Author: Ori

According to industry research, 85% of customer interaction will be handled without human agents by 2021. One of the most widely used tools to enable this customer service is the chatbot.

Businesses considering adding a chatbot to their marketing stack should focus on specific KPIs to measure the chatbot’s effectiveness. Chatbots are not set and forget software but constantly need improvement. However, businesses need to monitor chatbot analytics and KPIs to know what to improve. Chatbots are rapidly transforming digital marketing strategies in direct-to-consumer industries, including fashion & apparel, e-commerce, retail, and automotive. They are being adopted for lead generation, guided shopping experiences, and scaling personalized experiences beginning with the first ad touchpoint.

Marketing conversational chatbots streamline relationships with customers and marketing acquisition funnels. The introduction of conversational AI chatbots has allowed businesses to enhance customer communications by developing meaningful relationships, recognizing customer requirements, and offering the appropriate solutions to satisfy their needs. 

Chatbot Benefits for Organizations

The capabilities of chatbots and AI have led many businesses to scale up, providing enhanced operations and delivering better services to customers. Chatbots are not only available 24/7, but they also have other benefits. As chatbots continue to assist companies leverage customer service inquiries, the companies are also discovering more capabilities in which chatbots can be used to streamline tasks. A comprehensive list of chatbot benefits has been mentioned below: 

1. Cost Savings:
   Company requirements to expand the customer service department can be managed by implementing increasingly capable chatbots capable of handling complex queries. The implementation of chatbots requires a one-time investment cost with additional investments in the future to ensure security and improve the chatbot’s functionality. However, this cost will be lower in the long run than employing many customer service representatives. 
2. Faster Internal Processes:
   Chatbots can be used to improve internal communication and procedures for simple queries. Chatbots can be used in the onboarding process. IBM reports that 72% of employees don’t understand the company’s strategy. A chatbot could help answer employee questions about task prioritization. 
3. Increased Sales:
   Chatbots boost company sales by offering a frictionless platform for presenting users with algorithm-driven recommendations that can smartly introduce customers to new products and services. The constant use of data by chatbots assists in providing personalized recommendations. Bots can also boost sales due to 24/7 availability and a fast response rate. The instant response time of chatbots ensures that the customer is constantly engaged throughout their customer journey. Chatbots can be leveraged to increase customer engagement with timely tips and offers. 
4. Gaining a Deeper Understanding of Customers:
   Online customers rarely get to talk to businesses directly. Therefore, chatbots provide businesses with detailed, actionable data on customer requirements and grievances, helping the company improve its products and services. Chatbots are ideal tools for brands to learn about their customers’ expectations. Using the data provided by the chatbot-customer interaction, customer-specific targets can be planned. 
5. 24-hour Availability:
   Keeping a 24/7 response system allows sellers and customers to communicate continuously. Of course, this benefit is proportional to the level of chatbot sophistication. Chatbots that cannot serve simple customer queries fail to add value despite 24/7 availability. 
6. Instant & Consistent Answers:
   A customer service representative can resolve the queries of one customer at a time. However, a chatbot can answer multiple questions simultaneously due to the advanced software mechanisms and the scalability of chatbots. Talking to different customer service representatives of the same business could result in inconsistencies in answers. However, chatbots function on pre-determined frameworks and leverage their answers from a single source within the command catalog. This minimizes the possibility of inconsistency in responses. 
7. Conversation Records:
   Most chatbots can record the conversation and provide the customer with a copy of the chat transcript. The chat can also be archived, and the user can be issued a support ticket for it, thus providing context to the live agent and helping in faster resolution. 
8. Multilingual:
   One of the advantages of chatbots is that they can be programmed to carry out conversations in multiple languages by asking the user’s preferred language either at the beginning of the conversation or automatically switching to the regional language based on user location. This is useful for global brands operating in different markets.  
9. Programmability:
   Since chatbots function on pre-determined codes, they can be programmed to carry out various tasks as long as programmers continuously update their command catalog to improve their functionalities.
10. Personalization:
    The conversational AI capabilities of chatbots can store and leverage user interaction history to provide more personalized interaction. The chatbots can instantly draw up users’ background information to resolve their issues quicker. Chatbots can analyze the history of user interactions with a company to give a personalized experience. 

Why do Chatbot Analytics Matter?

