How Facebook Messenger chatbot can help your business in Malaysia

Many of us know and use Facebook Messenger on a daily basis to communicate with friends and businesses. 

And if you aren’t familiar with Meta’s Messenger Platform, don’t worry because we’ll dive deep and cover everything you need to know about the world’s third-most popular messaging app in this article. 

While this messaging platform is undoubtedly great for exchanging funny memes and links with your friends, its features that allow people to connect with new and existing customers are what makes Messenger an incredibly powerful tool. 

And as social commerce becomes more popular, businesses should pay close attention to Meta’s latest updates to Messenger and understand how you can leverage its messaging solution to enhance customer experience, which ultimately empowers your brand to scale.

Read more about Social Commerce in Malaysia for an in-depth understanding of market trends. 

What is a Facebook Messenger chatbot

Facebook Messenger bot is an automated chatbot that lives and works within Messenger. 

You can programme your Messenger chatbot to suit your business goals, such as collecting customer feedback, managing FAQs, and executing certain tasks under keyword or scenario-triggered scenarios. 

What you can do with Facebook Messenger for Business

Here’s an overview of Facebook Messenger for Business features: 

Connect Facebook chatbot with Instagram 

If you run an e-commerce business, you will most likely build a presence by having a Facebook Business page and an Instagram page. You can integrate Messenger API for Instagram with existing platforms and choose third-party communication partners to make it easier to manage your CRM needs. 

Send out surveys for customer feedback 

Messenger has native customer feedback templates, such as Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES), for customer service teams to understand customer satisfaction ratings. 

Send product catalogues using Facebook auto reply bot to directly promote your products

Source: Meta

Pictures speak louder than words, especially when it comes to promoting your product. Instead of listing product information, Messenger allows you to send product catalogues in chat. You can either send a Generic Template with up to 2 call-to-action buttons below or Webview where you can load webpages inside Messenger. 

Automate FAQs to qualify leads 

You can set up FAQ templates to gauge your customer’s interest level and then come up with the appropriate follow-up responses to avoid wasting your customer service team’s time. 

Add Messenger Chat Plugin for unified access to customer conversations

You can add the Chat Plugin for Messenger to your website, so it doesn’t matter whether you start conversations with your customers on the website or on Messenger. You’ll be able to carry over your customers between your website and Facebook Business page. 

Get paid and complete orders in Messenger

As an extension to the product catalogue function, you can also incorporate a URL button that directs your customers to ‘Order Now.’ The URL Button opens Webview or to your webpage for checkout. Upon purchase confirmation, you can use send order confirmation, receipts, or shipment tracking information to keep your customers updated on their orders. 

Track and analyse customer behaviour for retargeting campaigns

After the customer has been successfully checked out, the tracked customer information enables you to tailor your content to their customer preferences and shopping history as a way to build customer loyalty. Further powered by Facebook Ad Manager, you can retarget your existing customers with Sponsored Messages to promote your products or special offers. 

Benefits of Facebook Messenger chatbot in Malaysia

Let’s talk about how Messenger chatbots can enable businesses to sell more efficiently. 

Engage your customers consistently 

The pandemic has forced many consumers to turn to online channels for purchasing goods or services. 

As people spend more time on their mobile devices, they expect businesses to be active online, answering their enquiries and resolving their issues. In fact, 83% of consumers say they would buy products via instant messaging. That’s why businesses should not underestimate the revenue potential brought by chatbots.  

Pass on qualified leads to your customer service agents 

Your chatbot guarantees that you’ll be there for your customers always and instantly. 

Let’s say your customer has a simple question about how to book an appointment to your salon. By using automated chat templates, your chatbot can send the booking link in Messenger and resolve the enquiry. 

For more complicated requests, your chatbots can qualify leads, so that your customer service agents only have to engage high potential customers during office hours. 

Access to important data for relevant follow-up actions 

By interacting with your customers, chatbots can gain insights to customer behaviour and shopping preferences that will help you retarget marketing campaigns. 

You can also customise your chatbot to ask your customers about their feedback, then improve your product based on customer preferences to meet those conversion targets.

Learn more about how Facebook Messenger can help your business grow in our article. 

