So you’ve built your chatbot, brought it to light and made it public, and now you’re going to delete it? Grrr, wait! Why are you going to delete it? You just built it!

We all know this scenario. You took the step to build your chatbot, worked on perfecting, then brought it to light so people would start benefiting from your masterpiece of software, but bam – no one used it at all! And so; you just throw that artwork in the trash and delete your chatbot.

After all, the reason why we build bots is for our users to use them; whether it’s to answer their concerns, serve them, or sell to them. 

If our users never use our bots, then our bots are… *I don’t even want to say it* but… a waste cost, time, effort, and precious precious code. I had to said it 🤷🏻‍♂️

Why Aren’t Your Users Using Your Chatbot?

How did that masterpiece go waste? Let’s think of all the possible reasons that can drive someone to stop using your chatbot. 

1. Your users don’t understand your bot: As we said in our last blog post, always track how well your users understand your bot and interact with it based on that, so you can upgrade it to be more understandable.
2. Your bot is not of much help: What’s the point of a very understandable chatbot if it’s useless? Chatbots should either assist, serve, sell to, or at the very least entertain users. These are the basic chatbot uses.
3. Your bot is hard to reach: Your bot is amazing, but people don’t know how to reach it or you made it too hard. The bot shouldn’t only be reachable through going on Facebook, clicking on the “Send Message” button, and clicking on “Get Started”.

How Can I make My Chatbot More Reachable?

Why do ads on social media, television, radio, or even billboards work? Let’s take a beverage company for an example. You’re driving on the highway, and you see a billboard for that beverage. Then it’s on the radio, maybe also on the TV, and perhaps on social media. It’s everywhere! 

So now, you’re craving that beverage. You know which beverage I’m talking about.

Now, I know what you might be thinking of: No, don’t put a billboard for your chatbot for sure. So 90s 🙅🏻‍♂️

Your chatbot is already on Facebook. Imagine every time someone checks your website it prompts him to interact with it. A dream, right? Well, not anymore!

Using Facebook Native Plugins to Make Your Chatbot Easily Reachable

You can use several Facebook plugins to make reaching your chatbot easier than ever. Here’s some of them that work like magic.

1. The Customer Chat Plugin

This plugin allows you to integrate your Messenger experience directly into your website. Amazing, right? Allowing your users to interact with your business anytime with the same personalized experience they get in Messenger, or even complete a conversation with they originally started on Messenger. Read more about and apply it from here.

2. The Send to Messenger Plugin

This plugin is used on your website to trigger a specific authenticated event to your chatbot. It literally directs your users to use your chatbot on Messenger easier than ever! Read more about and apply it from here.

3. The Message Us Plugin

Similar to the Send to Messenger Plugin, the Message Us Plugin also gets embedded on your website to send visitors directly to start chatting with your chatbot. (Imagine how driving all or most of the traffic your website gets to your bot would grow it!) Read more about and apply it from here.

4. The Checkbox Plugin

Now this plugin is tricky and the good kind of tricky ones too! When your users are filling a form on your website, there will be a checkbox for them to opt-in to subscribing to your chatbot. Read more about and apply it from here.

Bonus, Simple Hacks

Other than Facebook plugins, there’re some simpler (somehow too simple) hacks you can use to help growing your bot. 

1. The Customized Messenger Links (m.me links)

Rather than like a gazillion number in your Messenger bot link, you can create a customized Messenger m.me link that should usually be your business name [https://m.me/(Business Name)]. That way, people can almost never forget how to reach you again. Read more and apply it from here.

2. Using The Proper Built-In Call-to-Action (CTA)

Using Facebook Pages’ built-in call-to-action button to prompt people to send a message to your page to immediately start using your chatbot when they visit your page.

To setup your call to action button: 

• Click + Add a Button below your page’s cover photo.
• Select a Contact you (Send Message) button from the dropdown menu.
• Select Send Message.
• Click Next.
• Select Messenger and click finish.