Chatbot analytics help determine the success of the chatbot. They can also provide valuable insight into opportunities for business growth and retention strategies. Businesses must be aware of the chatbot’s benefits and capabilities by constantly measuring its performance. This can only be done by knowing the key chatbot metrics, which is an important aspect and a decisive factor for business success.

Chatbot success metrics are important because they offer a wealth of data about the bot and its customers. Businesses should monitor how customers interact with the chatbot to ensure they continuously improve their experience, meet the set goals, and get a good ROI.

In some cases, businesses do not get the desired results from chatbots because they have been optimized for the wrong metrics. Chatbot analytics helps businesses track important KPIs and make data-driven decisions.

The following are some significant areas where chatbot analytics are critical:

1. Understand Customer Satisfaction:
   By using conversational AI customer analytics, businesses can understand customer satisfaction after interacting with the bot. Artificial intelligence allows the chatbot to measure user sentiment. 
2. Measure Business ROI:
   57% of businesses agree that chatbots deliver significant returns on investment (ROI) for minimal effort. Chatbot analytics helps measure the KPIs such as total leads generated, total issues resolved, estimated time to handle individual queries, and annual handling costs that aid in comparing its performance with other channels. Using these metrics, businesses can make calculated business decisions on the additional investment in required areas.
3. Understanding Customer Journey:
   Businesses need to visualize key aspects of the customer journey to make data-driven decisions such as user paths and exit points.

Most Important Conversational Marketing Chatbot KPIs 

Merely automating business tasks with an AI chatbot isn’t enough. Automation should focus on implementation and customizing the chatbot to achieve the desired goals.

There are 25 chatbot KPIs that can help brands maximize the success of conversational marketing chatbots. These measurements are indispensable for tracking the chatbot results, identifying problems, and improving performance. 

1. Total Number of Users:
   This KPI represents the total number of active, engaged, returning, or new users who have used or are using the chatbot. The total number of users who interacted with chatbots is one of the primary KPIs businesses should track. 

Active Users:

Active users are the number of users who interact with a chatbot without waiting for the bot to initiate a conversation. This can reveal helpful information about customer preferences. These users interact with a real purpose and thus will be more engaged.

Engaged Users:

Engaged users are significant because they represent active users who have repeated sessions in a short period. These users see the value in using the chatbot. They are satisfied using the bot and keep returning to the business. 

Returning Users:

Returning users are neither new nor engaged. After using it, these users came back to the chatbot but are not yet using it at regular intervals. The higher the number of returning users, the better, highlighting the number of users who find the helpful chatbot engaging.

New Users:

Equally important is the amount of new users the chatbot receives. High new user engagement can be an indication that the chatbot is popular. This metric shows the number of unique first-time users in a defined time frame. Using this metric helps assess the success of marketing or bot promotion efforts. New users help maintain a strong customer base as customer preferences change over time. 

Tracking metrics related to users helps capture insights about the number of customers using the chatbot. Additionally, it also assists the business in understanding the overall impact and chatbot success. This is a fundamental KPI metric, but it gives an understanding of the popularity of the chatbot. This metric can also calculate other metrics such as conversion rate.

2. Brand Interactions per User:
   Brand interactions per user describe the frequency of customer interactions with the chatbot during a given time. Interactions are defined as an active engagement a user has with a brand via the chatbot. This includes interaction using a quick reply chip, button, carousel call to action, or messaging. However, it does not involve seeing visuals or messages.

Brand Interactions per User = Total Interactions / Total Users

For instance, if a marketing chatbot generates 25,000 interactions from 10,000 users that engage with it, that equals 2.5 brand interactions per user. The number of brand interactions per user is essential as it helps to measure the depth of engagement with the marketing chatbot for each conversation. Measuring the brand interactions per user helps improve marketing chatbot performance and customer experience with each successful conversation as every touchpoint from discovery to conversion can be optimized. 

3. Customer Insights per User:
   Each brand interaction with a chatbot provides declared data that can be leveraged to improve the chatbot’s performance and other marketing campaigns. This is information voluntarily shared by the consumer during a conversation. Declared data is valuable because it empowers brands to stop relying on assumptions. Declared data can be used to validate assumptions and identify customer requirements. This KPI is called customer insights per user. It is calculated by dividing users’ total declared data points for a given time.

Customer Insights per User = Total Declared Data Points / Total Users

For example, if the conversational marketing chatbot collects 250 declared data points out of 50 users, it provides 5 customer insights per user.

