Facebook unleashes the bots on Messenger
Popular messaging service to allow businesses to create automated answers to queries
Facebook Messenger wants to get down to business.
At F8, the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Facebook announced a number of additions to its popular messaging client, including the ability for businesses to create bots — automated software programs — as part of a bigger push to get consumers and companies to use the service to communicate with each other.
“What those bots are going to be able to do is provide pretty much anything,” said Stan Chudnovsky, head of product, Messenger, Face- book. “They can provide automated subscription content, like weather and traffic, news updates and more.”
Bots, one of the hottest trends in messaging, can have simple conversations providing information to people. In Asia, they are used by many businesses on the country’s most popular messaging services, such as WeChat, and enable all sorts of information and business transactions. Waterloo, Ont.-based Kik has also enabled bots in its service. Facebook Messenger has more than 900 million users and it is clear that Facebook is looking at ways to increase its abilities for its user base.
In addition to the bots, Chudnovsky says the company will create send-and-receive tools that will let businesses create responses depending on the request, for example, a question about business operating hours.
“You can build a bot that will interact on behalf of the business with automated messages and start to build a very comprehensive conversation with those customers,” Chudnowsky said.
As well, the company is enabling Messenger Codes, so, for example, a business can place a code in their shop window and a user can scan it and start a conversation.
Facebook is also releasing tools for developers that will allow companies to initiate conversations on their businesses websites, as opposed to solely within Messenger.
While it may seem a stretch for some to start using Messenger in order to talk to businesses — as opposed to friends and family — Rogers Communications has had great success using the tool. However, the company uses live support agents, not bots, as part of its support.
“We were the first telco in the world to offer customer care support through Facebook Messenger,” Deepak Khandelwaal, chief customer officer, at Rogers said. “The results really support that it was a beneficial move for us.”
Beyond the convenience of using a platform that is at a user’s fingertips, he said that one of the benefits of using Messenger for consumers is that the back-and-forth conversation is ongoing, so consumers can ask questions and get a response at their convenience — and a history of the conversation remains, unlike the live chat support tool on Rogers’ website.
Facebook has also announced that the company will be selling concerts tickets through Ticketmaster on the social network.