Messaging Bot – Features, Importance, and Use Cases

Messaging is now a key component of customer communication. And brands that understand the power of messaging often engage their customers better. Thanks to the chatbot, customer engagement has become incredibly easy and smooth. 

With a messaging bot, your business can reach the audience quickly, get responses swiftly and ensure value through each stage of the customer journey. More importantly, these bots have made omnichannel support a real possibility. 

And if your business too wants happy customers, a chatbot should always be the first thing to start with. It can keep you available 24×7 and help you attend to customers’ queries anytime and anywhere. 

In this blog, we will discuss everything about an AI messaging bot, its importance, features, and use cases across industries. 

What is a Messaging Bot?

A messaging bot is an AI-based computer program with the capability to stimulate human conversations. It can work as a digital assistant and communicate through voice as well as text. Such a bot can be deployed across websites, apps, and messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Twitter, or Facebook Messenger to converse with users.

One of the key features of an AI messaging bot is its ability to interpret the user intent, process the request, and offer quick answers. Plus, it can offer real-time answers to users without involving any human contact. This kind of bot can handle most forms of basic questions and when it can’t, the queries get transferred to a human agent.  

Importance of an AI Messaging Bot

The real value of a messaging bot lies in ensuring quality conversations between businesses and customers. It also enables great conversational experiences for users so that they never feel like talking to a machine. When such a bot is part of your support team, you end up adding value to every aspect of customer service. 

A messaging bot is a must-have tool for changing the way customer conversations are handled and it can prove significant for various reasons. 

• Contextual responses – An AI-powered messaging bot can understand the context easily and respond according to the merit and nuances of the queries. It comes with the power of natural language processing (NLP) technology and can deliver relevant answers. 
• Hybrid support – No chatbot can be accurate 100% of the time as customer queries tend to be complex. However, an intelligent bot has the feature to allow human handover for situations when it can’t comprehend the query. This is how it can enable hybrid support. 
• Personalized engagement– Quality messaging chatbots are often developed using AI and machine learning technologies and they also leverage the power of analytics. Both these components help it respond to queries based on the intent and ensure personalized conversations with users.  
• FAQ-trained answers – You can train the chatbot with FAQs and make it answer customers’ routine queries. In fact, bots can be trained over time to keep them advanced in terms of maintaining the flow of conversations.  
• Interactive conversations – Most chatbots come with great UI/UX and also with a simple and intuitive design. All this helps users find it easy to use the bot and also enjoy the touch of interactivity that conversations have. 

Top Features of a Messaging Bot

A messaging bot can always add great value to different aspects of your business be it sales, marketing, or support. It has a range of useful features together with AI and ML technologies that make it a top tool for businesses across industries. 

Some of the top features you should expect in a messaging include – 

• Visual Flow Builder – You can make a chatbot effortlessly when it has the visual flow builder feature as it enables zero-code bot building. It helps you design a bot directly on the platform with a drag-and-drop builder. 
• Omnichannel Messaging Support –  You can implement your bot in multiple channels and do smooth conversations with customers only when it supports this feature. Quality bots always come with an omnichannel messaging support feature. 
• Live Chat Handover – No chatbot can handle 100% of customer queries as they will be complex situations when human intervention is needed. For such scenarios, a bot should have a well-defined fallback option to transfer the chat to the human agent.   
• Sentiment Analysis – A powerful bot is one that is able to understand the mood of the customer through sentence structures and verbal cues. Thanks to the sentiment analysis feature, your chatbot can respond based on the mood of the customers. 
• Analytics – The analytics feature is key in getting valuable insights and analyzing all the chat conversations handled by the bot. When a bot has an analytics feature, you can easily measure the accuracy of the customer responses. 

Use Cases of A Messaging Chatbot

A messaging chatbot can serve a variety of purposes for your business. Whether you use it for boosting customer service or driving sales conversion, it can contribute to virtually every aspect of the business. You can use it to automate tasks and streamline operations. 

Your business can use a chatbot for many different types of use cases. 

1. Customer Engagement 

When it comes to taking customer engagement to the next level, nothing beats a chatbot. It can help you drive engagement based on the user data and this is how an engagement turns more relevant and interactive.   

There are conversational AI chatbots for delivering consistent answers to queries of any nature and ensuring relevant to your customer communication. More importantly, you can use a chatbot to offer quick and valid responses which can make customers stay longer on your site. 

Plus, the bot can start a conversation on its own without needing human intervention and deliver accurate answers to most queries. 