How to create a Messenger chatbot for your business

Facebook equips businesses with a suite of automation tools to help you communicate with customers easily. Malaysia is the largest e-commerce market in Southeast Asia - a region that has the fastest digital sales growth in the world. So if you’re running a business here, you need to choose the right platform to enable an intelligent Messenger chatbot in order to set yourself apart from your competitors.

Serving over 5,000 customers around the world, SleekFlow’s omnichannel social commerce platform enables a comprehensive customer journey across SMS, live chat, and popular social messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram etc. 

Why integrate Facebook with SleekFlow? Here are the benefits: 

• Use auto reply on comments and messages to increase brand awareness without paying for ads 

• Facebook Lead Ad integration to enhance efficiency of omnichannel marketing campaigns

• Gain a holistic overview of your sales performance and customer behaviour through a unified dashboard across other popular social media platforms 

• Broadcast personalised messages on Facebook Messenger using OTN & Message Tags 

Examples of businesses in Malaysia that are using Facebook bot successfully

Tesco Malaysia: finding a new way to communicate with customers

Source: Meta

Tesco, now known as Lotus’s, is a leading grocer in Malaysia. Every week, Tesco will distribute a promotion catalogue featuring the upcoming week’s promotions and store information.

However, as corporations place more emphasis on sustainability, Tesco is keeping up as well by transforming its printed catalogues into digital assets for wider and quicker circulation. So they chose Facebook Messenger, a social messaging app that is widely used by Malaysians, as the communication channel for distributing the catalogue. 

With Facebook Messenger’s automation tools, Tesco could encourage customers to subscribe regularly for updates and make urgent enquiries. Every week, customers who have subscribed automatically receive the download link to the weekly digital catalogue and other promotions in their Messenger inbox. 

Furthermore, Tesco created a campaign with ads that lead customers to converse directly with Tesco representatives via Messenger, in order to attract new customers. As a result, the company’s customer service team’s efficiency increased because customers were able to receive responses via Messenger. 

And the other results demonstrated the benefits of automating marketing campaigns through Facebook: 

• 54% of people who reached out to Tesco via Messenger downloaded the digital catalogue

• 4x open rate in digital catalogue from Messenger compared to email marketing 

• 85% of enquiries were handled by the Messenger chatbot 

• 13% decrease in general enquiries to the customer service team

L’Oréal Malaysia: conversations with a more engaging experience

Source: Meta

L’Oréal is a household name for beauty and personal care products that has a huge presence in Malaysia. Since selling products on livestream has become an increasingly popular trend amongst Malaysian consumers during the pandemic, L’Oréal wanted to take advantage of these new selling channels using Facebook and Messenger so they hosted a 24-hour sale for their luxe portfolio of brands - Kiehl’s, Lancôme, YSL, Armani Beauty, Shu Uemura, Biotherm, Urban Decay, and IT Cosmetics. 

Each brand took over the livestream for 1.5 hours and invited celebrities, industry experts and beauty influencers to showcase their products and encourage audience engagement with giveaways. All the audience had to do was leave a hashtag phrase in the comments, which immediately opened Messenger chat with a beauty advisor. This meant that interested customers could directly receive 1:1 assistance from a brand representative who would guide them throughout the buying process, which overall enhanced the customer experience. 

The results proved that this event was a huge success with: 

• Over 17,000 chats in 24 hours

• 2.6 million people reached

• 12% post-engagement rate

• 4X increase in sales vs daily average

Lancôme Malaysia: human-like bot that responds instantly

Source: Meta

Lancôme is another successful brand that is under the L’Oréal group, so there’s no surprise that Lancôme also used Facebook to embrace social commerce in Malaysia. During Ramadan, a hot shopping period in Malaysia, Lancôme activated a two-week long Messenger campaign for customers to easily chat with the brand’s representatives. 

The challenge is: how can the beauty brand ensure that thousands of customers receive the same level of highly personalised customer service that it is so celebrated for? 

The answer is through automation. 

The instant responses that customers receive on Messenger strengthened their incentives to explore more products, answer questions and build a personal relationship with the brand. Similarly, customers were encouraged to leave a specific hashtag in the comments on a product-related post which automatically directed them to a Messenger conversation with a beauty advisor. 