Deep customer insights can be collected using a conversational marketing chatbot by defining attributes and values based on the responses collected. This creates a customer database that can be leveraged to segment, recommend tailored products, and provide actionable insights at scale.

4. Chatbot CTR to Website:
   Conversational marketing chatbots are an effective channel for driving conversions and sales. Chatbots should be programmed to guide customers through each marketing funnel stage and improve conversion rates. Higher CTR leads to an increased volume of qualified traffic redirected to key assets like product pages. Chatbot CTR measures the number of clicks to the website as a percentage of people engaged with the chatbot.
   
   Chatbot CTR to Website = Total Clicks / Total Users x 100

For example, if a marketing chatbot generated 1,000 clicks to the website out of 8,000 users, the click-through rate would be 12.5%.

It is critical to optimize marketing chatbot conversations for click-through rates to increase return on investment. Brands should monitor conversational goals regularly and continually review the chatbot analytics to identify opportunities for improving CTR, conversion rates, and performance. 93.67% of calls to action use verbs like buy, visit, find, try, schedule, discover, browse, view, see, etc. 

5. Matched Response Rate:
   Each customer has unique wants, needs, and demands. Unfortunately, many chatbot platforms cannot accurately map responses to tailored suggestions. They utilize generic approaches to natural language processing (NLP), making them unable to deliver answers and information tailored to the situation. Matched response rate is how often a marketing chatbot accurately fits customers with what they ask for. This KPI can only be analyzed for marketing chatbots utilizing machine learning and NLP.

Matched Response Rate = Matched Responses / Total Messages x 100

For example, if a conversational marketing chatbot accurately matches 500 messages from a pool of 1000, then the matched response rate is 50%.

NLP-powered chatbots can determine specific intents in different contexts. Brands can leverage customer input and data to create more accurate templates for the chatbot to make better predictions and match suitable responses. FAQs are one way to improve matched response rates. They’re questions on products, shipping, and returns.

6. Cost per Conversion:
   The cost per conversion is the total cost of acquiring a new customer. This includes the customer making a purchase, watching a video, or filling out a form. Since marketing chatbots drive conversions through guided shopping and personalized experiences, it’s essential to know the cost of each conversion action. This empowers the brand to discover ways to decrease cost per Conversion while generating revenue.
   
   Cost Per Conversion = Total Cost of Generating Traffic / Total Conversions
   
   For example, if the total media spend on a conversational display ad campaign was ₹5,000, resulting in 100 conversions, the cost per Conversion would be ₹50.
   
   Conversions and the associated costs can be tracked using UTM parameters on URLs in the chatbot. 

7. Conversion Rate:
   The conversion rate of a marketing chatbot is the rate at which traffic from the chatbot is converted. These include a completed purchase, reaching a particular page, or scheduling an appointment. It’s calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the total traffic and multiplying it by 100 to get a percentage.
   
   Conversion Rate = (Conversions / Total Visitors from Chatbot) x 100

For example, if a business generates 100 conversions from 2,000 total visitors to the chatbot, that would equal a 5% conversion rate. 

Brands can track the conversion rate to understand how marketing chatbots perform compared to other marketing channels. It is a key performance indicator for the chatbot.

8. Conversation Duration:
   The conversation duration may depend on the chatbot’s intention. For example, if the chatbot is required to guide a visitor to a demo request fast, a short time is good. It shows that the chatbot understands what is needed. A chatbot programmed to handle support questions related to products or services may have a longer average duration.

Therefore, the ideal length of a chatbot session should be long enough to solve the user’s problem and short enough to prevent them from giving up. The chat duration measures the length of the bot and user interaction. Monitoring this KPI helps to gauge the chatbot’s effectiveness using the size of the conversation. It shows whether the bot can have meaningful discussions and keep the user engaged.

9. Average Daily Sessions:
   This KPI tells how often users (new, returning, or engaged) are starting a conversation with the chatbot each day. It is preferable to have many daily sessions to show the chatbot’s effectiveness. The chatbot metric measures the interactions sent and received between the users and the chatbot. It monitors and provides information on its ability to engage in a conversation. Comparing this to other daily metrics, like average daily traffic to the site, estimates the percentage of users using the chatbot on any given day. 

