How to Use a Bot to Improve Your Online Branding and Sales

There may come a time in the not-too-distant future where it is common place for all of us to have robots and artificial intelligences on our staff. Today though, it is still quite a novel phenomenon!

That’s why it’s such an interesting but also confusing option for many businesses to consider using a chatbot.

A chatbot is an example of “weak AI,” meaning that it is an AI designed to do just one thing. In this case, that means respond to conversation via a chat box or directly through Facebook Messenger. This can be an extremely powerful tool for businesses, and in this post we’re going to break down why that is and how you can get started.

Using a Bot

The most obvious way to use a bot is to handle customer queries that you might otherwise not have been able to answer.

If you have a business with a prominent brand as well as a Facebook page, then you might well be familiar with just how difficult it can be to answer all of the questions that come through this way. You may not even have looked at your inbox on Facebook for a while!

This does two things:

• It means ignoring very warm leads that are highly engaged and extremely likely to buy from you
• It means upsetting your customers

The latter point is a serious one. Because customers aren’t hearing back from you, they feel ignored. They also feel as though your business is “faceless” and that if they pay you and have any problems, you’ll be equally likely to get hold of. None of this is good!

A chat bot can thus come to the rescue by answering those questions for you. This will follow a basic flow-chart system to answer set questions that will be prompted to the user. This way, you can explain that your team are busy but that their custom is valuable to you – and then help guide them to the next step.