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In January 2021, Telegram announced that it reached 500 million monthly active users. By 2022, it expects to cross a billion users.

In a world where privacy is a major concern, Telegram has made explicit attempts to protect its users’ data. That’s why it’s got an astoundingly loyal user base.

Due to its focus on privacy and security, consumers all over the world are shifting towards the app. That gives your business a great opportunity to engage with customers on a platform where they feel safe and comfortable.

But, how do you engage and support your customers at scale on Telegram?

By creating an intelligent Telegram chatbot that can automate the resolution of your queries!‍

What can your business use your Telegram chatbot for?

1. Marketing

An AI-driven telegram chatbot can help you deliver personalized marketing messages to your prospects and even help you upsell your current customers.

You can use your telegram bot to broadcast messages about promotional offers and new arrivals. You can even drive targeted marketing campaigns over your chatbot.

Your NLP-driven chatbot can even help you generate leads. You can collect customer details and auto-populate them in spreadsheets.

By creating a Telegram chatbot, you even make it easier for customers to make reservations, book appointments, and set up demos.

All your customers need to do is select the time that works for them, provide their details and they’ll have it scheduled.

‍2. Customer Support

Here’s where your bot truly shines.

As your business grows, the number of customer queries coming in increases exponentially. It would take too much of your agents’ time and energy to handle every single request manually.

About 80% of the queries that come in are repetitive. They don’t warrant personal attention.

Imagine being a customer support agent and being subjected to the torture of answering every single one of these queries. What would feel like after answering the same question for 17 different customers in a single day?

You’d probably be frustrated beyond belief by the time you’re done answering it the 4th time. By the 7th request, you’re screaming internally. And by the 10th time, you’re fighting a losing battle with the part of you that wants to leave your desk and go live as a hermit.

Fortunately, it doesn’t need to come to this.

Your Telegram chatbot can take care of all these repetitive requests, without the slightest delay.

Now your agents will only have to handle complicated customer queries that call for personal attention.

Your agents won’t need to worry about automation taking over their jobs. Rather, automation will help them perform their jobs in a better manner. It will help them focus on higher-level work, on solving complex problems rather than getting bogged down with mundane, repetitive queries.‍

3. Sales

Whether you’re an e-commerce store, an insurance agency, or anything in the middle, a Telegram chatbot can help you drive sales and collect payments!

It allows you to display your offerings, nurture your leads, and answer all the last-minute questions that may pop up in your prospects’ minds.

Why force your customers to make the effort of visiting your website and browsing your offerings?

Saying that users are more comfortable with Telegram is an understatement. A lot of them are absolutely obsessed with the app.

Why do you think Amazon is phenomenally successful? They’re all about reducing customer effort. It’s what customers love about them. 1-Click purchases make their lives so much easier.

Apply the same philosophy to your business.

Your customers spend their time on Telegram. Simplifying the customer journey by allowing them to make purchases from you over Telegram itself would make it so much easier for them to do business with you.

‘The easier you make it for people to do something, the more they’ll do it’‍

4. Sharing content

It doesn’t matter if you’re creating marketing content or running a publication, Telegram can help you get your content out to people who’d benefit from it.

Ever heard of the Create Once Publish Everywhere philosophy?

As the name suggests, it focuses on publishing a single piece of content on as many channels as necessary. While publishing it in the same format might not be the best idea, you could tweak the content as necessary for different audiences on different channels.

Telegram chatbots can help you expand the reach of your content.

Your bots empower you to send your content out in the form of links, documents, pictures, and videos over Telegram, at scale.

The Wall Street Journal uses this strategy to push their articles out to their audience over Facebook Messenger chatbots.

Since your audience prefers Telegram, it might be worth engaging them by sharing content that they’d be interested in over your Telegram bot.‍

5. Employee engagement

Employees have questions that, when left unanswered, impact the quality of their work. The good news is that a lot of these questions don’t need to be answered personally.

Onboarding can be automated to a large extent with an HR chatbot. Even payroll-related queries can be handled by a bot, with the more complex ones being routed to live agents.

With the shift towards remote work, HR bots have increased in importance. Employees don’t have to chance to just run into HR at work. They can’t just stroll up to the HR manager and have their queries answered.

And though they have the option to send an email, it may not be answered as soon as they’d like it to be.

HR chatbots become particularly useful when it comes to change management. When organizations go through changes, employees are left confused. They need clarity.

The influx of questions is too great for the HR team to handle manually. That’s where a Telegram HR chatbot comes in.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

‍6. Tracking orders

After a customer places an order, they’ve just got 1 thought floating through their minds, “Where is my shipment?”.

It practically makes us anxious.

But logging into your e-commerce portal or even downloading your mobile app is just too much effort. Besides, most apps get deleted within 48 hours of being installed.

However, your customers love Telegram.

The best way to ease the anxiety they face is to provide tracking updates and information over your Telegram chatbot.‍

How do you create a Telegram chatbot?

We’re going to break this down into three sections.

• How to create a basic chatbot
• How to configure advanced bot capabilities
• How to deploy your chatbot on Telegram

Let’s get started.

1. How to create a basic chatbot

Engati has made it easy for you to create a basic chatbot in a few minutes.

Our bot creation wizard streamlines the entire process, allowing you to set your bot up in no time. It even shows you the areas that you should fine-tune later.

First off, you need to add the basic details for your bot. This would include the name, description, and category that your chatbot would fall under.

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Now, you don’t need to build your chatbot from scratch.

Engati allows you to build your chatbot using a range of template chatbots, designed for various use-cases.

You can find template chatbots for lead generation, HR, e-commerce, and many other use cases. Instead of making the effort to build a whole new bot, you can simply use these template chatbots as a base layer and customize them to your requirements.

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After choosing your template, you can configure the look and feel of your bot for your website with themes, fonts, and other options. You can deploy your chatbot on other channels after the initial setup is completed.

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Now, choose to enable live chat in order to get the perfect blend of automation and the human touch.‍

It’s now time for you to customize the welcome path for your chatbot. You can even set up FAQs really quickly in this step.

