7 Ways to Win at Customer Service with a Customer Support Chatbot + Live Chat Support in 2020

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Marketing and Entrepreneurship

15 min readSep 18, 2019

Today you’re going to learn how to integrate a cost-saving, 24/7 customer support chatbot into your customer service operations.

By 2020, customer support chatbots will save businesses like yours $8 billion a year!

You can reap the cost-saving rewards of customer support chatbots today when you follow these techniques for building a useful customer service chatbot.

In this post you’ll learn:

When you’re done with this guide, you’ll know all the facts about customer support chatbots, who’s doing customer support bots right, and how to build the perfect customer support chatbot, aka the newest member of your CS team.

7 Immediate Ways Facebook Chatbots Benefit Businesses & Customer Experience (CX)

Gartner predicts that 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human by 2020.

Instead, self-service websites and automated technology like chatbot marketing make this prediction possible.

So…

What’s a customer support chatbot?

Chatbots are software programmed to do tasks automatically, inside a chat interface. A customer service chatbot automatically gets customers the information they need or resolves customer service issues. And when needed, a customer support chatbot escalates an issue to a live customer support agent.

How can chatbots improve customer service?

Here are 7 key ways to use Facebook chatbots to improve the customer service experience today.

Chatbots give customers instant answers, 24/7.
They decrease customer service costs for business.
They can seamlessly escalate issues to a live chat agent.
They can be used to automate customer care notifications (like order updates or shipping updates).
Customers can resume convos in Facebook Messenger any time, from any device.
Businesses can stay in touch and top of mind by sending follow-up messaging.
Customers get more personalized, interactive and engaging messaging experiences.

In a customer support role, a chatbot is there to automate a lot of the low-hanging fruit to save business costs.

After cost-saving automation is in place, the chatbot can do proactive customer care and marketing outreach.

And finally, a good customer service chatbot will pass the conversation off to a live human when customers need it.

Which leads us to …

Introducing MobileMonkey Live Chat! Here’s Where to Find It & How to Use It

Live chat in MobileMonkey launched this week!

You can now monitor active bot conversations or jump into any conversation directly in MobileMonkey.

To get to Live Chat in MobileMonkey, find the “Live Chat” menu item:

You can see all your conversations in the inbox, along with info about your contacts including:

Name
Locale
Conversation sessions
Tags
All custom attributes (searchable)

You can see the whole lifetime conversation, pause the bot and reply to people directly from here.

More functionality will be rolling out soon.

Check it out and let us know what you think. Feel free to leave a comment in the private group thread.

Live chat is a feature available in MobileMonkey’s free chatbot tools.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the Facebook chatbots doing great customer support for businesses across the web.

7 Best Customer Support Chatbots in the Wild & Lessons to Learn from Them

1. MobileMonkey Support Bot

Talk to the MobileMonkey Support Bot.

What’s to learn from the MobileMonkey Support bot:

Users can self select the issue they need support for.
Q&A triggers are set up for many common FAQs.
Engaging GIFs are sprinkled throughout conversations.
Personal support is offered when the bot doesn’t have an answer.

Here’s what this dialogue set up looks like in the MobileMonkey back end:

The “file a ticket” dialogue is made up of a quick question widget and some quick reply responses linked to follow up dialogues.

2. Search Engine Journal Virtual Assistant

Talk to the Search Engine Journal chatbot.

What’s to learn from the SEJ support bot:

Users who type “start” or “home” will return to the welcome menu.
Users will receive personalized updates based on their interests.
Q&A triggers like “advertise” will return info that the user is looking for.

3. Air France Virtual Assistant

Talk to the Air France customer support chatbot.

What’s to learn from the Air France support bot:

Users can self select the issue they need support for.
Q&A triggers are set up for many common FAQs.
Personal support is offered when the bot doesn’t have an answer.

4. Pizza Hut Messenger Chatbot

Talk to the Pizza Hut Instant Ordering chatbot.

What’s to learn from the Pizza Hut instant order bot:

Customers can complete an order using the chatbot!
Customers get updates as their order is being fulfilled.

5. Fandango Virtual Assistant

Talk to the Fandango customer support chatbot.

What’s to learn from the Fandango customer support bot:

Users can self select the issue they need support for.
Q&A triggers are set up for movies, theaters and other common issues.

6. Whole Foods Market Assistant

Talk to the Whole Foods chatbot.

What’s to learn from the Whole Foods chatbot:

Users can self select topics that help them become a more informed customer like recipes and store locations.
The recipe browser is a value added educational service.

7. Sephora Virtual Assistant

Talk to the Sephora customer support chatbot.

What’s to learn from the Sephora chatbot:

The bot offers a range of customer service support options, from appointment setting, virtual makeup looks and live agent takeover.
Bot dialogues are designed with visually interesting list widgets with graphics.