How can a chatbot boost customer engagement? 

• You can expect bots to engage customers, offer answers and analyze responses based on previous details and browsing history. This is how you can engage customers at a personal level and enhance their experience with your brand.  
• Whether you need to deliver real-time or one-on-one responses, a chatbot can always prove useful as it can do both together with maintaining the flow of conversations.  

2. Lead Generation 

Chatbots are so useful that they assist 55% of businesses in generating high-quality leads. 

A growing number of businesses now use chatbots to engage customers with personalized messaging and ensure value at each stage of the customer journey. Apart from engaging users, a bot can also prove quite effective in lead generation. 

In fact, you can guide customers at each step of the way and help them make quick decisions in regard to your products or service. You can deploy the bot on your website and provide help as and where needed. 

More so, a bot can automatically use a preset questionnaire to ask relevant queries at different stages and then encourage them to convert into leads.  

Tips to use a chatbot for lead generation 

• Bots can ask relevant questions from customers and this helps in qualifying leads. They can also direct the lead to the sales team for conversion. 
• You can also use a chatbot to help customers with appointment booking when the team is away. 
• A business can also expect a bot to help in better lead nurturing by giving personalized recommendations at key stages of the journey. 

3. Automate Social Support 

Social media is now a major platform for both brands and customers to engage. Users find social channels a quick and easy way to get help while companies feel happy to be where their customers are. 

Despite the ever-growing uses and popularity of social media, a lot of businesses make the mistake of either not taking this medium as seriously as they should or not addressing social comments at all. Resource crunch is always a big factor behind this. 

A chatbot can help a lot as it can ensure automated responses to queries of any nature. In fact, social messaging bots can converse with users automatically, guide them and offer help – all this can change the way brands approach social support. 

Best practices in using the bot for social media support   

• A chatbot can help you respond to social comments on time and this will definitely enhance the user experience with your brand. 
• You can use a social bot as an assistant and ensure real-time support on a platform that customers use the most these days.   

4. Conversational Marketing 

Customer interactions should never be ignored as they are key to a successful marketing strategy. And unless you can engage buyers on the website or app, how can you hope to achieve the sales goal you have in mind?

This is where a chatbot can help as it’s a very helpful tool for communication between customers and businesses. And when you have an AI bot as part of the support strategy, it means 53% of consumers are more likely to engage and shop with you. 

Plus, you can automate tasks using an AI-powered chatbot and improve customer engagement manifold. When you use chatbots for marketing, you can easily engage people through targeted messaging and this can drive the conversion rate. 

How can conversational marketing help your business?  

• Conversational marketing can prove very helpful in engaging with more leads as it gives visitors the freedom to start conversations on the website. 
• Bots won’t ask users to fill out a form or follow a fixed funnel route as they ensure quick and real-time responses which always enhances opportunities for marketing. 

5. Personalize the User Experience    

Customers want to feel special when they connect with your business or support team. The only way you can make them feel so is by personalization. If you’re able to personalize their overall experience with your brand, you will have ensured a great time with your brand.

Thanks to a messaging bot, you can not only personalize the experience but can also ensure relevant offers to them. To make this possible, your bot will have to use past data and browsing history. 

An AI chatbot is able to extract key customer data such as name, gender, location, past purchases, etc. to personalize the experience. 

Tips to use a chatbot to personalize the user experience 

• You can program your bot to start conversations with website visitors as doing this will help you get key customer details. 
• Chatbot surveys can be used to first know what customers expect from your business and then you can personalize the offers to make them happy with your brand. 

Build a Powerful Messaging Bot with REVE and Boost Your Customer Communication 

It takes the support of the right tools to effectively communicate with your audience. And when you don’t have the tools, you might suffer to deliver what customers expect.    

With the REVE platform, you can create a feature-rich messaging chatbot and redefine the way you do engage with customers. 

The platform has a drag-and-drop feature and anybody can easily create the bot and then add huge value to the way they engage with customers.    

Here, you can find other engagement tools as well like video chat and co-browsing software that can further boost your communication strategy.  

In fact, you can combine the bot with live chat software and offer hybrid support. All this can make sure amazing support to customers at each step of the journey. 

Bolster Your Customer Messaging with AI Chatbot from REVE 

The way you communicate with customers can have a big impact on the overall growth trajectory of your business.   

We, at REVE Chat, realize the role a chatbot can play in adding positive value to various aspects of the business. 

You can start a free trial of our bot and see its features, potential, and value addition for the business.