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Guess what. You’ve just created your own chatbot.

All that’s left to do is quickly review your bot… and configure its advanced capabilities.‍

2. How to configure advanced bot capabilities

Now that you’ve created a basic chatbot, it’s time to take it to the next level. These are the ones that truly set your bot apart.

Let’s get started!

Languages

Only 26% of internet users even understand basic English. And since Telegram has large userbases in countries where English isn’t the most popular language, it makes sense to reach customers in their own language.

Engati allows you to engage your customers over chatbots and live chat in 50+ languages. These include, but are not limited to, Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish, and Right-to-Left (RTL) languages like Arabic.

To set up multilingual chatbots, select a bot, navigate to the ‘Configure’ section, go to ‘Languages’, and click on ‘Enable’.

Now just choose the language from the dropdown list, download the language keys, edit them and reupload them.

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Data collection

If you’re using your bot to generate leads, you might as well have the data stored and organized automatically too.

When you integrate your Engati chatbot with Google Sheets, you’ll be able to add data to the sheets, update the data and even retrieve the data automatically.‍

Scheduling appointments

Your chatbot can help customers book appointments, consultations, and product demos.

By integrating your chatbot with Google Calendar, you’ll be able to pull the available time slots and allow your customers to schedule their sessions.‍

Payments

By integrating your Engati chatbot with Stripe and other payment gateways, you’ll be able to drive sales and collect payments directly over your Telegram chatbot.‍

Live Chat

Engati offers you a power-packed, integrated solution that gives you both — speed and personalization.

It merges automation and live chat into a single solution.

But it gets even better.

You can even integrate Engati Live Chat with your ticketing and CRM systems, including Salesforce, Zendesk, and Freshdesk .‍

Third-party integrations

Your Telegram chatbot can also be integrated with other platforms using Zapier and JSON API integrations.‍

3. How to deploy your chatbot on Telegram

Deploying your chatbot on Telegram is rather easy.

In the Engati portal, go to the deploy workflow. Select Telegram from the list of channels.

Now, enter the Bot Father link (https:/telegram.me/botfather) in your browser or open the Telegram app and search for ‘Bot Father’ in the search field on the top of the chat page.

The Bot Father will send you a list of commands that you can use to set up your chatbot.‍

Telegram BotFather commands‍

To create a new Telegram bot, enter “/newbot”.

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Create a new Telegram bot‍

Now, you need to select a name for your bot.

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Give your Telegram bot a name‍

After you select a name, it’s time for you to choose a username for your Telegram bot. This username must end with “bot”.

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Choose a bot username

‍Once you’ve chosen a username for your bot, the Bot Father will provide you with an access token.

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Telegram bot access token‍

Copy this access token, head over to the Engati Portal and go to Deploy -> Telegram, and paste it in the Access Token field.‍

Paste your access token in the Engati portal

Just hit save and your bot is ready to be used on Telegram.

It’s that simple. That’s all it takes to make and deploy a bot on Telegram.

‍

Case-study: Larsen & Toubro’s Telegram chatbot

Larsen & Toubro has over 3,30,000 employees. With a workforce that large, it’s hard to engage your employees, answer their questions, and get progress updates from them.

It realized that it needed to engage its employees over a chatbot. And, of course, it chose Engati.

I loved how easy it was to use the Engati platform. In fact, L&T managed to build its entire integrated solution on its own, using Engati’s easy drag and drop conversational modeler with minimal intervention from Engati’s bot building experts.

To strengthen its connection with its employees, L&T decided to opt for a multichannel approach to communicate with them

It deployed its AI-driven chatbot on both — Telegram and WhatsApp.

The bot is deployed at different construction sites to improve the communication between the on-site workers and off-site project managers. The remote workers send out daily reports to their managers through this bot by answering basic questions asked by the bot. Sending/ updating daily reports through the bot did not only save remote workers time but also made it much easier for project managers to track the progress on several projects.

To make its employees’ lives even easier, it launched its chatbots in English as well as Hindi.‍

Create your Telegram chatbot

Now it’s time for you to build your own Telegram chatbot and engage your customers over the chat channel they prefer, in the language they prefer. Start now!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Create Telegram Chatbot was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Are you hoping to create a portfolio that showcases your conversation design skills, attracts your ideal clients, companies and helps you land your dream job? Read this!

Portfolios are always a hot topic in career Q&As and the conversation design community, and for good reason! A portfolio is a great way to highlight your writing and design skills, but with a little creativity, they can speak to so much more than just a prototype. I put together my top considerations and must-have skills for your own portfolio, to ensure that it speaks for you, and that your ideal audience will understand your work and what you’re most passionate about when it comes to conversation design. Later in this post, Brielle Nickoloff and I review four portfolios from real conversation designers!

Six Essentials to Highlight In Your Conversation Design Portfolio

1.Writing Skills. This is the most obvious and most important thing to highlight in your portfolio. As a conversation designer, writing is one of the most important parts of the job. Highlight what types of writing you have experience in, whether it’s UX writing, microcopy, social media copywriting, etc.

2. User Experience Skills. Communicating that you understand the user, understand the importance of advocating for their experience and their role in the conversation is also crucial. You may have traditional UX writing or UX design experience already, or perhaps you have spent time working in user research. If not, think of a time when you had the user in mind and explain that experience. They should be the focus of your conversation design projects already, so this should be a simple skill to include!

3. Creativity and What Makes You Unique. A lot of people come to conversation design from a variety of backgrounds, whether it’s writing, social media, linguistics, research, film or even comedy. No matter what your previous experiences are, look at them through the lens of designing a conversation and user interaction. What does your perspective bring to your projects? How does this help you be creative and think differently? Use these skills to your advantage!

4. Collaboration Skills. If you’re going to work in a team environment, it’s important to understand and illustrate your working style and process. Do you have experience working in agile practices? Are you comfortable communicating with different stakeholders, managing your projects and advocating for your user through research, strategy and data you collect? How have you worked in the past? These experiences will help to paint a picture of what it’s like to work with you for future team members who may be looking at your portfolio.

