How does selling more arrangements while having customer service questions answered at the same time sound? What if you could accomplish all this without lifting a finger? As more brands start relying on messenger bots to take care of low-level customer questions and extensions of their online catalogs, business owners are seeing a productivity boost from their employees who have time to focus on more pressing issues.
In the floral industry specially, a Facebook Messenger bot can answer close to 80 percent to 85 percent of your customer service questions. These can be inquiries such as directions to your shop, delivery boundaries, and if you go a little more in-depth, when the arrangement was delivered and who signed for it.
On top of freeing up your employees from answering basic questions all day, bots can also help your customers find the exact arrangement they’re looking for easily by color, flower type, or occasion, and send them right to a shopping cart to checkout.
Messenger bots also offer a feature called broadcasting. Broadcasting allows your bot to send a message directly to your customers and produce more sales by reminding them of discounts, upcoming design classes, subscription services, and even lets them set their own reminders for personal dates to remember.
The most impressive thing about broadcasting to your customers is the open rates. With email you may get up to 30 percent of your emails opened, with even less clicking through to your site. With a Facebook Messenger bot, that open rate increases to more than 75 percent and your customer already has your products in front of them.
The important thing is to get your customer to the arrangements or the answers they want in a timely fashion. The rule of 3’s — making sure a customer only has to click three times to find a solution — usually works best in this case, eliminating multiple clicks that frustrate the customer more than getting them to the resolution they need. Just in case, there will always be a way for your customers to speak with a live person if they’re having problems finding the answers to their questions.
It’s important to note that while you can still have a Facebook Messenger bot built right now, Facebook is improving their systems for verifying them and temporarily won’t be able to add new bots during that short time period. While there are multiple platforms that can help you get stated creating a bot, I recommend hiring a professional, which can cost between $800 and $1,200 (more if there is a massive catalog of products, in-depth coding for special features, and multiple adjustments to the bot itself).
When employees have more time to be productive in your shop, your entire business runs more efficiently.
Editor’s Note: Jeff Higgins is certified on multiple industry leading platforms, a contributor to Social Media Today, Hacker Noon, Art + Marketing, top writer in Social Media on Medium, Sprout Social Elite All Star, and the social media Director at Bloomerang Solutions. Read his column on updates to social media in the latest issue of Floral Management.
