Facebook Messenger Bot for businesses.

Antti

Yksilöessee (2P)

Markkinointi / Tekoäly

You might drive into a situation with your business, where you need to know about bots and AI, even though you are not a coder or a developer. Software engineers are expensive and if you want to know about coding enough to create your own chatbot system or something familiar to that, it’s not actually that very easy. Luckily in today’s world there are a lot of options for this kind of service and for these kinds of problems, that you can just very easily implement to your own system and service.

Many people still think bots are too far in the future, but very common companies are today using automatic answer systems on their websites. For example, I went to Slush event website and the whole page that I landed to transformed into a chat with a bot. I asked for a free ticket and the bot told me that “he” didn’t know any other good jokes. It was funny thing to consider that they have had to make that as a option and think about people who ask for free tickets.

What these bots are capable of? Well of course they are created for quick response for very simple questions. If customer has lost his or her PUK-code for the SIM- card in the phone, they can just ask it from a bot with DNA/ELISA. Then the bot asks for customer number and immediately searches it with A.I from the database of some sort of CRM service. It’s very easy and the customer gets the phone open and can continue the day. This of course is a very simple way to use the bot.

In this article I’m talking anyways about the Facebook Messenger bot that is getting updated quite frequently. At the moment you can make simple hello messages and contact information forms for customers who ask something when the shop is example closed. Anyhow the coding is still required to create a automatic answering system, for example if the customer wan
ts updates every day about news. It can be coded to the system and customer can send a message to the bot for example “Start” and the bot asks next what news do you want to subscribe and get notifications of?

The next thing you can do is to write “Business” this time the bot can automatically send you the latest news forecast about that subject. The business owner can of course make the timings when does the bot send everything. So if you business is wanting to get sells every Monday, you can time the bot to send notifications via the Messenger app every Monday 2AM. Below is a concrete picture of aFINNISH stock analytic company INDERES, who uses RASSE bot.

So in this Essay, I got the actual doing to the next level. I used several information sources, I gathered it along while writing the essay and I created a similar bot to Rasse. The bot I created is serving purpose for company called FuelMe.

The bot is simple using the messenger platform, and Shopify shop system, with a nice touch of attributes that understand what people do. The reason for Fuelme, a company based for food services in Helsinki, to use this kind of system is just to remind people. 85-90% of the people open up messages sent in messenger. The normal email gets opened, well you can guess that it’s a lot less. The bot for Fuelme does basically remind people to order the meals on the last day, when it is possible. So basically it sends automated reminder to all “subscribers “ about, what is going to be new on the menu and also just to tell that you are amazing and have a nice Thursday evening!

How to do it by yourself? Well, the Slush was this year full of chatbot companies. The problem is that they are either huge or very small. The ones that are huge can give you a lot of options and the basic features are free and suits you very well. For example, without any coding you can use chatfuel’s chatbot, that is able to send automated messages, talk to people how you want to and even search databases. The bot is free for 1000 subscribes for which is quite a lot if you think a small business. If you want to actually code it by yourself, you still need Facebook messenger in order to get the messages to people on their smartphones as a “notification”. So, Facebook is a huge player in the next upcoming years with bot-services, since most people are still at Facebook.

I found that while I didn’t open much of this in the essay, It was quite easy to understand and execute, to create the system for FuelMe, which they took in use today. Here is a perfect example, how you can read and dig into something while making it to real-life use on the same time.

Lähteet

https://www.tidio.com/blog/what-is-a-chatbot/Read 20.11.2019

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/09/20/are-chatbots-useful/#27f1d2452069Read 21.11.2019

https://marutitech.com/14-powerful-chatbot-platforms/Read 21.11.2019

https://dashboard.chatfuel.com/#/botsRead, 21.11.2019

Salescom Kasvupodcast ,  Jani Aaltonen