5. Soft Skills and Tools. There are many different tools and platforms in the world of conversational AI, and each team may use different ones! Sharing what tools you have used for specific projects, how you used them and what skills you have (like the ability to train AI models or knowing your way around Dialogflow) can go a step further than your resume would, and will appeal to any team that uses the same ones. While you likely have a suite of go-to tools, it’s important to stay up to date with what is popular in the industry as well.

6. Show Your Work! This is a given. A BIG part of your portfolio should be showing off your conversation design projects. Instead of simply linking to the projects, try explaining everything that went into them. What was the process like? What did you do before you began designing? What process did you follow, and why did you decide to use this approach? Were there any challenges that came up, and how did you overcome them? There are many details that go into creating a chatbot that don’t show in the final version, and that is still very important work to highlight, because that is what you will be doing for a prospective client.

Want more advice on what skills you should highlight? Check out this Clubhouse panel chat! Moderated by Greg Bennet from Salesforce, featuring a team lead in voice at Ford, a Conversational AI CEO and professional Conversation Designer (plus, me 😎)

Wondering what recruiters are looking for and how to ace your interviews? Watch this Career Q&A replay with Allys Parsons and Leigh Smith from Techire.ai! There’s tons of BONUS advice on portfolios, too.

Portfolio Reviews

To help you get inspired for your own chatbot portfolio, conversation design experts Brielle Nickoloff, Co-Founder and Head of Product at Botmock and myself, Hillary Black, Co-Founder of Mav, Founder of Conversation Designer Jobs and Host of Conversation Designers Internet Club, reviewed four portfolios from a mix of professional and aspiring conversation designers. Each of these designers highlight their work in a slightly different way, so they are sure to give you several ideas for your own chatbot portfolio!

Hopefully, these portfolio case studies will give you some inspiration as you develop a chatbot portfolio that showcases your skill and passion!

Portfolio 1 — Andrew Fryckowski

The first thing that catches your eye when you land at Andrew’s website is the “Ask The Bruno” chatbot pop up that Andrew designed. The chatbot is engaging and naturally encourages you to interact with it. When you click on Bruno, you’re given four options to navigate through Andrew’s profile. These include a short bio, education, most recent work, and an intriguing option called “Boop The Nose”.

A chatbot like this one is a killer way for Andrew to immediately showcase his conversation design, marketing, and technical prowess, as well as his personality and the thought process he implements for a chatbot design. Right off the bat, this chatbot lets us know that Andrew understands how to create a solid chatbot hook and how to provide the user with an easily navigable and informative conversation flow.

In his portfolio of projects, Andrew took the time to describe (with great detail!) his process for several conversation design projects. In these, he goes beyond showing how a perfect and finished chatbot works. He goes further by explaining other parts of a chatbot like the fallback and the flow map; both important conversation design assets wouldn’t otherwise surface if he just showed a happy path demo. Having access to his copy and information further showcases his thought process and offers further clues to his personality.

Alongside his professional projects, Andrew was also clever in including a page that would explain in detail the entire process of how he designed the “Ask The Bruno” chatbot. Showcasing both professional and personal projects provides the visitor or potential recruiter with a window into how he works when he has full creative freedom vs a client-based collaboration. It also makes it very clear that Andrew is excited enough about conversation design that he took the time to immerse himself in a cxd side project.

Instead of telling you what he can do, Andrew shows you what he has done. When you explore Andrew’s site, it becomes apparent that he has a great deal of knowledge in conversation design.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

Suggestions:

Andrew’s Experience and Skills section on the about tab is simple and effective, but the average viewer might not see it! This bar should also be included on the portfolio page to showcase what Andrew can do.

Portfolio 2 — Raagini Chadha

Raagini’s landing page is straightforward and communicates upfront that her conversation design expertise comes from her mixed background in both analytical linguistics and experience design. Raagini shows you that she understands all aspects of conversation design, AI, and NLP, and she illustrates this with illustrative blurbs, in-depth project overviews, by detailing her background. And on her site, she includes an entire page dedicated to showing off her design framework; this is the relevant information that a client OR a hiring manager wants to see.

Raagini is also very open and thoughtful about her design process, calling out specific quotes from stakeholders and including documents that describe conversation flows and persona characteristics. Detailing the ins and outs of her conversation design team’s process so thoroughly demonstrates that she really gets all the moving parts of launching a product like this one. This information will likely catch the eye of prospective clients or recruiters.

Many designers wonder about the best way to show their “real client” work after signing NDA’s with their clients. Raagini does an excellent job of presenting client work without revealing the identity of the client, and she glides around this by introducing the client and the problem like this:

“When a Fortune Global 500 Information and Communication Technology company decided to leverage AI to transform their business in 2018, a key frontier of their digital transformation journey was to introduce an Intelligent Virtual Assistant. In 2019, I became part of an ambitious project to deploy a customer-facing cognitive assistant on their website, to deliver personalized customer experiences at scale. To comply with my confidentiality agreement, I have obfuscated classified information in this case study. The designs below are a reinterpretation of the original.”

When explaining the details of a project, Raagini also gives insight into the expectations communicated to the client by her team. When the client wanted them to demonstrate value FAST, the team elected to move forward with two use cases instead of the entire list of 40. It’s often easy to say, “yes, we can do everything,” but showing that you can still make an impact when the plan and value are thought out and delivered, is more effective than falling short when you try to take on too much.

Suggestion:

From the home page, it’s not super clear that the working example is behind the “Conversation Experience Design” Learn More button. Raagini could make this work easy to find by including it on the top navigation bar or editing the copy of that section to clarify that an example is inside.

Portfolio 3 — Jen Meservey

The visitor that navigates to Jen’s online portfolio will instantly realize that she is detail-oriented, organized, and passionate about her career. Jen’s inspiration, “I fight for the users”, provides the visitor with an insight into her design style. The portfolio is full of information, yet remains fun and easy to navigate. Her site displays how creative she is, and after reading it, you have a good sense of her personality, which is a big pro!