Once the button has been created, you can test your button:

• Hover over your button.
• Select Test Button.

3. Utilizing Your Cover Photo

Use the Facebook cover photo (or video, go crazy!) to say: “Hey guys, we have a chatbot and it’s usable here and it does this, and this, and that.” Otherwise, how will they know you have a one right under your cover photo?

Pro Tip: Even better, there’s an option in Facebook Pages settings that prompts a chat pop-up with your bot whenever your fans visit your page.

That’s a lot of growth hacks actually, use all or one at least, and watch your chatbot never getting lonely again!

Let’s Get Started

Why do we need chatbots analytics? We, as humans, need feedback to be able to understand where we’re excelling and what we need to work on; we need a little bit of guidance to know which way to go.

Chatbots are no different. In order to build, create, and successfully manage a chatbot, you need to pause every now and then and check how your bot is performing: what’s working, what isn’t, what can stay and what needs to go.

Otherwise, your bot will never evolve, and at some point, will most probably give you little to no ROI.

Which is why you need to analyze the results of your efforts, to understand more and improve inevitably.

What Do I Analyze?

There’re always specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can track and analyze in order to understand your bot efforts better.

Those are four basic, essential metrics you can track to understand your bot better. Those metrics are more focused on tracking your engagement and retention rates.

Based on your industry and needs, you can track other metrics such as engaged users, total conversations, retention rate, and user satisfaction.

The most important, basic KPIs are as follow:

Active Users

You need to know how your bot is performing in general; how many people are talking to your bot actively? Moreover, how many people are using your chatbot on a regular basis? more importantly, how are people finding your chatbot?

Besides tracking the active users, you also need to track the new ones, the engaged ones, as well as the new engaged ones.

Session Length

How long do people interact with your bot? Let’s face it, some bots are boring, some are annoying, and some are pretty fun! You need to observe how much time people spend chatting with your bot, and what is affecting their session length.

A long session doesn’t necessarily mean your bot is performing well, and vice versa. A long session can mean your user and bot couldn’t understand each other; meanwhile, a short session can mean your bot is so efficient that the user was able to benefit from it straight away.

Which is why you sometimes need to skim through the chats to understand your bot’s performance even better.

Chatbot Ratings

What’s a better way to know what people think of your chatbot than actually asking them? Listen to your users to ratings to your chatbot because it may raise a flag for you when your users are suffering, or reassure you when everything with it is fine.

Chatbot Fallback Responses

Fallback responses are the automated messages your chatbot uses when it doesn’t understand the user’s input. Now, think, how many times does your chatbot not understand the user? You need to track those because it’s a major red flag if your chatbot uses a lot of fallback responses.

Now, How Do I Measure These Things?

Measuring those on your own is exhausting and will most probably be pointlessly inaccurate. Based on that, you now have the below options:

1. Native Facebook Messenger Insights.
2. Third-party tools.
3. The bot funnel.

1. Using The Native Facebook Insights Analytics

You can use the “Messages” tab present in the Page Insights section on your page to track how your messages are performing. The insights here will be very similar to the normal Facebook Pages insights.

You can also use Facebook Analytics tool as it now supports Messenger bots to track how your bot is performing.

If those metrics are not enough for you, you can use third-party tools for more profound metrics.

2. Using Third-party Chatbots Analytics Tools

Third-party tools come with a variety of options, and each one is inevitably different. Deciding which tool(s) to use depends on your needs as well.

Here are our pick for chatbots analytics tools:

• Dashbot

Dashbot provides bot-specific analytics and comes packed with a lot of features, including but not limited to: conversational analytics, audience demographics, user behavior analytics, comparison metrics, and more.

• Chatbase

Chatbase is Google’s chatbot analytics platform that can also be used to build AI-powered virtual agents and provide analytics for those agents.

Being a Google product, Chatbase naturally comes packed with suggested intent and machine learning features, A/B testing features, transcripts, reports, integrations, and much much more.

