Tips for building Facebook Messenger bots

Many businesses are just starting to use bots to provide their customers with better and more seamless user experiences. If you are one of those businesses, this post is exactly what you need to guide you through building your Facebook Messenger Bots. It will also provide you with a list of tips to help you avoid making some major mistakes that could affect the quality of your bots.

Ready for the action? Let’s get right to it!

Facebook Messenger bots: Tips, tricks & more

• Focus on planning, not building

There are so many things that you could do with bots. However, you need to try and stay focused on what you should do rather than on what you could do. This means you need to take time to find the right business application and strategy for implementing your bots, plan carefully, then start building them.

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• Consider the content

Remember that there is a huge difference between how you talk to friends on Messenger and how your bot will talk to your customers. Moreover, consider emojis, stickers and gifs when you are figuring out the most delightful way to engage your users.

• Know your audience

Although Messenger has around 1.3 billion monthly active users, every country has a different preferred messaging app. For example, in Latin America, WhatsApp is the preferred app for messaging. Be sure to take that into consideration before you commit to any platform and start building bots for it. You want to meet your audience where they are not force them to use an app they usually never use.

• Keep expectations at bay

It is easy to get carried away and fantasize about building powerful state-of-the-art bots. However, keep in mind that even simple IF/THEN logic trees can build engaging and valuable bots. Your bot doesn’t need to be a genius from the get go; it can develop with time and experience.

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• Avoid deceiving users

Your users are smart. They can and will easily figure out that you are using a bot only by asking a few questions. So avoid trying to trick them or deceive them into thinking they are interacting with a human. Moreover, be clear about what users can expect from your Facebook Messenger bot from the beginning of their interaction with it.

• Place value before fun

Yes, your bot should provide fun and delight to your users. However, first and foremost, the primary purpose for your bot should be to provide value to users and solve an existing problem for them.

• Remember that humans are irreplaceable

No matter how fancy or intelligent your Facebook Messenger bot is, always keep it mind that it can never ever replace human interaction. So avoid trying to automate everything and let bots and humans work together to provide the ultimate user experience. Use bots for predictable and repeatable conversations but make sure to place humans on the front lines when it comes to delicate situations.

• Think ahead

There are two very important things you must be aware of: 1) Your bot might break and give you error messages every now and then and you need to be prepared for that. 2) Users will have high expectations of your bot so you need to be sure it can handle those expectations.

Have you ever built a bot? Please share with us your experience, tips and insights in the comment section below.  

The post All You Need to Know About Facebook Messenger Bots appeared first on The Global Now.