When you access Jen’s portfolio section, you will notice that she divided it into three sections. Separating topics is good practice for anyone out there with several areas of expertise or various relevant work they want to showcase. Having a portfolio that explains your mastery in more than one craft can be confusing to possible clients, hiring managers, or other people viewing your work. With that said, if you guide the viewer down each path and show them the depth of your work in each area, they will be able to build a mental model of who you are. They’ll have proof of what you’re able to do, instead of wondering, “this person claims that they can do it all…but can they do anything well?”

In the “chatbot” section of her portfolio, Jen displays five projects that are all slightly different. Showcasing variety is a great way to earn the attention of prospective clients or job recruiters. For example, in her case, we can gather that she can use multiple design tools like Botmock or Manychat. In addition to that, Jen also provides insight into her design process by showing the script, persona, the full prototype, or a link to the live version of the design. In some of them, she links directly to the PDF she used for the project. Giving access to all of this information is a perfect way to demonstrate that you walk the walk, you don’t just talk the talk.

Jen has several certifications in conversation design, including one from Hillary Black’s online course Chatbot Writing & Design (developed with UX Writers Collective and Botmock), which helped to build out her portfolio and position her as a designer who knows the process beginning to end. ChiChi is the chatbot she created in the course!

Suggestions:

Since “Jenbot” is a bot about Jen and her conversation design work, it would be great to have this bot embedded on her portfolio page! You can easily embed a Messenger bot widget on a webpage using a plugin. This is also a great way to see who is viewing your website.

Jen could also create a more developed narrative for each chatbot project. Right now, the visitor has access to the different artifacts (flowcharts, scripts, video demos, etc) that she used for the project, and it would be great if she could also provide a link that would explain in further detail the design process of these projects.

Portfolio 4 — Elaine Anzaldo

Elaine’s landing page and portfolio are a stroke of genius. It is simple and to the point, which is the point! In less than ten words, she shows you that she knows about linguistics, conversation design, and how the two intersect.

On her landing page, Elaine provides the viewer with a short “About Me” that quickly explains the journey of how she found her fiend for conversation design. Reading about how Elaine found her “why” speaks to her enthusiasm for chatbots.

After her short bio, the viewer can scroll down to “Featured Projects”. Inside the “view case study” for the projects, she spells out the entire thought process of the design, she reflects on why decisions were made, and perhaps, why they were changed. By providing this insight, she informs the viewer or potential recruiter about her smart design thinking.

You then see that her first project Water Log Voice Experience she created during a Designathon that Botmock hosted. (Participating in workshops, hackathons, and designations is a fantastic way to get your hands dirty and show possible employers that even if you haven’t held an official role in conversation design, you can show your work, and you have been proactive about gaining experience in this field!) On the page for this project, the viewer can scroll around, look at the different flows she isolated, and test the bot’s prototype. For this project, Elaine mentioned that thanks to testing, they realized that an element in their bot was not as easy to design as they initially thought, and since it would not result in the best user experience, they decided to go another way with the design. Including this introspection is very useful to all viewers of her work, including hiring managers!

Suggestions

It would be great to see a key quote or embed of the video that Elaine references as her “why,” so that the viewer can put themselves in the same mindset while they browse her site.

A portion of this post originally appeared on the Botmock Blog. Special thanks to Brielle, Andrew, Raagini, Jen and Elaine for making this possible!

I’m Hillary, the Head of Marketing & Conversation Design at Mav and Founder of ConversationDesignerJobs.com

Want to chat bots? Network with 2000+ conversation designers when you Join my Private Facebook Group!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How to Build a Great Conversation Design Portfolio was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

No one wants to install a new app for every business or service they want to interact with.‍

That’s what Zuckerberg said in his keynote speech while launching Facebook Messenger chatbots.

But chatbots had been around for a while, even before he said that. How did he plan on changing the game with his Messenger chatbots?‍

What are Facebook Messenger Chatbots?

Though Facebook remains unbeaten, many emerging conversational platforms provide the same ‘social’ experience but in different ways. One such conversational platform that has caught all the marketers’ attention is an AI-equipped chatbot! AI chatbots have been used extensively, across all the sectors of the industries. From your bank organization to your home, everything has turned ‘intelligent’, bringing upon the age of smart-living. Businesses were looking to use this AI-driven chatbot technology innovatively. And that’s when the idea arose- “Why don’t we integrate chatbots on social media platforms? Facebook has 1.4 billion daily users, so won’t that be a great platform to connect our business to a wider audience?”

Fast-forward to today

It’s been a couple of years since Mark Zuckerberg announced that businesses can make Facebook Messenger chatbots for business accounts and everyone’s been going gaga ever since! Facebook is the largest messaging platform available today with over a million people on Messenger. According to the stats, the top 4 messaging apps have more users than the top 4 social networks! With businesses leveraging all the benefits from Messenger chatbots, there has been an increase in the number of registrations.

There are currently more than 300,000 active chatbots on Facebook Messenger! Chatbots can take on the burden of time-consuming business tasks and handle communications with your visitors, becoming the first point of contact. This is accelerating communication between businesses and customers at a rapid scale. And Facebook’s data shows that!

• 61% of people in the UK messaged a business between March and June 2018
• 53% of people are more likely to interact with a business they can message directly
• More than 50% of people consider business messaging as the modern way to communicate

Now more than ever, there’s a need to add a bot to your Facebook page — it helps with responding to customers quicker than ever and provides them with a high-quality service.

Yet, many businesses refrain from merging bots into their pages on social platforms! And why? Because they think building chatbots is expensive, time-consuming, and is unexplored terrain for those unfamiliar with coding. And yes it is, but only when you build a bot manually!‍

What’s different about Facebook Messenger chatbots?

For starters, you don’t have to be a programmer to build a sophisticated Messenger chatbot. Mark’s major advantage lies in the fact that Messenger notifications pop up rather overtly on the user’s screen. This causes them to be noticed and replied to even if the user isn’t on the app then.

This is pivotal since native chatbots living in websites & mobile applications could only reach users if and when they were using these websites or apps.