• BotAnalytics

BotAnalytics is a conversational analytics tool focused on analyzing engagement and retention measurement for chatbots. Some of the breathtaking features of BotAnalytics include but are not limited to analytics & user/conversation metrics, segmentation of conversations, and funnels & events analysis.

• BotMetrics

BotMetrics is characterized by its simple API that allows you to track your bot with one simple request. With a simple dashboard, conversation analysis, and retention tracking. BotMetrics is quite different.

• StatsBot

Statsbot is an analytics software designed to easily work with raw data stored in modern data warehouses. It queries and transforms data and does background jobs to optimize heavy calculations for better performance.

• Statbot

Statbot is a powerful Discord statistics bot with a web dashboard you can track messages, voice, member flow, invites and much more.

3. Using Bot Funnels

What is a bot funnel?

Quite similar to the marketing funnel, a bot funnel is used to track how successfully the user is interacting with the bot.  

Why bot funnels?

The important thing about bot funnels is that not only do they provide you insights on how your bot is performing, but more importantly, they give you deep insight on how to improve it.

You can use the bot funnel in any of the three ways below:

1. Organically using the bot funnel

This is the standard, basic bot funnel that you can use. However, you can make your own bot funnel, decide what is the start point and end/success point in your funnel that means your user’s interaction with the bot was successful. And use basic metrics or just track conversations to identify where exactly your user is in your bot funnel.

The con about this is that it might be inaccurate and is definitely exhausting.

2. Using the bot funnel through Facebook Analytics

Inside Facebook Messenger Insights, there’s an organic bot funnel section. Through which, you can choose the metrics that form your bot funnel, and track your user’s position in the funnel based on that.

The only con to that is that you’re tied up to Facebook’s metrics, which are relatively limited.

3. Using the bot funnels through third-party tools

Just like with Facebook Messenger Insights, there is also an organic bot funnel inside most of (if not all of) third-party analytics tools.

The super-pro with using third-party analytics tools is that they’re extra-customizable when it comes to the metrics you choose to track.

However you choose to track your bot’s success, now you know the most important things you need to know about chatbots analytics from the why to the where to the how.

Let’s Get Started

Facebook changes its policies very frequent. And if you don’t keep up with those updates, you might be super shocked when something suddenly changes.

The recently announced Facebook’s subscription messaging updates are set to change the lives of anyone who has a chatbot on Facebook very soon, which is why we’re here to let you know everything you need to know about it!

Facebook Messaging Policies: Present and Future

Present

The most important messaging updates were as follows:

The Standard Messaging (24+1) Policy: This policy states that you can send promotional and non-promotional messages to your user if the message you send lies within a 24-hour window from the last time the user interacted with the bot. Inside the 24-hour window, you can send as many messages as you’d like, however, outside of the window, you can only send one message.

Of course, for every rule, there’s a workaround. When it comes to the 24+1 policy, the workaround is something called Message Tags. Message tags can tag your message as a different, Facebook-eligible tag, making it possible to send messages overlooking the 24+1 policy. You can know more about the message tags here.

Other than the message tags loophole, you can only send messages overlooking the policy if they’re sponsored.

Non-promotional Subscription Message Tag: Speaking of message tags, one very important tag is the “Non-promotional Subscription” tag. This tag allows sending messages for subscription purposes, such as when sending broadcast messages. However, this comes with a twist. Because in order for a page to be able to send non-promotional subscription broadcast messages, a page has to apply for the subscription permission. To do so, if the page is using an application that has app-level subscription permission, they can use the app’s permission.

Since Facebook had granted chatbots built on our platform this app-level subscription permission, you didn’t have to worry about applying for the permission, until now.

Future

During the latest Facebook F8 conference, Facebook announced that somethings are going to change regarding this permission. As per the previous subscription permissions update, after June 30th 2019, any page wants to send its users’ broadcasts using the non-promotional subscription tag has to apply for its own page-level permission. As the app-level permission won’t cover it anymore.

