Chatbots on messenger - what's all the hype about?
You may have heard of a little thing called Facebook Messenger? Well it has 1.3 billion users*, so it's really not so little. In fact, it's huge! Messenger became its own app in 2014 when it was decoupled from the Facebook app. Messaging apps in general have astonishing popularity, making up six of the top ten apps globally**. With that large of a user base, it's no wonder businesses are hyped up about tapping into that revenue potential.
In 2016, Facebook launched a bot platform that allows organizations and individuals to develop and place their own
chatbots on Messenger, and the race was on. Chatbots are artificial intelligence-enabled technology that emulate human conversation. They range in capabilities from simple chatbots that can converse based on narrowly defined topics, to more sophisticated bots that use machine learning to get smarter over time. There are now roughly
300,000 chatbots on Messenger.
Being able to put their own chatbots on Messenger was a potential game changer for companies, but only for ones with viable use cases. The success of a company's chatbot on Messenger depends on a variety of factors, such as customer demographics and the type of industry. Some business models just lend themselves more to chatbots than others.
Chatbots are typically successful at answering simple questions about topics like order delivery dates or store hours. They can provide responses from knowledge bases based on key words the customer uses, so some organizations use them as first-tier customer support. Chatbots on Messenger can also perform more sophisticated tasks like setting appointments, making product recommendations, and taking food orders, so they can also bump up sales conversion rates.