10. Bounce Rate:
    The Bounce Rate corresponds to the volume of user sessions that fail to result in the intended use of the chatbot. It refers to the number of user visitors who enter the website and leave without interacting with the chatbot. A high bounce rate shows that the chatbot fails to provide correct answers, help users with their requests, or is not engaging enough. This should prompt the business to update its content, rethink its placement in the customer experience, or both. This chatbot KPI needs to be observed closely, impacting the customer experience.

11. Fallback Rate:
    Fallback is defined as the number of times the chatbot cannot understand what the user needs and cannot complete the task or redirect correctly. The fallback rate captures insights into those scenarios where the bot cannot understand the user request and provide a relevant solution. This metric measures the percentage of messages when the bot didn’t get user intent or failed to answer the user’s question. This metric is important because it helps to understand how often the bot has no answer and find areas for improvement.
    
    The higher the fallback rate, the lower will be the user satisfaction. If this rate is high, the business may need to add more content or reassess the chatbot’s natural language processing abilities.

12. Activation Rate:
    The activation rate allows companies to determine how customers are selecting the chatbot option accurately. It refers to how many customers engaged with more than one question. This metric counts the number of unique users who sent a message within a specific time frame. As well as with total users, businesses can track the active user number to calculate the percentage of active users out of total users. Multiple metrics are included in this KPI, such as the number of users, how many opened a chatbot message, and the number of users who responded to the chatbot. Comparing these monthly data sets will enable brands to substantiate the merit of their investment or find better ways to use the technology more engagingly.

13. Chatbot Response Time:
    Chatbot Response Time is the time taken for the chatbot to respond to a question or comment. This shows how quickly the chatbot can start responding to the user. Ideally, businesses want this number to be on the low since customers are using the chatbot with the expectation that they’ll receive a quick response. However, an immediate response means nothing to the customer if it’s not correct or doesn’t fully address their issue.

14. Human vs. Chatbot Interaction:
    The human vs. chatbot interaction rate will indicate how efficiently the chatbot redirects conversations to a human agent.

The human takeover of the interaction is one of the critical chatbot evaluation metrics that determine the bot’s success. It refers to two main scenarios:

• The conversations that the bot cannot understand are transferred to the human agents as a fallback scenario.
• To have a comprehensive discussion, customers prefer to communicate with a human agent rather than a chatbot.

Businesses can know whether the customers are happy conversing with the bot by understanding the chatbot analytics. If the ratio of human handover increases, it is better to switch back to live chat and use the bot to collect the initial details of customers. Businesses should monitor the number of human interactions vs. chatbot interactions to gauge whether the chatbot has managed to reduce the number of human interactions required.

15. Ticket Deflection Rate:
    If the chatbot is being used to reduce customer support agents’ workload, businesses should focus on ticket deflection rates. This shows the average number of tickets the customer support team has had over time due to the chatbot. The deflection rate is calculated by dividing the number of chatbot conversations by the number of conversations transferred to a customer support agent. If the deflection rate is high, businesses may need to program the chatbot better to answer customer questions. 

16. Most Frequently Asked Questions:
    Businesses can analyze the chatbot metrics and evaluate customer journeys to see which questions are being asked closely and how the chatbot is addressing them. Data like this can show whether the chatbot is equipped to answer customers’ or prospects’ concerns. Thus, businesses can program the chatbot to specialize in the subjects that come up most commonly and thereby improve its performance. Analyzing recurring questions will allow the company to focus on the topics of most significant interest to the users and improve the quality of bot responses and its overall comprehension levels.

17. Customer Satisfaction Rate:
    The customer satisfaction KPI measures the level of user satisfaction with bot conversations. There are various ways to express satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the bot, including star ratings or providing emoticons with different expressions. It is essential to acquire customer feedback as businesses will be able to identify the flaws in the bot conversation flow and improve it. 

Companies that provide customer service Chatbots must be evaluated regarding their influence on customer satisfaction. One way to measure customer satisfaction is by tracking chatbot errors and confusion triggers which can indicate problems with the experience, alongside metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), a customer loyalty metric that measures the likelihood of customers recommending the brand to others. 

18. Chatbot Activity Volume:
    Chat volume is measured by looking at the number of successful interactions. This indicator is essential for verifying that the brands are achieving their goals. If brands target a specific population, they can measure the penetration rate for this audience to confirm that the intended people are making good use of the chatbot. If the conversation is more extended, it indicates a higher chat volume as the visitors find it easy to converse with the bot, and at the same time, the bot can deliver more value to them. The chat volume KPI answers two key questions:

• How frequently is the chatbot being used?
• Is the user base increasing?

