Did you know that Chatbots can be integrated into XMPie-powered omnichannel campaigns to maximize the customer experience and drive customer acquisition?

If you’re a social media user, you’ll know how powerful social platforms are for sharing information and communicating, not only with friends and family but also businesses. One of the major social platforms today – Facebook – is used by many consumers, including myself, to interact with favorite brands. Whether it’s to ask a question or to provide feedback, Facebook makes it very simple to get in touch with a brand.

1.3 billion people are using Facebook messenger, and over 2 billion messages are sent between consumers and businesses every month. That’s a lot of consumers and messages – and a big opportunity for brands.

It’s an opportunity that needs an action plan to make it successful. The most critical part of a brand-consumer interaction on Facebook is response time. Consumers crave interaction. They won’t wait around for days for a response – in most cases, if they don’t hear within an hour or two, they’ll move on elsewhere. Failing to respond promptly is unhelpful to the consumer and might lead to lost business.  But from a business perspective, it may not make financial sense to have your staff responding to social inquiries around the clock.

There is another option that makes it easier for businesses to be responsive, without staff covering the platform 24/7.

Chatbots and XMPie

Enter the chatbot. The chatbot or conversational agent, uses a variety of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to communicate with consumers. There are a variety of different platforms and solutions that can be used as standalone messaging applications or used in other ways.

Because the XMPie platform is built with open software architecture, it’s possible to integrate chatbots into XMPie-powered omnichannel campaigns to maximize the customer experience. Based on the conversation, the context and specifics of the consumer’s intent, combined with the brand and marketing data, a chatbot can present back very detailed and targeted information that can add real value to a conversation.

Here’s where integrating XMPie-powered consumer journeys with chatbots can take a campaign to another level.  Regular chatbots are great at handling realistic conversations.  But if the consumer asks for content that is relevant to their inquiry, such as a product brochure for a specific product, the consumer should receive something personalized back.  The marketer shouldn’t aim to give their prospects a standard brochure in this situation, because after all, the consumer could go and download that by himself from the brand’s website.

By integrating chatbots with the XMPie platform, marketers can interact with consumers in an entirely different way and give them relevant and real-time information.

XMPie Facebook Chatbot

To better illustrate this integration, we’ve prepared an XMPie Facebook test page with an automated chatbot integrated into XMPie.  But before you race over to Facebook to try it out, I’ll walk you through how it works here:

As with everything we do, we’ll start with the data. Traditionally, we take a database and feed it into an omnichannel campaign that includes print and digital touchpoints, but in this case, we’ll do things a little differently.  Because we want to gain a better understanding of the consumer during the campaign: who they are and what their intent is, we’ll use our chatbot to help build our database as we go.  Thanks to AI, the chatbot knows how to interact with the consumer, asking all the appropriate questions it needs to determine what relevant, personalized content to send to the consumer in real time to get what it needs to build out the database or continue the customer journey. Our chatbot isn’t the brightest bot there is, but that is only because we haven’t trained it to be – this is a demonstration to inspire you.

Our chatbot journey begins with the Facebook user answering the bot’s first question –

Would you like to experience how an automated chat on Facebook can be integrated into an XMPie campaign?

If the answer is yes, the bot will explain the process to the Facebook user and begin to ask some questions. What’s interesting here is that this chatbot is working directly inside Facebook, so it already has access to your Facebook data: your name, gender, etc. and we can immediately start to personalize the experience.

During the demonstration, the chatbot is interacting (using a playbook type conversation) with the consumer to understand the consumer’s intent and collect any data that it needs to fulfill the request. When the chatbot has obtained the information it needs – it passes this data over to Circle which takes over and automates the next phase of the conversation. XMPie Circle is software for designing, deploying, automating and measuring personalized omnichannel marketing campaigns and is an important part of the XMPie platform.

As you’ll experience, the chatbot works in real-time, which is essential for helping the consumer get what he’s looking for, precisely when he’s looking for it. The chatbot also gives the brand another way to ensure that it’s providing consumers with timely and memorable customer experiences.

Give our XMPie Facebook chatbot a try today by clicking on ‘send message’ button on the page and saying ‘hi’, ‘hello’, ‘hey’ or ‘hola’. Once the first demo finishes, try asking for a flyer!

No-one is hiding behind the scenes typing everything in, but it is monitored, so you never know when someone might jump in.  It’s all being driven by a bot that is handling numerous conversations at the same time! Let us know what you think by writing a comment below or get in touch to schedule a demo!