This means if you want to continue sending your subscribers non-promotional subscription broadcasts, you’ll have to apply for the page-level subscription permission.

(Quick tip: If you’d like to apply for the page-level subscription permission, you can read all about and know how to apply for here.)

Bummer, right? But…

Do I really need the subscription messaging permission?

The subscription messaging permission is not a general need; meaning that it has specific use cases for you to need it. And if your bot doesn’t classify as one of those use cases, then you don’t need to apply for the permission.

The subscription messaging use cases are:

1. News: Informing your users about important/recent events in all categories of news, sports, politics, or entertainment as an example.

2. Productivity: Helping your users with their own personal productivity through reminders or managing their calendar.

3. Personal Tracking: Providing your users with data that helps them track data about themselves, for example, data about their health.

Other than these three use cases, you wouldn’t need the subscription messaging permission.

What do I do if I need the subscription permission?

Now, if you realized your page needs the page-level subscription permission and you’d like to apply for it, you can read all about it and know exactly how to apply for from the previously mentioned link.

We feel though the need to clarify the below cases, though:-

– If you already have the page-level subscription permission: Hooray! You don’t need to do anything, and you can start using since the new permission activation date (June 3oth 2019)

– If you have already applied for the page-level subscription permission: You don’t need to apply again, and all the best with getting accepted.

– If you have applied for the permission and for some reason it wasn’t accepted: You will no longer be able to use the Non-promotional Subscription tag. However, you can still use the Update tag to send promotional broadcast within the 24-hour window. Other than that,  you’d need to use sponsored messages to send the same updates.

Other than this, you still have access to the other 16 message tags that cover many use cases that you may use broadcasts for. (You can find them all through this link)

Let’s Get Started

This post was originally put together by Merna Mustafa.

Staying updated with news is hard because there’re so many sources and so many news that makes you inevitably get lost in the middle. Staying updated with technology news is even harder, because the speed the industry goes with and the new things get rolled out every day!

And while chatbots are now a major tool that can definitely change the course of your business, you need to stay up-to-date with its news, to maximize the benefit you can gain out from it.

That being said, we’ve combined you a list of some of the best chatbots & AI resources to keep you always updated.

Starting off with what we know best, Chatbots

1. Chatbots Magazine

Chatbots Magazine is one of my favorite resources for chatbots news. From in-depth articles into features of chatbots that can benefit you and why, to more educational articles & announcements, and coverage of chatbot events; Chatbots Magazine really has it all.

2. Chatbot News Daily

Chatbot News Daily has a more intense focus on the part where chatbots and business collide and their articles are very interesting.

3. Chatbots Life

Chatbots Life is a great source for educational guides and informative articles that can really teach you a lot: strategy, tips & tricks, and tutorials.

4. BotList Blog

BotList is like the ultimate bot directory where you can find a listing of a large number of chatbots on a large number of platforms. Their blog is a great resource for when you’re researching or looking for inspiration. You’ll also find there a bot-loving community and nice guides.

5. Botsociety Blog

Botsociety is a conversational design platform that really masters conversational design (our personal fave!), and their blog is no different. Focusing on features or just discussing ideas, Botsociety blog blows our mind off with its “Ideas” articles, not to mention we absolutely love its color scheme.

And now moving to AI

6. TOPBOTS

TOPBOTS main focus is the intersection of Applied AI and business within all branches of business, in addition to design and technology in general. It’s a great blog for anyone in business to learn from and follow.

7. AI Weekly

AI Weekly is a newsletter that emails you every week with the latest AI news and the best resources they come across as well. Talk about a smart inbox!

8. AI Trends

AI Trends gives strong newspaper vibes. You’ll find a nice variety of articles on AI whether it’s case studies, resources, business news, or really complex AI articles that I wouldn’t understand a word of but someone else definitely will.

