Tips for Improving Your Customer Experience Through Messaging

1. Be brief. Most people will contact your Messenger bot on a mobile phone, where their physical environment, other apps or other threads in Messenger can be distracting. Anticipate interruptions and expect people to forget what they were doing. The easiest way to address this is to keep interactions short. When that’s not possible, consider how to maintain and reestablish context.
2. Finesse your format. Carefully consider the format that will create the most straightforward, intuitive experience for your audience. For most messaging systems, this is a combination of conversational and user interface (UI) interactions.
3. Construct your conversation. Be deliberate about language, voice, length of messages and even how fast your bot responds. If your Messenger bot supports both automated and human interactions, be clear about what’s happening to avoid creating a confusing experience. Learn more about general best practices.
4. Embrace structure. While recognizing free-form typed responses can be valuable, it can also be challenging to implement and tedious for people interacting with your bot. Make use of greetings, buttons, quick replies and the persistent menu to structure user input.
5. Be predictable. Provide a confirmation when a request is processed. Use the typing indicator to let people know when your bot is in-progress. Provide clear opt-in functionality for subscriptions.
6. Pass to support. If your audience messages a request that you don’t understand, suggest alternative routes to find the help they need. Offer an email address to contact customer support, if that’s available to you, or provide a phone number to help them reach better assistance.
7. Offer a unified presence. In general, it’s best to tie the identity of your Messenger bot to your existing Facebook Page, rather than creating a new one. This ensures people will have an easier time finding it and feeling confident it is you or your business.

Now it’s your turn to apply these tips to your conversations with customers. Learn more and get started with Messenger.