drop in conversion rates, do not worry, the chatbot will help improve this problem right away.

In any case, do not forget everything is all about building the best customer experience.

2. Select the appropriate platform to use

Depending on the types of social networks and information channels users choose, the content of chatbot conversations will be built to suit the best.

3 common options you should consider installing chatbot, including:

• Company website
• Facebook Messenger
• Direct messages on Twitter

First, about the company website, the website homepage visitors are likely to already know or learn about the product or service you offer.

In contrast, the visitor to one of the blog posts displayed on the website seems to know you.

Based on that, install and adjust the active bot corresponding to each page.

Similar to social networking systems, because demographics are different platforms, the question for Facebook users will not be applicable to Twitter visitors.

Refer to the social media demographics article to better understand these differences.

In general, regardless of the platform, your task is to collect as much information about potential customers as possible, then use them for the next step.

3. Building content strategy

After choosing the desired platform, you start creating content to attract customers during the chatbot interaction process.

First, let’s start with the FAQs model (frequently asked questions), which is a question that customers can ask your chatbot.

This way you can easily build a stream of questions as well as the most logical answer for the entire conversation.

If you are unsure about frequently asked questions, try discussing more with teams that regularly interact with customers to come up with the most accurate content samples:

• Customer care team: these are the people who have the most opportunity to talk with customers in the company, so it will not be difficult to consult their customers about the trend of asking customers questions.
• Team Sales: have a mission to reach potential customers, so they will have very clear questions that can convert from users to real customers for the company.
• Team Marketing: Marketing team mainly works with customers in the media more than anyone else, so they understand the questions to encourage users to actively interact with businesses on the website as well as social networking sites.
• Quora: Quora is a website that summarizes business questions. You can refer to the source from this page to apply to your chatbot.

In addition, instead of creating new content, why not try to take advantage of your most popular content articles and improve them so that you can experiment with chatbots and contribute to the marketing campaign?

4. Create your own voice and personality for the Bot

It sounds a bit strange, right? But this is absolutely true!

Imagine if your bot is cloned, has a unique personality, and is capable of giving an interesting user experience, what will be the result?

It will not make customers much more satisfied. Moreover, the ability to closely connect with the brand image of the business in the long run.

You can even give a unique name to the chatbot, creating friendliness and transparency with customers.

To do that, refer to the ideas of the team copywriting to ensure the principle of operation as well as the common voice for chatbot.

5. Create welcome message

Welcome messages are extremely important to attract users and get them to respond to your bot.

Ideally, the best welcome messages often have to meet the following three criteria: attractive, lead to customer expectations and follow the trend of asking questions.

• Attractive users

The chatbot is automatically installed, but you should avoid letting it work like a robot.

As I mentioned above, make Messenger bots more vivid, have names, have unique characteristics and bring the most comfortable experience for users.

It is not only because of the chatbot’s own image but also the representation of the business brand’s voice.

• Leading to customer expectations

First, let customers know they are chatting with the bot so they understand the conversation limits.

Then, from chatbot to customers know how and when to be able to communicate and communicate with a real person.

• Make a question

Once you have successfully connected with your prospect, ask them questions that help extend the conversation.

Use the key questions you have found in step 3 to ensure you meet customer needs.

Here is an example of how the bot greets the user with a cheerful waving gif to start the conversation:

The bot then mentioned that it was a private chat room and persuaded users to answer the question.

6. Draw a Customer Journey diagram

After the introductory question, start mapping the conversation journey with customers with a professional chat tool like Sprout Social or if you are new to chatbots, you can experiment with Google Drawings like

Below is an example of how a restaurant communicates basic information (in order) to customers such as operating hours, special offers and loyalty programs through a questionnaire for chatbot:

7. Create the best answer for each question

For each question you created in step 3, find the best answer that will please your users.

You can even create multiple answers to the same question to satisfy the user needs.

8. Build all conversation trees

Now, with every question you ask and every answer available to users, keep building the conversation for as long as possible.

At the same time, make sure all conversations fully meet the needs of customers to lead customers to the ultimate goal of direct contact with the representative of the company.

In case of any errors at any stage, you can check the whole operation of the chatbot through Sprout’s Bot Builder.

9. Adding some visual components

To create more engaging messages for users, you can bring to the conversation some visual components, like: emoticons, images or animated GIFs, or even just waving hello!

The visual aspect not only highlights the bot personality, but also helps reinforce the messages you send and increases conversation conversion rates.

The example above shows you just a small light bulb icon makes the conversation much lively.

10. Lead the ultimate target customer through call-to-action buttons

Once the user has answered all your questions and is ready to proceed to the next step, a call-to-action button will help complete the process perfectly, and achieve the goal set from the beginning.

The call-to-action button is responsible for directing consumers to a specific product catalog or page on your website, or calling users to share their experience with friends on social networks and above all Take them directly to the purchase payment page.

Think carefully about the goals you want your customers to go after pressing the call-to-action button.

This is important because the interaction with the brand is completely automated from the bot without any human support, but has the potential to bring many useful values.

11. Check all conversations

The customer itinerary does not always work smoothly. Mistakes or worse are annoying, disappointing customers is absolutely possible.

However, you can still avoid or minimize these bad situations by carefully examining each type of dialogue.

Most chatbot platforms have a live preview function, so you can test all the steps without having to test first.

12. Turn on the activity and conduct chatbot tracking

Once you have completed all the steps above, it is time to start experimenting with your first chatbot!

Make sure you follow the user throughout their interactions with your bot, avoiding any disruptions at any stage or unexpected problems. I believe these 12 creation steps will help you to accompany and capture customer psychology better to serve your business.

Conclusion

Obviously, chatbots are not simply an alternative messaging tool for humans but they understand more deeply, this is considered a powerful assistant in interacting as well as maintaining sustainable relationships with customers.

Moreover, Chatbot also helps save costs and efforts significantly, enabling businesses to focus on other more important jobs.

I hope this article has gathered all the knowledge I need to know about the Facebook Messenger bot. From there, you know how to apply it effectively to your business.

If you have not used Facebook, you should give it a try today and share your thoughts with us!

Good luck to you!