Recently I awoke to an intense, pulsing pain in my lower abdomen. A few years ago, I would have had two options — go to the emergency room or an urgent care facility. Both are pricey. This time, I sought help from the telemedicine service covered by my health insurance plan, where I was able to call in and speak with a medical practitioner. They confirmed that I likely had a kidney stone and helped me understand the next steps to treatment.
It was a great service, but I had to wait about two hours for the call back from the medical practitioner… and that is a long wait when you’re in pain.
Getting help from a chatbot
What if I could have gone online and chatted with a doctor in minutes instead of hours?
I could have.
It turns out a number of medical chatbot applications are available — you install one on your phone, and you can get self-help diagnostic information for your ailments. It uses artificial intelligence to enable you to hold a conversation with a chatbot and get conversational answers to your medical questions. It can even connect you with healthcare providers in realtime.
How are companies using chatbots in marketing?
Dozens of large marketing-heavy institutions, including Uber and Kayak, are using chatbots to connect with their customers and sell more services.
Kayak, one of the most popular air and hotel booking platforms, allows you to interact with its chatbots via Facebook Messenger, Slack or Amazon Alexa. Kayak’s main website provides tools for searching airlines and hotels and then booking them directly. With their chatbots, they are taking their service even further: you can receive budget-driven recommendations, get updates on your already-planned trips, or evaluate the best time to travel to certain hotspots.
Chatbots are meant to be more interactive ways to communicate with potential customers, not merely a way to help close a sale. As such, Kayak has introduced more conversational functionality beyond simply booking travel.
Likewise, chatbots can be leveraged in more creative fashions to generate leads.
Using chatbots to generate leads
Traditional lead generation for both B2C and B2B marketing involves a lot of advertising and calls-to-action, such as “download this ebook,” to capture the lead for a sales follow-up.
Enter chatbots.
With 79 percent of online adults in the United States on Facebook, according to Pew Research, you have a strong probability that you can get your chatbot in front of your target demographic if you create a chatbot for Facebook.
Any product or service that has a high level of pre-purchase decision making, such as auto sales, real estate or enterprise software, can gain immense value from a chatbot. Because your prospective customer is likely doing a fair amount of online research into which product to buy, it makes sense to build a chatbot that helps answer questions for them, in a smart and conversational way.
Somewhere in the conversation your chatbot can offer a downloadable guide — all the prospective customer needs to do is provide some contact information, and the guide will be sent to them. Assuming your chatbot provides value to the consumer, when your salesperson reaches out to discuss the sale, they will have already had a favorable interaction with your brand.
How to get started building a chatbot
When I first looked into chatbots about a year ago, the chatbot builder solutions required some coding knowledge. Thankfully, that is no longer the case.
There are dozens of chatbot-building solutions out there, with two of the most popular for Facebook Messenger chatbots being Chatfuel and API.ai. Both of these solutions provide point-and-click, no-coding-necessary options for creating an interactive chatbot on the Facebook Messenger platform.
The big difference between Chatfuel and API.ai:
Chatfuel is super easy to get rolling with and does have a fairly robust feature set. I recommend it for beginners and small businesses who need an MVP (minimum viable product) they can try out quickly. For the DIY guide below, we will be using Chatfuel.
API.ai is a more robust solution, though it is still simple and requires no coding. I recommend it for organizations that have more resources and are looking for a more powerful chatbot that can interface with their ecommerce solution or other enterprise-level tools.
What do these tools cost? Both are free, up to a limit. Chatfuel says if you’re going to have more than 500,000 active monthly users, you need to sign up for a premium account. API.ai doesn’t specify what their limit is, which means they’ll likely add in features in the future which you’ll need to pay for. As of now though, both systems are more than generous in their free plans.
DIY guide to building your own chatbot
Now that you have a good understanding of what a chatbot is, how it can be used in lead generation, and the two leading platforms for building code-free chatbots, let’s jump into actually building one.
This is such a simple process that it can be done by anyone with at least some technical prowess and 10 minutes to spare.
Note: My “build it in 10 minutes” claim is not promising a chatbot that will wow your potential customers. But, it will be enough time to build and launch a very basic chatbot. To build a feature-full chatbot with some immersive artificial intelligence that can carry on strong conversations — that will require some considerable time and effort on your part. This time isn’t spent actually building the tool, but you will be spending considerable time writing content, forecasting what the most frequently asked questions are going to be, etc.
Step 1: Connect your Facebook account to the Chatfuel chatbot builder
This step is super easy. Make sure you’re logged into Facebook on the browser you’re going to connect to Chatfuel in. Then simply click the “get started for free” button on the Chatfuel homepage. It will bring up a Facebook connection page that allows you to give permissions to Chatfuel to see your Facebook information. You need to authorize it, and you’ll then be taken back into the Chatfuel chatbot builder, where you’ll select which Facebook page you want to connect to.
Step 2: Connect to your Facebook business page
Because chatbots are tied to organizations and not to individuals, you need to have an organization Facebook page that you use to tie your Chatbot to. If you don’t already have a Facebook page for the business you’re going to do marketing for, you should create one. Here’s a quick guide from Hootsuite to help you get started building a Facebook business page.
Alternatively, you can also click the “Create a Facebook page” button in the Chatfuel interface to set up your page at this step. However, setting up a Facebook page is very important, and you need to make sure you do it the right way, so I recommend going into Facebook to do it and using the above-linked guide. Then come back to Chatfuel.
Once you have a Facebook page, simply select it and you’re on your way.
Step 3: Walk through the in-app tutorial
Now that you’ve connected your page, you’ll be taken into the actual chatbot builder.
Chatfuel has a fairly detailed tutorial you can follow, though it’s not as good as this guide. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.2.1/72x72/1f642.png" alt="