From the beauty company’s perspective, Facebook’s ability to support an end-to-end social commerce journey makes retargeting campaigns so much easier because the data is all centralised. Their success was reflected in its sales results: 

• 25% of conversations converted to a purchase

• 750 transactions in during the last week of Ramadan

4 tips to make sure your Messenger bot provides a great user experience

If you look around, many businesses in Malaysia have already adopted chatbots to manage conversations with customers every day. While chatbots can guarantee an instant response at anytime, some customers still get frustrated that chatbots lack the personalised tone to resolve issues. 

As a brand, your communication style and delivery reflect the way your customer sees your brand. That’s why we’re going to teach you how to build a chatbot that serves as an extension of your brand whilst enabling it to help you achieve your business goals. 

1. Clearly define your goals

Some questions that are worth considering at the beginning: 

• Who is your target audience? 

• How do you want to guide their commerce journey: are users going to be redirected from Facebook to your e-commerce site, or are they going to stay within the app until checkout? 

• What role is your chatbot going to play in this process: customer support or marketing to unique audiences? 

2. Finding a voice for your chatbot

Think of your chatbot as a virtual brand ambassador for your business. 

How are they going to greet or address customers? Is it a simple: “hello, thank you for reaching out!” or something more casual “what’s up?” 

Add some human elements to the template messages within Messenger to bring warmth and comfort to your customers. The more approachable you can come across via Messenger, the more likely your happy customer will convert and return for repeat purchases. 

3. Deliver the right message at the right time

Leverage data from Messenger and advanced analytics from SleekFlow so that your customers receive relevant information at the right time. 

Consider your goals and how using Facebook can help you achieve them. 

If you’re a fashion brand, you can use your chatbot to qualify leads, send product catalogues, and then identify their preferences for future retargeting campaigns. 

Or, if you’re a grocer, your chatbot can be for providing your customers with the latest shipping updates and daily promotional items. 

Knowing your chatbot goals can inform the way it interacts with your customers, thereby generating more revenue simultaneously. 

Want to get inspired with some marketing tactics using the Messenger chatbot? Head to our article to find out. 

4. Revaluate and retarget audiences 

One of the greatest advantages of using platforms like Facebook and SleekFlow is that you gain access to a vault of insightful and valuable data. 

With SleekFlow, you can tailor automated workflow scenarios for Facebook messages and comments across posts, stories, and live streams. Like L’Oréal, you can create a live stream marketing campaign and then use a hashtag as a trigger word for your chatbot to initiate conversations with new customers. 

Create auto reply for your Facebook chatbot with SleekFlow

Your time is valuable and manually responding to customers’ comments or messages is not the wisest way to spend it. There’s a lot on your plate, and SleekFlow knows exactly how to help. 

By connecting Facebook Messenger with SleekFlow, you can automate your customer social commerce journey. Let’s take a quick look at how else SleekFlow can help businesses sell, support, and convert better than ever. 

An omnichannel inbox for accessing popular social messaging channels

SleekFlow is a social CRM that equips businesses with a wide range of integrations from social messaging channels to e-commerce platforms, such as native integration with Shopify. 

Save time by managing omnichannel communications in one place. 

Auto-assignment and auto reply for both internal and external workflows 

SleekFlow’s automation feature aims to make it easier for both your teams and your customers. 

In addition to automating responses to Facebook posts and messages, you can also assign teammates to specific tasks for immediate follow-up action. 

Our mobile app also increases the convenience and efficiency of your workflow, empowering your business to grow faster and scale up. 

Integrate Facebook Messenger auto reply bot with SleekFlow 

Connecting Facebook Messenger with SleekFlow is quick and easy. Once you’ve completed setup, you can manage your team from our app and within a few clicks. 

Reach out to our team to understand how to set it up now. 

Finance solution for building trust via secured omnichannel communications

When the end-to-end (from product exploration to checkout) customer journey happens all within one app, SleekFlow’s finance solution bolsters customer confidence by protecting customer data with top-notch security infrastructure.

Our servers are ISO27001 and GDPR-certified, whilst personal information are encrypted and masked. So whether you’re a large corporate or SME, your customers are in good hands even if they complete payments in chat.