Tips from Top Brands: How to Be Successful with Customer Service Bots

1. Keep your people in the picture.

Set up triggers in the bot that customers can use to get in touch with a person. Trigger words for this purpose include “human” and “help”.

When your customers reach the dialogue that responds to requests for human help, set up an email alert that notifies the right person to jump into Live Chat.

Or set up an Zapier chatbot integration that sends the request to your customer support ticket system.

2. Create a menu of options to choose from, like a phone tree.

Customer service bots aren’t about AI or machine learning.

As much as possible, give users a chatbot customer experience with intentional paths.

Facebook recommends that, rather than allowing customers to send the bot open-ended text responses, businesses give users menu items to choose from.

Similar to a phone tree, give the people chatting with your bot the ability to tell you what they are looking for by sending them down a segmenting path.

3. Give customers every opportunity to segment themselves to find what they need faster.

The more your chatbot know about your customers, the better they can serve them the info and responses they’re looking for.

Set up bot dialogues with selection menus that allow them to locate info related to their issue.

This will give users a more personalized experience, too.

4. Make a regular habit of updating your Q&A triggers.

MobileMonkey saves all the customer responses that it doesn’t have a programmed answer to.

See the step by step process for setting up your customer support chatbot in the following section.

Once a week or once a month, whatever makes sense for your, assign answers to unanswered queries.

5. Be upfront to set expectations. Don’t try to hide that it’s a bot chatting.

You can avoid a lot of customer tension by being transparent when it’s a bot they’re talking to.

Truth of the matter is, 40% of customers just don’t care whether a chatbot or a human helps them — as long as they get the help they need.

Step-by-Step Process for How to Use Facebook Messenger Chatbots for Customer Support

Are you ready to program your own Facebook Messenger support chatbot? Here’s how to do it in 5 steps.

Program answers to your customers’ most common questions and issues.
Set up the integrations or alert system to address issues that need human support.
Make your customer support chatbot easily accessible on your website, app, and Facebook.
Include additional resources outside business hours.
Jump in with support agents and Live Chat takeover.

1. Program answers to your customers’ most common questions and issues

Given that your product support chatbot’s primary role will be answering simple inquiries, the first step in the process is creating a list of the questions and issues a bot could be used to address.

For example, if customers often reach out because they’ve forgotten their password, add this to the list. If they have trouble getting your product to work with a third-party integration, add that, too.

Once you have a list of straightforward product support inquiries, use them to build the foundation of your product support chatbot.

In the MobileMonkey Chatbot Builder, you can direct users to appropriate content by using Q&A triggers.

For example, let’s say one of your most common product support issues is that users forget their usernames and passwords.

First, you’ll need to create a page in your chatbot with the solution. This can include an introduction assuring the user that your chatbot can handle their issue, along with step-by-step instructions for the appropriate resolution.

With the Q&A feature, enter phrases like “forgot my password” and “forgot my username” as triggers, and the corresponding page as a response.

This way, your chatbot will be able to respond appropriately whenever users enter these phrases.

Alternatively, you can opt to provide links directly to resources on your website that address those issues.

This way, you won’t need to spend time adding step-by-step instructions into your chatbot, but can still speed up the process of getting users to the information they need.

While you’re working in the Q&A dashboard, it’s also a good idea to take a look at the “Unanswered Questions” listed in the right column.

This section shows all of the input your users have entered that your chatbot isn’t yet programmed to respond to.

Even if you choose to reach out to the customers who’ve asked these questions individually with responses, you can still add answers to your chatbot. This way, if more customers have the same question in the future, your chatbot will be equipped to answer.

2. Set up the integrations or alert system to address issues that need human support

And as you craft your responses, it’s a good idea to loop your support agents in on the writing process. They have experience responding to each of these inquiries, so that know how to address them in a way that satisfies your customers.

Although support teams are different for every company, there are a few types of inquiries that come up often in just about every industry. And the support employees that have been handling those inquiries can help you craft the best responses possible.

Of course, you’ll need to customize this response for specific features, and update your responses as new features roll out.

Then, as you organize your support chatbot, it can also be helpful to divide your pages and resources into categories.

For example, when a user indicates that they’re looking for product support from the MobileMonkey chatbot, they can choose from three general categories.

Structuring your chatbot with multiple-choice menus makes it easy for users to narrow in on the resources they need, so that your chatbot can provide an answer as quickly as possible.

Then, once a user selects a category, they’re given another set of options to choose from.

From there, the bot directs the user to resources tailored to their specific interest or issue.

Finally, it confirms that they’re satisfied with that resource — and offers cute monkey GIF for good measure.