9. Artificial Intelligence Blog

Artificial Intelligence Blog has nearly everything when it comes to AI; they’re talking resources, books, researches, news, conferences’ coverage, and a lot of educational articles that’ll teach you everything about AI. It’s a library on its own!

Bonus

10. UX Chat Bear

UX Chat Bear is not only a great resource but also a very entertaining one. Get all the handy, useful tips related to conversational UX by chatting with a bot bear who’s really fun to chat with.

11. UI Movement – Chatbots Tag

UI Movement is where you’ll always find ideas for your chatbot (and mobile app) UI design, it’s a great source of inspiration for anyone building, designing, and perfecting their chatbot masterpiece.

We know it may still be tricky to keep updated with news on everything new with chatbots & AI, but we hope to have helped with this listing

Let’s Get Started

How often have you heard of artificial intelligence lately? Whatever is going on in the world, it’s inevitable nowadays for us to live hand-in-hand with artificial intelligence.

Your ability to learn from your surroundings and past experiences is often referred to as intelligence. Based on that, artificial intelligence is defined as the theory and development of computer systems to be able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. Meaning that a computer system can be called intelligent it has the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experiences.

It may seem like AI wouldn’t affect or reach you, but the truth is that it is all around us and growing contributing to our daily lives.

A large part of your modernized life is artificial-intelligent-dependent somehow, from your smartphone’s voice assistant to even the music streaming & transportation apps you use. Most of the companies that are now global and multinational, apply AI in one way or another.

This industry guide is here to serve as your quick and simple elaborator to the world’s everlasting technology trend.

What is AI?

As mentioned earlier, Artificial Intelligence is any machine’s ability to learn from input, past experiences, and analysis.

AI depends mainly on data as it takes a large sum of data to not just teach a machine something, but to educate it this thing so well that it starts making
predictions and conclusions about of its own; as the machine be able to think based on these data.

Believe it or not, but AI has been in development since the ’50s of the last century, and still developing every single day!

AI branches into two types: Narrow AI and General AI

In a  nutshell, Narrow AI is all the AI technologies we’ve reached so far. From voice detection to sentiment analysis, responding to questions and carrying on semi-human conversations, to being able to carry out tasks that require organization or detection. Basically, Narrow AI is a machine being able to carry out the tasks you programmed and prepared it to do smoothly, one task a time.

On the other hand General AI is hugely different, as General AI is what we haven’t been able to reach with machines yet, and it’s probable that we never be able to do. But it’s essentially when the machines are able to perform intellectual tasks that a human being can; after providing them with relevant data and learning from past experiences (hence the term: Machine Learning).

It’s estimated that in case General AI ever sees the light, it won’t be before several years from now. And Since General AI has not seen the light yet, any AI you see or hear of so far is Narrow AI.

There’s a lot of knowledge lies between a science as big as Artificial Intelligence, but it mainly can be categorized to 6 main subfields according to IntelliPaat. So here are some of them:

1- Machine Learning: Machine learning is basically a machine’s ability to learn from the examples and experiences it understands from the data it receives.

From Machine Learning Deep Learning branches out, which basically focuses on analyzing more layers and layers of patterns of data as in the neural networks of an actual human brain.

2- Cognitive Computing:  Cognitive computing focuses on imitating the thinking patterns, process, and methods that occur in the human brain within a computer.

3- Computer Vision: Computer Vision is a machine’s ability to see, recognize, understand, and process images.

4- Natural Language Processing (NLP): Natural Language Processing is a machine’s ability to process a specific language like a human can do.

Now that we’ve given an overall brief about AI, do you think it can benefit an Arabian business? The answer is: Definitely yes! And with a twist, it can do so much more than that.

Our twist on AI: Arabic

Arabic is the fifth most spoken language in the world with over 300 million global speakers increasing every minute, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations (UN). Through Arabic, you can guarantee reaching almost everyone in the Arab world and even millions in other countries.

But Arabic comes with challenges…

Arabic is a language that is so rich in vocabulary, which can make it difficult for several people to deal with, how about machines? And here lies the first challenge. Another thing that makes it really hard for people to use Arabic is the fact that it’s also rich in different slangs.

