How to Build a Great Chatbot: Top 5 Functionality Features
My team of chatbot builders has been working on chatbot development for numerous clients for almost 2 years keeping all bots up-to-date and adding up custom integrations for thousands of active users.
There are several features that I consider a big advantage to have in a chatbot and would like to share them with you. If you like them, feel free to implement the same in your own chatbots and let me know how it worked.
So what are these features and how can you use them?
Here are the main strategies:
- Set up the marketing campaign via the Facebook Ads Manager
Have you ever come across Facebook ads with the e-commerce offers in your news feed? If you have a marketing team make sure it pays quite a lot of attention to advertising to convert new users to your chatbot. Let your potential users know what you can offer and those who are interested will go ahead and check it out inside of your chatbot.
The add should look appealing and include not only well-structured copy but images, GIFs or videos with proper branding.
Clicking on the Send Message button should land your target users into the chatbot with a welcome message to start the flow.
2. Let users Share the chatbot with their friends instantly
Set up a Share button in the Messenger persistent menu or in any relevant point of the flow. Any user can use this functionality to share the chatbot information you consider relevant with his Messenger friends just by tapping one button. Spreading the word about your chatbot got much easier with this functionality offered by Facebook Messenger team. So make use of it :)
3. Find the nearest locations of your business in seconds
When you need to find the nearest store or any other important location of a certain business, a chatbot becomes handy. It will take a user several seconds to receive a gallery with the nearest locations of the retail stores, consultation centers, etc by sharing their current location or a zip code. Furthermore, this is an awesome way to tell your chatbot users about the current working, especially on holidays or during the weekend. Adding the Store hours button into the flow that will open a smart webview with working hours or display a text card with the same information will become a neat and well-used feature.
4. Schedule an appointment with a real person via a chatbot
Are you done with calls and being put on hold when you need to set up an appointment with the store representative, your doctor or an insurance agency? A chatbot with properly implemented integration provides users a possibility to schedule an appointment almost instantly. Simply, set up the flow with all necessary information a user needs to enter to book an appointment. When the choices are made a user should receive an appointment confirmation card with the time and date of a scheduled appointment and a possibility to cancel or reschedule it with one click if his plans change. Isn’t that neat?
5. Receive a response from the customer service agent in 10 seconds
No matter how cool a chatbot may be, sometimes we still need to talk to a real human to resolve some issues or receive an answer to a very particular question, etc. In this case the chatbot is the tool to use. Instead of calling and waiting until you are connected to an agent, you can receive a response inside of a chatbot within 10 seconds after initiating a chat. It is that easy with a proper custom integration. Here’s what Chatfuel team suggests in terms of using their Live Chat plugin:
If you find anything else quite appealing in this chatbot or would like it to be there, please let me know. If you find something boring, please, share as well. The team is always ready to implement enhancements and new features.