Zuckerberg literally blessed marketers with the ability to push promotional messages & content in a way that people will notice.‍

Promotion!

Facebook made it really easy for users to find your bots. They can search for them through the Messenger application.

But the good folks over at Messenger didn’t want to force you to leave discovery up to chance. They’ve given you opportunities to be proactive and promote your bot for your customers to interact with. Here’s a rundown on some of the methods you can employ to get your bot out for the masses to use:

1. Messenger links

Facebook generates links to your Messenger bot, using your Facebook page’s username. Users clicking those messenger links will get be taken directly to your Facebook Messenger chatbot.‍

2. Customer matching

This lets you connect customers that are already in your database to your bot. Messenger lets you add them by their phone numbers. You can use their phone numbers to send them messages directly in your Messenger bot.‍

3. Messenger codes

These are essentially QR codes for your Messenger Chatbots. They can be printed out & stuck in physical locations and work in a fashion similar to Snapchat and Instagram codes. On being scanned, they redirect users to your chatbot.

‍4. Messenger buttons

Facebook lets you embed these buttons into your website. This allows anyone who clicks on them to initiate a conversation with your chatbot.‍

What’s in it for me?

Good question. The benefits of employing Messenger Chatbots are numerous. Here are a couple of ways in which you could use a Messenger bot to improve your business processes.

1. Catch them where they are

Your users are already chatting on Facebook. That’s where you bait them in. You don’t have to make the effort to send them to an external site or a different application (which they may not even want to download in the first place). Make it easy. Comfortable. Minimize the effort that they need to put in to reach you and you’ve got yourself a winning strategy.

In fact, you can actually collect email addresses by simply asking for them and then, using Zapier, transfer their replies into your Email CRM (eg. MailChimp & Salesforce)

You even qualify leads, using the decision node to find out whether they fit certain criteria.‍

2. Make it personal(ized)

Your Messenger bots can collect customer preference data, based on their conversations with the users. Now, using this information, they can curate marketing messages, offers, promotional messages, and content relevant to the users’ interests.

Personalized content and offers are more powerful than average marketing messages. Messenger chatbots help you employ this with ease.‍

3. Get ’em clickin’

Messenger Chatbots boast phenomenal ORs and CTRs. On average, Messenger chats have Open Rates of 70–80% and Click-Through Rates well above 20%, whereas emails can expect to achieve 5–10% open rates. Send them content that interests them enough and they will take action.‍

4. Make it obvious

One of the biggest advantages of deploying a bot on Messenger — notifications are obvious. The chances of readers missing out on what you have to say are tremendously reduced. And you can thank Facebook Messenger’s ‘in-your-face style of sending notifications for that.

If your users have conversations with your Messenger chatbots on their phones (quite likely), you’re in luck. Facebook Messenger sends out notifications that are the absolute opposite of subtlety. And clearly, it’s working. The Open Rates and Click-Through Rates above make that quite obvious.‍

5. Build relationships

The only way someone will buy from you is if they trust you. And the best way to get them to trust you is by establishing a relationship with them.

Messenger bots allow you to build a relationship with your potential customers. Especially if you use these bots to share content that provides them with value. Sending them content that is beneficial and/or educational to them gets users to trust you, and that’s when your chances of getting a sale go up.‍

6. Diversify service lines

You can only handle so many service requests via phone calls. If that’s your only way of taking care of your customers, your lines will certainly get swamped. Using Messenger chatbots, you can provide support to multiple customers at the same time.

Even if customers want to have a conversation with an actual human agent, with Live Chat software, the agent can handle more than 7 customers simultaneously.‍

7. Solve the ‘abandoned cart’ issue

An issue that has been plaguing E-Commerce operators ever since E-Commerce came into existence. Abandoned carts are the one thing that E-Commerce businesses have nightmares about.

Messenger chatbots reduce cart abandonment by making the checkout process substantially easier.

They even help in retrieving carts that were already abandoned. By sending the users reminders and offers, E-commerce chatbots can lure them back into completing their purchases.‍

8. Educate them!

There are some things about your product or service that your users need to know to utilize your offerings to their full potential. But a lot of them aren’t too keen on digging through your knowledge base to find a bit of information. It’s too much effort. A Facebook Messenger Chatbot would be a simple and effective way for them to access information about your products and services.

All they’d need to do is type in the query they have in mind and then could receive the information directly in chat format. Alternatively, they could even get a link that takes them to the exact spot in your online knowledge base that explains the topic that they’re interested in. No need for them to take the effort to painstakingly navigate through your knowledge base (and possibly give up before finding what they need).‍

9. Uses better engagement tactics

As mentioned above, Facebook bots take your customers’ information, but this time they can also personalize their content by analyzing their history of searches and interests. Therefore, you can send your customers links, images, carousels, and much more! Yes, you can sell your product through your Facebook Messenger bot! You can also provide a CTA that directs your customer to your website or allows them to make payments. Hit a home run, E-commerce!‍

10. Deliver daily or weekly messages

Engage your audience by sending in notifications, suggestions, news on discounts, etc through your Facebook Messenger chatbot.‍

11. Prompt users to book services

You can make use of carousels and provide CTA buttons on your Messenger to book services or buy your products. By providing CTA through your chatbot, your customers don’t have enough time to change their minds and move down the sales funnel faster.‍

12. Send special offers or coupons

If you’re an e-commerce enterprise, Facebook marketing seems to be the ideal strategy for you. Sending your customers special offers and discount notifications through your Messenger chatbot is a lot more effective than sending emails that end up going into the spam section. Your message is communicated clearly and effectively with chatbots.‍

13. Conduct polls and surveys

One interesting way of collecting information- Polls and surveys. You can now create polls on your chatbot and send them to your customers and collect their feedback easily or even make statistical analyses.‍

14. Announce new blog posts or send new content to subscribers

One great way of marketing your brand and increasing ROI is through blog posts and articles. And with chatbots, you can increase your traffic by sending your audience announcements, links, or even a piece of content.‍

15. Inform any new updates or features

Facebook chatbots are ideal for communicating any updates and new features in your business. You don’t have to spend any time promoting your new updates, you can just do it cost-effectively through your chatbot!‍

16. Save time and money on customer care

Customers expect 24/7 availability, but they hate waiting on hold. They also ask many of the same questions over and over (and over) again. If you’re spending a lot of time helping people track deliveries, check your return policy, or book appointments, a little automation will go a long way. Free up your focus for the tasks that a Messenger chatbot can’t do.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots‍

What are the benefits of chatbots in Messenger?