This makes the process of finding answers not only fast and easy, but also much more engaging than navigating a standard self-service resource.

3. Make your customer support chatbot easily accessible on your website, app, and Facebook

Even the most well-designed product support features won’t help users if they can’t find them — so it’s important to make this part of your bot easily accessible for your customers.

The easiest way to do this is to add Product Support to your chatbot’s main menu.

For example, when a user interacts with the MobileMonkey chatbot in Facebook Messenger, Product Support is an option on the first menu they see.

If they select that option, they can jump straight into the process of finding the resources they need. This way, users can get the help they’re looking for quickly and efficiently — without wasting time clicking through multiple menus.

Once you’ve structured your menus the way you want, you can maximize the value of your product support chatbot by adding it to your website.

If your site runs on WordPress, you can add your chatbot to your site using MobileMonkey’s WordPress chatbot plugin. If your site runs on another CMS, you can add a chat widget using Google Tag Manager.

After installing your widget, your chatbot will appear in the lower right corner of your website on visitors’ screens, like you’ll find on Lincoln Davies Building Supply.

This way, your customers can get the support they need without visiting Facebook — and you can get even more value out of your investment in your chatbot.

4. Integrate additional resources outside business hours

Your company likely already has resources for your customers, ranging self-help articles and tutorials to troubleshooting information to videos and training courses to familiarize customers with your product.

Regardless of what your resources are, they can often be the perfect solution to customer support needs — and you can help users find them by including them in your product support chatbot.

For example, the MobileMonkey chatbot directs users to MobileMonkey Help Docs outside of live support office hours.

This way, users can look for the information they need in our searchable library of tips, videos, and FAQs.

You can do the same with your company’s website.

This not only helps users find information beyond your chatbot’s capabilities, but can also help you get more value out of your existing resources.

After all, creating in-depth guides, articles, and other resources requires serious investments of time and money. By directing users to those assets, you can maximize the value you see from each of them.

You can also make your resource inclusion strategy more effective by linking directly to individual resources or categories.

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that our Help Portal includes training videos, FAQs, and step-by-step instructions for bot building.

If a user indicated that they were specifically looking for one of those types of resources, we could link straight to the category pages to help them get to the appropriate page as quickly as possible.

Plus, with this approach, you can also integrate resources you host on other platforms.

Start by making a list of all of the training resources you’ve created for your customers. Then, determine where they fall in the support process, and add them to your chatbot where they make the most sense.

5. Jump in with support agents and Live Chat takeover

Even the most well-designed chatbot won’t be able to handle all of your customers’ product support needs, especially those that are particularly complex or unprecedented.

That’s why it’s also important to get your support agents involved with your chatbot and make sure that users can get in touch with them when necessary.

First, you’ll want to make sure that users have the option to contact your support team directly. Include links to your support resources in your chatbot, and make sure that customers know that they can opt to speak with a human via live chat or other channels if they want to.

Then, use live chat takeover to let agents step in via the new Live Chat in MobileMonkey. This feature has a few helpful purposes.

For example, let’s say a customer contacts your chatbot and your chatbot responds, but the user immediately stops engaging.

After a period of time, an agent can reach out to make sure that the customer was able to find the information they needed.

As soon as you step into a conversation, your chatbot will disengage and stop responding to that user’s input until there has been ten minutes of inactivity.

This ensures that there’s no overlap between your responses, and that users aren’t confused by receiving multiple answers to a single input. But as soon as you’re finished helping a customer, you can type “\return” and your chatbot will start responding again immediately.

This is helpful for situations in which your bot isn’t equipped to resolve a specific inquiry. An agent can easily step in and help that customer find the information they need.

For example, let’s say a user contacts your chatbot because they want to set up a demo of your product — but your bot isn’t equipped for this job.

But the conversation doesn’t have to end there. Because all of your chatbot’s conversations are visible in your Facebook Business Page inbox, you can see this brief interaction. Then, you can get involved by letting the user know that you’re a real person and asking how you can help.

This not only prevents the user from becoming frustrated, but is a great way to make sure you’re not missing out customers and leads just because your chatbot can’t provide all of the help they need.

Plus, even if an agent needs to step in, the user’s interaction with the chatbot can often speed up the process by collecting basic details about their issue.

This way, by the time the agent steps in, they’ll already have the information they need, and can get to work on providing a solution — without having to ask that customer to repeat the details of their situation.

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About the Author

Larry Kim is the CEO of MobileMonkey — provider of the World’s Best Facebook Messenger Marketing Platform. He’s also the founder of WordStream.

You can connect with him on Facebook Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram.

Do you want a Free Facebook Chatbot builder for your Facebook page? Check out MobileMonkey!

Originally posted on Mobilemonkey.com