A word can mean a very normal thing in the Egyptian slang, for example, but be extremely offensive to someone in another slang as the Syrian one.

Another challenge that faces Arabic is its multi grammatical rules and structure of the sentences, that give other various possibilities to creating different meanings from.

Arabic + AI = 📈

When it comes to AI in Arabic, that’s a whole new level! Because as mentioned earlier most of AI fields need submitting massive amounts of data that machines can learn from. And as Arabic has a lot of slangs, that brings us to real challenge as it’s already difficult for a machine to learn one slang with one meaning of a language, how about learning multiple slangs with different meanings for the same language?

Gathering & training a machine with this kind of data is very difficult, but once you’ve done, you’ll have basically won everyone who speaks Arabic as your loyal customer. Because if you’re a business dealing with a lot of Arabic speakers, using AI technologies in Arabic helps you reaching your customers better, acquiring them faster, and leveraging your relationship with them as they feel understood.

Talking to someone in their native language (and slang) is always a plus as it puts you automatically on the top of their list, because at the end of the day, all types of customers just want to be understood faster and addressed more appropriately. Your customers will feel connected to your brand.

Wrapping up, AI technologies (in general) can improve your customer relationship and sales. Add the native language factor to the equation, and you just won your customers’ relationship game!

Let’s Get Started

Chatbots are one of the tweaks of technology that are currently raving our world. There isn’t a place on the internet now where you won’t come across a chatbot, whether it’s to help you, to sell to you, to remind you of something, or just to give you a laugh.

Why are chatbots so common nowadays?

Did you ever think why do people start using a chatbot, especially if you’re a business owner? You must have once wondered why so many businesses of all sizes are now obsessed with chatbots. In case you’re wondering, no, this is not just to keep up with technology or to “seem cool to be up-to-date”. It’s because chatbots can bring a lot of qualitative & quantitative benefits to your business. Let’s dig in them!

How can a chatbot boost your business?

There’re endless ways a chatbot can benefit a business, of course these ways are variable according to the features and functions of that bot; nevertheless, they’re still super beneficial by any means.

1- Interacting In Your Users Own Slangs

Chatbots bring very important value to the table when it comes to customer relationship, as they can interact with the user’s own slang in a near-human level and many other slangs coming from the same chatbot. This benefit is one of the benefits that can only limited tools as chatbots do, if none any other.

2- Engaging & Personalizing

There’re two things customers love more than anything: feeling special and offers. A chatbot can make your customers feel extra special when responding to their inquiries instantly and solving their requests immediately. Without you having to interfere yourself at all, it’s available 24/7 anyway.

Not just that, but also messages sent from the chatbot can be customized to the extent of every single user with their previously stored data, imagine the possibilities you can do with such a tool!

3- Taking Your Customer Service to The Next Level

Having a chatbot under your communication(s) channel’s belt can introduce your business to a new level of customer service. Think with me of a customer service agent who can respond to *all customers* in *any language* at *the same time*? I think you just hired a whole new department of customer service agents for the cost of a one.

4- It’s Your Little Perfect Salesman

Your chatbot can close sales faster than any salesman; instant replying and the ability to immediately find the product the customer is asking for on the website, ordering it for them, and completely close the sale in a matter of seconds are things that just challenge the abilities of the human salesman. And if it not closing sales every time, at least it’s not losing them.

5- Say “Hi” to Saving a Lot of Money

Welcome back my bank account! If there’s a slogan for chatbots, we think that should be. Because as we walked through their benefits, they can understand, engage, support, close deals, and do all these functionalities in the cost of one tool and one only for all of them.

Imagine how much money would you spend on that with manpower? Really, A LOT!

We’re just scratching the surface of the potential of chatbots and their great benefits for any business in any industry with these points, and you yourself can uncover even more potential if you build one yourself.

Let’s Get Started