The advantages of chatbots are many. But to list them down conceptually, here are a few benefits of Chatbots in Messenger.

1. Better open rates

Messenger marketing crushes email when it comes to engagement. A competitive email marketer can expect to achieve 5–10% open rates. But with Messenger marketing, open rates skyrocket to 70–80% in the first hour.‍

2. Better engagement

Chatbots on Facebook provide a better channel for businesses to engage with their customers and reach a wider audience.‍

3. Automate Q&A for common queries

Chatbots can be the first point of contact for your business and by integrating them on Facebook, you can be easily available to your customers and provide assistance for common queries 24/7.‍

4. Deliver daily or weekly messages

Engage your audience by sending in notifications, suggestions, news on discounts, etc through your Facebook Messenger chatbot.‍

5. Prompt users to book services

You can make use of carousels and provide CTA buttons on your Messenger to book services or buy your products. By providing CTA through your chatbot, your customers don’t have enough time to change their minds and move down the sales funnel faster.‍

6. Send special offers or coupons

If you’re an e-commerce enterprise, Facebook marketing seems to be the ideal strategy for you. Sending your customers special offers and discount notifications through your Messenger chatbot is a lot more effective than sending emails that end up going into the spam section. Your message is communicated clearly and effectively with chatbots.‍

7. Conduct polls and surveys

One interesting way of collecting information- Polls and surveys. You can now create polls on your chatbot and send them to your customers and collect their feedbacks easily or even make statistical analysis.‍

8. Announce new blog posts or send new content to subscribers

One great way of marketing your brand and increasing ROI is through blog posts and articles. And with chatbots, you can increase your traffic by sending your audience announcements, links, or even a piece of content.

Inform any new updates or features:

Chatbots are ideal for communicating any updates and new features in your business. You don’t have to spend any time promoting your new updates, you can just do it cost-effectively through your chatbot!‍

9. Save time and money on customer care

Customers expect 24/7 availability, but they hate waiting on hold. They also ask many of the same questions over and over (and over) again. If you’re spending a lot of time helping people track deliveries, check your return policy, or book appointments, a little automation will go a long way. Free up your focus for the tasks that a Messenger chatbot can’t do.‍

10. Identify leads

As your bot greets potential customers, it can identify their needs, ask basic questions, (i.e., “What’s your budget?”), and immediately direct high-quality leads to your human sales team.‍

11. Handle e-commerce transactions

With the right script, bots can do the selling, too. And because everything happens without leaving the comfort of Facebook Messenger, drop-off rates are lower than in a traditional ad-to-webpage pipeline. Also, conversational commerce leaves room for personalized upselling as the bot makes suggestions. Everything from “Seems your flight won’t be leaving until 4 PM. Would you prefer a late check-out?” to “Fries with that?”.

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What’s the world doing with them?

Ananda livemore

As with any company in the telecommunications industry, providing phone and internet services isn’t enough. Ananda Livemore was putting in continuous efforts to improve the customer experience while adapting to new digital technologies to stay ahead of the market.

Ananda livemore is a 4G+ data operator with international service standards, a state-of-the-art network. It’s owned and operated by Amara Communications, a leading telecommunications service provider in Myanmar. Through the delivery of high-speed, reliable broadband solutions, ananda aims to provide a truly liberating digital experience to enterprise customers and consumers.

A Messenger chatbot allows them to improve their customer experience by providing easy access to information while reducing wait time. Instead of customers going through the usual route of calls, and long wait times, Engati’s messenger bots answered customer queries immediately.

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2. HP

HP came up with a Messenger chatbot that allowed people to print documents, files, and pictures through any connected printer. PrintBot lets people send images directly from Messenger to a printer, regardless of where they were. They no longer had to be physically present and hunt for connection wires to get something printed.‍

3. iMile

iMile is a flexible logistics solutions provider for E-commerce deliveries and courier services for the Middle East. When expecting a courier, customers typically feel a lot of anxiety. Queries on tracking and scheduling are bound to come up and clog support lines. Since these queries were repetitive, IMile needed a solution that could automate addressing these queries. They also needed a solution to respond to these queries in English and Arabic.

Hence they deployed a multilingual chatbot over Facebook Messenger. With Engati’s omnichannel feature, iMIle was able to deploy the bot on both Facebook and their website. They could answer multiple users at once, answering almost every query coming.

4. Marriott

Marriott created their very first Facebook bot back in 2016. It allowed guests to combine their reward points when Marriott purchased Starwood hotels.

This Messenger bot took off so well, that Marriott created an entire fleet of chatbots. From making reservations to showcasing content from the Marriott Traveller Magazine, their bots can do it all. They even send you tips, tricks, and suggestions to make your stay with Marriott a better experience.

Amanda Moore, senior director of Social & Digital Marketing at Marriott International, said that they utilize chatbots in collaboration with humans. She said, “We truly believe the machine experience is best paired with a human. They can always signify if they want to speak to a real person. If the chatbot can’t answer a question, it can route to one of our associates.”

Marriott essentially utilizes a live chat function to give their guests a choice between speaking to a bot and a human, improving their customer experience.‍

5. Tokio Marine

Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire is Japan’s oldest and largest non-life Insurance company, which traces its roots back to 1879. They needed a solution to reduce customer wait times and attend to customer queries coming from multiple channels. The bot provides quotes, renews a policy, reviews claim status, and answers FAQs round the clock. It fetches user information, effectively working as a stream for lead generation. When new users land on TMNF, the bot generates a quote in real-time and allows users to register directly.

