Bots development has been around for sometimes. These apps are designed to automate services without much human beings intervention. This has many advantages. For example:
- A bot will not call in sick
- It is consistent
- It is designed to communicate with other artificial intelligence gadgets and apps.
- It can improve a company’s profits
An example of how bots work is what happens when you call customer care of a company. In most cases, you don’t immediately talk to a real human being. Instead, a bot will guide you through a series of self-service menu by asking you to key-in particular numbers whereby you are redirected to the relevant area where your problem may be solved – all these without dealing with a real person. It is only at the end of the available bot menu that you may be given a number to key in order to speak to a real human customer care person.
Now what Facebook has done is something akin to this. However, their bot app development is so advanced that what I have just described is considered ‘old school’ in comparison. The Facebook Messenger bot platform allows businesses to have many opportunities in what they can do with it.
Why should this be of interest to you as a bot developer?
Top on the list is that companies need your expertise in order to benefit fully from this Facebook development. The numbers associated with Facebook Messenger tell the story. For example there are over 900 million active users who make Facebook Messenger part of their social media communication tool each month. So as a bot developer in this field, the potential number of people you can reach is phenomenal.
The aim of Facebook as a company is to make their messenger bot platform an economic hub. Other than offering a customer service interface, it aims at, or may have already started, using it as a transport arrangement tool with some of the world’s renown companies in this field already engaged. The hospitality industry is another area that has embraced it.
The platform has so many current and potential uses that will offer customers a ‘shopping mall’ experience where so many services (even money transfer) will all be available under one app.
Another reason why you should become a Facebook messenger bot developer is that Facebook has made things easier for you on the development field. Here you build your bot inside Facebook’s wit.ai Bot Engine. This creates a good user experience because customers will not need to install many different apps about the same company. Instead they will only have to get to the Facebook Messenger and get all the information they need in one place.
To get customers to know about your bots on Facebook Messenger, Facebook is supporting you through:
- Links to your Facebook page
- Phone links to your customers (those who have allowed you to do this). This ascertains that you are matched with the right customers.
- Messenger (image) codes that allow visual identification of your business
- Buttons that open conversation between your customer and your business.
These are just a few of the reasons why you should become a Facebook Messenger developer and reap from the many advantages offered by doing so on the Facebook Messenger bot development platform.