Before chatbots could offer customer support… support, in general, used to be something you could take or leave! Although most companies had a customer service department… reaching them meant a long time on the phone, or even writing a letter! Yikes! Then came email support… This seemed like an improvement, but it often led to a lot of misunderstandings. Usually, there were/are a huge number of emails back and forth, and tons of lost emails never got answered. The next phase was online chat. This was a vast improvement! Customers just had to wait for an agent to get to the message, and problems were often solved quickly. And today, we have Facebook Messenger chatbots. These bots can make that process even faster and easier.
Chatbots Offer Customer Support
A FB Messenger chatbot can offer customer support. And a bot has a lot of advantages over other methods of customer support:
- No delay. A chatbot can answer questions in seconds. The customer might have held on the line for a customer service person for an hour via phone or chat.
- Simple answers – Support bots can direct customers to articles they can use to solve their own issues. As long as the articles are well-written… it’s easy to fix many problems, from fixing a website to returning an online purchase.
- Familiar. Over a billion people use Facebook Messenger every day. Your customers are already using it. So using Messenger to help them solve their problems makes it very familiar and comfortable.
- Lower costs. Since so many support conversations are the same, your chatbot can handle them. You can reduce the number of customer service staff. Or move them to handle escalated cases instead of routine concerns.
- Ease of use. Rather than throwing your customers into a giant pile of instruction articles… a great bot will narrow it down to the article they need to solve their problem effectively.
- Patient – Unlike a human, a chatbot can wait for the client to come back and let it know if it worked. If it did, great. If it didn’t, the chatbot could get the attention of a human to help the customer.
Before the sale
A chatbot can be an excellent pre-sales tool! And it’s perfect for support when offering prospect answers for all their questions. Before you buy something, there are often questions… like what color is it, what’s it made of, what size, or what operating system it uses. All these questions can be answered by a chatbot that’s pleasant… and makes the prospect feel cared about. If a bot already does that BEFORE they are a customer, what may they think of your actual service?
After the Sale
Do you know those Scandinavian furniture companies? You know, the companies that sell stuff that have to put together yourself? I swear they have shares in divorce lawyer companies… Anyways, they give you instructions with no words that feel like reading hieroglyphics. Now, imagine being able to go to their website and find a chatbot that says, “I can show you how to do that. Click here to watch a video, or I can take you through it step-by-step.” The bot can be designed to walk you through the process from counting the materials… all the way to putting the finishing touches. This is how powerful a chatbot can be. Since it includes things like video attachments. But also downloads, images, and even augmented reality! It’s even more effective than a human who might struggle to get the visuals across with a chat or a phone.
Technical Customer Support
For most of us, technical support is the most critical and frequent support we seek out. Most of us can figure out how to put together a dresser with instructions and a few choice words. It’s a lot different if we get the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)… Shoutout to Microsoft… on our computer. Or our phone suddenly starts making its own calls to Hong Kong, lol. Technical support has become a more significant issue, as our lives have become techier. Especially now that we have refrigerators that can order dinner all by themselves.
We need to be able to find someone or something to help us solve problems as quickly as possible. A Facebook Messenger chatbot is, in many ways, the perfect solution. The perfect solution for technical support needs, that is. Why? Because most of the problems people have are the same as their neighbors. Meaning… Having a chatbot that can answer basic questions and find out more about the issues that someone may have… can help many more people than a team of customer service reps. Another advantage is that the chatbot can find out what the problem really is.
A Plan for Bots That Offer Customer Support
A solid plan is key to building a great support chatbot on Facebook Messenger. When your customers start interacting with your chatbot, you want it easy for them to get to what they need to know. One of the biggest factors is to create your chatbot so that your customers can find what they need with 2 or 3 questions. There might be some necessary information that you’ll need. Because once they start talking about their problem, you want it to be fast and easy to get an answer. This is where working with a chatbot Pro can help. These Pro’s able to help you develop a plan that will streamline everything your customers are looking for.
How to Build a FB Messenger Chatbot That Can Offer Customer Support?
There are lots of guides online for building your own Facebook Messenger chatbot. In fact, Facebook went out of its way to make it easy, but… That’s usually not the best way for a company of any size to do it. To have an actually effective chatbot, you should call on the help of a chatbot building platform. Experts in building FB Messengers chatbots can make sure that your support chatbot is a source of customer loyalty…, not frustration. Most people know they’re talking to a chatbot. And they don’t mind, but if they keep asking questions… or try to reach a person and the chatbot doesn’t work, it will lead to a lot of frustration. You’ll want to avoid that.
That said. We got many experts in our Clepher community that would be more than willing to help out. Not that you need it… Clever is easy to set up!
If you’d like to learn more about using a Facebook Messenger chatbot for support, go here to this page.
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