/ The Facebook bot: what is it and why does it work?
Alexander Wijninga
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4 min
Despite channels such as fast-growing TikTok, hugely popular YouTube and ever-expanding Instagram, Facebook refuses to be beaten. Facebook is still the most used social media channel in the Netherlands, and therefore still of interest to businesses. The Facebook bot was consequently no surprising development. What the Facebook chatbot is exactly, and how the bot can be profitable for your company, you can read in this article.
A Facebook bot is a chatbot that you deploy in the Facebook Messenger chat. Through this software your bot communicates with your customers. By mapping out the frequently asked questions and teaching them to your chatbot, the bot can respond to customers. By filling in conversations in advance and running practice conversations, you teach the bot to respond to the customer in the right way. On top of that there is software that makes the bot artificially intelligent, which lets it learn to recognise different question variations too. That way the bot can also give a fitting answer when the question is phrased differently.
Why do companies choose a Facebook bot? There are various benefits attached to it that let your customer service department work more efficiently. We have lined up all the benefits below.
When you use a Facebook bot, you make sure your customer gets a response 24/7. It is a digital colleague that works on public holidays too, gives an answer at lightning speed at any minute of the night and never takes a day off. Should a customer be struggling with a question and want an answer straight away, you prevent them from changing their mind or going to look at a competitor.
Because many Dutch people have a Facebook account, there is a good chance your target audience knows their way around this channel too. When the customer can quickly send you a message via this channel, that is much easier. Because the customer gets a notification when they receive a reply, some audiences find this handier than live chat on a website, for example.
Once the customer has asked the bot a question, you can set the chatbot up to request a few crucial details from the customer. Think of name, email address, telephone number, and so on. You can also choose to have the bot send brochures. This way you make it easier for your sales and marketing team to get in contact with leads.
When the bot does not understand something, it can pass the question on to a member of your customer service team automatically. This way all the frequently asked questions are answered automatically, and your customer service staff pick up all the questions that are somewhat more complex. That gives your customer a fast and clear answer.
How do our customers implement the Facebook bot? One of our customers, Droginet, has implemented the Facebook bot for several online chemists, such as Koopjesdrogisterij.nl. They implemented a chatbot on Facebook Messenger, so that customers can now ask questions there. The questions are varied: the status of orders, searching for products, paying afterwards, deliveries abroad.
The word ‘bot’ gives many people the impression that this is quite a technical challenge, but it does not have to be. You can also program a Facebook bot yourself. When you use a chatbot platform, the technical challenge has already been solved for you. Watermelon is one such solution. With it you build a chatbot in five simple steps, without any technical knowledge being involved. Note:
Once you are logged in to the chatbot platform, you add your chatbot's knowledge yourself. Which questions does your customer service receive regularly? What does the customer run into? You enter all these questions and answers into the platform. You can also instruct the bot to request information itself. Think of a name or an email address.
Once all your chatbot's knowledge is in the platform, you train your bot at the push of a button. At that moment all the knowledge you added becomes part of the database: the chatbot's brain.
Once the chatbot has been trained, it is time to put the bot to the test! Test the chatbot thoroughly: call in colleagues, family and friends to grill the chatbot. That way you get all the teething problems out of the bot before it is introduced to the wider public.
Once the bot has been built, trained and tested, it is ready for the digital world! You can now connect the bot to various channels, including Facebook Messenger. You start the Facebook integration from the Watermelon platform, after which Facebook handles the last part in a few simple steps. After that your chatbot is standing by on Facebook Messenger for the online storm of enquiries!
The real work only really begins after going live. Optimising the chatbot makes the bot even smarter, and lets it answer even more questions automatically. This will take a bit more time investment at the start, but in the long term it will actually save time and produce higher customer satisfaction.
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