.png)
Customer Chat Plugin - Facebook Messenger - A Step-by-Step Guide
When Messenger published the Custom Chat Plugin, I was pretty excited by the product’s potential. Their new Customer Chat Plugin increases customer engagement by allowing them to interact with your company directly on your website via Facebook Messenger.
What is the Customer Chat Plugin?
Roughly speaking, Messenger created a free live chat tool that’s connected to the messenger of your Facebook page! With only a few clicks you can add the Facebook Customer Chat Plugin to your website. Then, customers can, for example, ask questions in this chat and they can get an answer directly 24/7 with no delay.
For example, customers who ask questions after visiting your page are able to ask them.
However, as often the case, when you give an option to a user, they will have the tendency to use it… and that means deploying a community manager behind the conversations to answer questions. And that, that’s not scalable… but we will come back to that later.
In terms of marketing, the advantage of this Customer Chat Plugin is that the users who sent you a message can be contacted again through this same messenger. There are broadcast APIs that can send messages to potential customers with open rates ten times higher than emails!
In addition, customers who have asked questions also constitute a special audience in Messenger’s central advertising and can be retargeted on Facebook, Instagram and the entire Facebook advertising network. This is a hot audience that needs to be taken care of and traditionally has very good conversation rates.
But how do I respond to all these customers?
In parallel with this Plugin, Messenger has allowed the development of chatbots. More than 300,000 robots interact with users, 24/7. The idea is to connect a chatbot to a Facebook page, which will make it available in the Customer Chat Plugin and thus on your website.
Chatbots (chatting robots) answer automatically to your customers when they interact with your chat. Facebook made it easy and simple to implement such a chatbot via Messenger so your customers can easily send message that your robot understands.
How does this chatbot speak with my customers?
It’s possible to use natural language understanding algorithms to automatically respond to users’ questions and thus remove their last objections. The robot will understand the question and provide them with the correct answers. First, your customer’s message will be analysed by your chatbot’s IA.
With proper training the robot will understand some words and analyse them. Then, it will deduce your customer intent and provide them with the correct answers.
Don’t be afraid, this is now very simple and can be done with no code!
What are the use cases of this chat plugin?
Since you can completely customize your Facebook chat plugin, the use cases are infinite and depend on what your objectives are. Do you want to get more leads? Close sales? Automate your support?
Get more leads
Using a chatbot is great for getting leads, they are up and ready to answer user’s questions 24/7, day and night. In today's globalized world, this is even more important because your customer may be on the other side of the globe and your customer support can’t be up every time your customer needs you.
Configure your Chat Plugin to collect users’ contact information such as their phone number or their email address. With Ideta, you can even program your chatbot to send the information to your CRM so your sales team can contact your leads once they can.
Automate your FAQ
Before purchasing, 81% of customers conduct product research. This means that your landing page has to be clear and answer every customer’s hesitation. This can also be done by implementing a customer chat plugin to your website.
By providing your chatbot with answers for the most common questions, it helps enhance your customer experience. They will get answers to their queries in few second and without putting to much pressure on your customer support team
In summary?
By connecting a chatbot with Customer Chat Plugin, you will answer user questions, which generally helps increase conversation rates. You can also re-contact them via a newsletter on Messenger or through targeted advertising.
According to a Facebook survey, 64% of people assert that chatting through a messenger have made their exchange easier. Big companies have rapidly adapted and they integrated the Customer Chat plugin onto their website and their Facebook page. They rapidly see an increase in their customer satisfaction and engagement.
What about the drawbacks of this chat plugin?
In my opinion, the Customer Chat Plugin can be an excellent tool in B2C, but the connection to Facebook is mandatory, therefore limiting the reachable audience.
How can I install the Customer Chat Plugin?
Facebook made it really easy to add their Chat Plugin to your website. With only a few clicks you can enable messaging so your customer can speak directly to you while browsing.
Step One: Include Facebook’s SDK
Copy and paste Facebook’s piece of JavaScript into the HTML code of your website. Insert it directly after the opening body tag of each page you want your Customer Chat Plugin to appear.
This will install the Facebook SDK on your website. SDK means “Software Development Kit”, which is a set of software tools and programs given by Facebook to make their Customer Plugin easy to install
You can find the SDK, here.
Step Two: Whitelist your domain
Whitelist your domain on your Facebook page settings. Go to:
- Page Settings -> Messenger Platform -> Whitelisted Domains
- Enter your domain name
Step Three: Add it to your website
Add the Chat Plugin to your website by pasting the code and include the attribute you want. You can see what each attribute does here.
Step Four: Connect to Ideta
Connect your Ideta’s account to Facebook and publish your chatbot!
If you are not a developper, try this.
If you are not familiar with web development, you can also use the Setup Tool Facebook that Facebook provides. Go to:
- Page Settings -> Messaging -> “Add Messenger to your website” section
- Customize your chat
When you are finished, the setup tool automatically generates the code you need and you can copy and paste it to your website. You can also directly add your domain to your whitelist.
And that’s it, you are live! Your customer can now contact you through the Customer Chat Plugin and you can answer them live
You want to increase your Facebook Post Engagement? Check out our completely free auto comment & reply tool for Facebook!