Get a quote — Instead of navigating through portals and web pages, customers can get a direct quote for cars, homes, travel, and other insurance through the chatbot.

Track a claim — Customers can check the status of their claim with the claim reference number.

Renewing a policy — Customers can renew an existing TMNF policy or a policy from another insurance company.

‍

6. Chromeo

Chromeo is a Canada-based, Electro Funk band that uses a chatbot with TONS of personality to connect with their raving fans. They make talking to a bot feel like the absolute opposite of robotics.

Chromeo sends song recommendations to their fans via their Messenger Chatbot. It pushes out suggestions and essentially markets its own music while making it a fascinating experience.‍

7. Garasi

Garasi, a leading Indonesian car dealership simplifies online shopping with the Facebook Marketplace and a Facebook solution with Engati to handle incoming requests. With the huge inflow of repetitive queries coming, it was difficult to scale and attend to these customers in real-time. Instead of having agents respond to queries, Garasi’s bot picks up the vehicle ID directly from the end user’s message. With Engati’s extensible integrations, the bot was able to fetch the contact number from the database and reply to the customer.

The bot was able to handle 3x users than the agents, which reduced the wait time by 77%. Garasi needed a system that was able to handle queries coming in from Facebook Marketplace. With Engati’s omnichannel feature, they were able to deploy the bot on Facebook Messenger.

‍8. Fandango

Fandango knows that a lot of their users don’t want to take the effort to switch apps just to access a bit of content. Sure they could just wait for users to download the app, navigate to the movie that they’re interested in, and then read the review or watch the trailer. But that’s more effort than a lot of the users want to make.

That’s why they came up with a Facebook Messenger Chatbot from which users can watch trailers and even find local showtimes.‍

9. Livspace

Livspace is a trusted interior design marketplace that connects interior designers, vendors, and customers across India and Singapore that provides end-to-end home interior services. As a design and technology-first start-up, they started to employ a combination of data science, algorithms, and design to create unique experiences for homeowners and scale the job of interior designers.

Their 1st stepping stone into this venture is a Messenger chatbot. Through Facebook Messenger, their leads and customers have the ability to browse through Livspace’s catalog without having to open extra windows or download extra apps. And if users felt stumped, a Live agent can swoop in and help them navigate.‍

‍

10. XacBank

XacBank is one of the largest systemic banks serving individual consumers, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and corporate customers by providing a full range of banking, insurance, and other value-added financial products and services. Their vision is to bring world-class financial services to Mongolia. Since Facebook is one of the most popular messaging applications in Mongolia, they decided to pull customers in with a Facebook chatbot.‍

‍Build a Facebook Messenger Chatbot in 10 minutes

Did you know that chatbots have single-handedly contributed to an increase in profits by 25%?

Also, 43% of millennials leverage social channels to engage in customer support today. Chatbots at social platforms allow businesses to automate conversations with people who click on your Facebook Messenger to start a discussion. Through this, people can easily get in touch with your business.

Well, that sounds worthwhile, and you know what? Anyone can build this bot! Using bot-building tools such as Engati, all you need to be is S-M-A-R-T. There is no coding required at all! Convenient, isn’t it?

So, to create a Facebook Messenger chatbot, follow these simple steps:

• Sign up with a digital CX platform register with Engati for free to get started right away!
• Go to the Bot MarketplaceExplore Engati’s Bot Marketplace. Then identify your use case, go through 150+ bot templates, and download one that’s perfect for your requirements.
• Construct and customize your conversational flow you can add carousels, build paths, use multilingual features, and much more. You can also customize your own welcome message and default answers, though they’re already inbuilt in our bots using the NLP engine.
• Go to the ‘Deploy’ section after you’re done building the botThis section lets you integrate your bot on any platform of your choice. Our bots can be currently integrated on 12 platforms like Slack, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Kik, Telegram, etc, including Zapier and JSonAPI that allows more integrations to be possible.
• Make sure you have a Facebook page already and your account is connected to integrate a bot on your Facebook page, having an existing Facebook account is a given!
• Link the bot to your Facebook page to deploy the bot on Facebook, copy your Facebook account URL, paste it in the deploy bar, hit the deploy button, and voila! Here’s your new Messenger bot!

Facebook Messenger bot best practices

Here are some hard-earned tips from the experts, aimed at those of you who are ready to build your own Facebook Messenger bot.

Set your expectations

No bot can do everything — yet. When you’re designing your first campaign, select one goal or use case for the bot to handle. Popular ideas include customer service, lead identification, product promotion, or discovery. Keep it simple, and walk before you run.‍

2. Set your customer’s expectations

This works the other way, too: often, your bot will be teaching the user how to interact with it as it goes. Alas, utopian-minded people who expect your appointment-booking bot to pass the Turing test may be disappointed. And folks who have no idea what a bot is could be equally frustrated. Clearly define the chatbot’s role in initial interactions to keep everyone on the same page. Then, throughout the interaction, program the chatbot to take the lead in guiding the user through the experience.‍

3. Invite personalization

Segmenting your customers and getting to know them drives engagement. Bots that invite a person to identify their preferences and narrow down options have much higher click-through rates. Build a bot that people genuinely want to interact with.‍

4. Get to the point

Bots are still pretty novel, but ultimately the goal here is to save users time. According to Jonathan Schriftman of Snaps, there’s a significant drop in users when a bot takes more than five clicks to get to point-of-sale.‍

5. Always have a human on-hand

A bot’s success depends on its ability to recognize when a human being is needed. Automated conversations are fabulously speedy and responsive, but they can’t replace human connection. Customers should have the option, at any point in the conversation, to connect with a person.‍

6. Be transparent

While a bot’s ability to store and remember information is one of its most attractive features, be upfront with users about data retention. What data will be stored? How will it be used? How can a person opt out? Give your users power over their private information.‍

7. Keep learning

Once you’ve built it, integrate your bot into your marketing calendar and your overall Facebook strategy. Your Facebook Messenger bot isn’t replacing email, customer service agents, or apps yet, but it offers features of all three, which means it must be treated like the unique beast it is.‍

Conclusion

Zuckerberg clearly created a winner when he launched Facebook Messenger Chatbots. Missing out on these would be a mistake that you would definitely not want to make.

We can make it even easier for you to make and deploy a chatbot on Facebook Messenger. With Engati, you can build and create a chatbot without having to know anything about coding. But we don’t just stop there. We let you deploy your bots on a variety of platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter, and even your own website.

Register with Engati to build your very own Facebook bot today!

‍

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Facebook Messenger Chatbot was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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If you are using Amazon Lex to train your virtual assistant, you must have realized how easy it is. In a short period of time, you can have a virtual assistant based on Artificial Intelligence answering your clients’ questions.

Configuring questions and answers in Amazon Lex is very easy, but deploying your chatbot to your website can be really complicated.

To be able to do that, you need to have advanced knowledge in programming to make the connection with the API, to know how to deal with errors and to use suitable methods.

Also, you need to have skills to design a chat box, from its functionality to the UX, the integration with the API and the installation in the website.

With Blahbox, you can solve these issues with just a few clicks.

You can watch the following video to see what this is about:

You can find below my explanation, step by step, about how to create the first chat box in Blahbox:

First, you must have an account in Blahbox.

1. Go to blahbox.net

2. Then, click on the “Start for free” button.

3. Register using your Google or Facebook user. You can also register with an email if you wish to.

Create your first chat box

1. When you go into Blahbox for the first time, you have to click on the “New chat” button.

2. Then, you need to choose the option “For a WebSite”.

3. Write the name you want to give to your chat box and then click on “Go”.

4. Here, I recommend you to click on the button “Skip step, set up later”. I will explain later how to insert the credentials for Amazon Lex.

And that’s it! In that moment, you’d have your first chat box created. You can access the chat box from Blahbox’s dashboard.

Now, we’ll connect the chatbot to Blahbox. Below, I’ll explain the process step by step:

Basically, what we have to do is to find the following information in Amazon Lex to paste it in Blahbox:

1. User’s Credentials

2. Bot’s name, Alias and Version

3. Region

Link Amazon Lex with Blahbox

In order to link your Bot trained in Amazon Lex, you must enter into the NLP section of Blahbox’s dashboard:

1- Log into Blahbox.

2- Enter into the chat you wish to link with Amazon Lex.

3- Then, click on the option “NLP” from the side menu.

4- Select “Amazon Lex” from the options on the right side of the screen.

Amazon Lex Credentials

Once you get to this screen, you must follow the instructions below to obtain the information from AWS:

How can I obtain the User’s Credentials?

In order to obtain the user’s credentials, a new user must be created in AWS. I’ll explain to you how to do this.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

1. Create a group

1.1- Go into the AWS Management Console.

1.2- Go into the IAM service (inside the “Security, Identity and Compliance” group).

1.3- Go to “Groups” from the side menu.

1.4- Click on the “Create New Group” button.

1.5- Give a name to the group (e.g. LexBlahbox) and then, “Next Step”.

1.6- Find the “AmazonLexRunBotsOnly” policy.

1.7- Tick the policy as is shown in the image above and click on the “Next Step” button.

1.8- Click on “Create Group”.

2. Create a User

2.1- Go to the “Users” option from the side menu.

2.2- Click on the “Add user” button.

2.3- Give a name to the user (e.g. Blahbox).

2.4- Tick the option “Programmatic access”.

2.5- Click on the “Next: Permissions” button.

2.6- Tick on the group created in step 1 of these instructions.

2.7- Click on the “Next: Tags” button.

2.8- Click on the “Next: Review” button.

2.9- Click on the “Create user” button.

2.10- You can download the credentials from the button “Download .csv”.

2.11- Save the following information: “Access key ID” and “Secret access key”.

2.12- Once the information is saved, click on “Close”.

2.13- Paste the “Access key ID” obtained in AWS in the field “Access key ID” of Blahbox’s screen.

2.14- Paste the “Secret access key” obtained in AWS in the field “Secret access key” of Blahbox’s screen.

You’re almost there!

How can I obtain the Bot’s name, Alias and Version?

1.1- Go into the AWS Management Console.

1.2- Go to the Amazon Lex service (inside the “Machine Learning” group).

1.3- Go into the bot you wish to link with Blahbox.

1.4- Click on the “Settings” tab.

1.5- You can find the name of the bot in the top left-hand corner.

1.6- Clicking on the option “Aliases”, you’ll be able to find the bot’s aliases.

1.7- From this screen, you’ll be able to obtain the Alias and the Version of the bot you wish to link with Blahbox.

1.8- You must paste the information that you obtained, in Blahbox’s NLP screen.

1.9- Finally, you must obtain the AWS Region where the bot which was created is located.

1.10- In the top right-hand corner of the AWS Console, you can see the region where the Bot is created.

1.11- You must select the same region in Blahbox’s NLP screen.

1.12- Then, click on “Go” and that’s it! You have your chat box linked with your Amazon Lex Chatbot!!!

Now you have your first chat box created in Blahbox linked with your chatbot created with Amazon Lex! Congratulations!

Now, the last step is designing the appearance of the chat box to obtain the appearance you want for your website.

When you go to the chat configuration section in Blahbox, you can find many features to configure: fonts, texts, avatars, colors, forms, etc.

Below you can find some screenshots that will show you how easy it is to configure the appearance of your chat box.

Avatar configuration. You can use a predefined image or upload yours

Edges of the header

Format and colors of the chat bubbles

Floating icon

You’re almost there!

Now you have to publish the chatbot widget with the “Publish” button.

And, finally, copy and paste in your website the code that Blahbox generates automatically to deploy the chat box to your website.

You can find the code by clicking on the option “Install” from the left navigator. You have to copy the code and paste it as it is between the tags <head> or <body> of each page of your site where you want your chatbot to be present.

Install your widget

And it’s ready!

In a short period of time you have your Amazon Lex chatbot running on your website with the shapes and colors you need!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Connect Amazon Lex chatbot on your website with no code was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.