19. Retention Rate:
    The Retention Rate refers to the proportion of users who have consulted the chatbot on repeated occasions over a given period. It provides a good indication of the chatbot’s relevance and acceptance among business clients. The more frequently people come back to use the bot, the greater the retention rate. Businesses can monitor the retention rate by breaking it down into time frames. This will help them identify vital progress in the customer journey and adjust the customer engagement strategy accordingly.

Some ways to increase the bot retention rate are:

• Offer customers a discount based on their behavior
• Deliver hyper-personalized conversations

This KPI can indicate whether the current level of investment in the technology is sustainable and whether aspects of the technology need to be refined to improve the experience.

However, businesses should remember that multiple return visits to the bot might suggest that a customer’s issue wasn’t resolved.

20. Use Rate by Open Sessions:
    This is the number of sessions that are simultaneously active with the chatbot. This rate must be weighted with the average number of open sessions during a given period to get a meaningful measurement.

21. Usage Distribution by Hour:
    This indicator is beneficial as it demonstrates how this 24/7 channel enables businesses to cover 20%, 30%, or even 50% of the hours during which user support services were previously unavailable. This measures how many times the chatbot is being used during each hour of the day. Additionally, businesses can use this metric to schedule more staff during peak usage hours.

22. Question per Conversation:
    This indicator will help determine how many questions the chatbot needs to ask before providing its users with the necessary information. The interpretation of this metric depends heavily on the specific objectives. The lower this number, the more efficiently the chatbot addresses the questions.

23. Interaction Rate & Non-Response Rate:
    Interaction Rate allows businesses to measure the average number of messages exchanged per conversation. The higher the interaction rate, the greater the bot’s effectiveness. This is a crucial metric for understanding overall engagement. While the non-response rate measures the number of times the chatbot fails to respond to a question. Such failure may result from a lack of content or the chatbot’s difficulty comprehending user inquiries.

24. Self Service Rate:
    This rate corresponds to the number of users who were able to obtain the help they needed through the responses given by the chatbot without subsequently having to call Customer Service. It is calculated based on the percentage of completed sessions through an interaction with the bot without being redirected to a live operator. In the process, it enables businesses to evaluate client satisfaction.

25. User Feedback:
    Finally, it’s indispensable to know what users think about the chatbot. This feedback will allow businesses to calculate two indicators:

• The Satisfaction Rate – the average score received by the chatbot in user evaluations
• The Evaluation Rate – the percentage of sessions in which the user evaluated the bot responses at least once
  
  This KPI is directly tied to the user satisfaction rate.

Are These Chatbot KPIs Enough?

These different KPIs are sufficient to evaluate the ROI and the added value of the chatbot. However, these KPIs should not be the only metrics taken into consideration when assessing the overall impact of the solution. Thus, beyond the KPIs directly linked to a chatbot, businesses should correlate these metrics with pre-chatbot indicators such as the volume of phone contacts, the volume of incoming emails via a contact form, and the volume of chats with agents.

The Bottom Line on Marketing Chatbot KPIs

Key performance indicators are significant. Without them, the brand won’t know how a marketing chatbot performs. Use the main chatbot KPIs we covered and other metrics like ad recall and purchase intent to help the business measure performance and achieve its goals. Defining an objective or purpose is essential to building a successful chatbot.

However, measuring the right chatbot analytics and metrics is how to improve chatbot performance.

Therefore, before brands start building a chatbot, they should:

• Identify the end goal during each stage of the bot. While designing the chatbot, the critical practice is to outline the end goal when evaluating chatbot experiences.
• Assign the right chatbot metrics to evaluate its performance. Choosing the correct KPI is crucial to measuring the overall effectiveness of the chatbot and identifying the loopholes. Brands can iterate the bot flow based on flaws to improve the communication process.

Chatbots have gained immense popularity in almost every industry – e-commerce, retail, and logistics- because they are successfully helping companies with self-service support automation transform user experience and improve customer retention and conversion rates. Even if businesses don’t have the bandwidth to track every chatbot analytics metric, identifying the most relevant ones for the business will ensure businesses are making more intelligent decisions.

Remember, as the business evolves, so should the chatbot. As an extension of the customer engagement strategy, the chatbot should be updated any time the business launches new features or goes through a brand revamp.

To begin with, chatbots are like a digital resolution in this digital era. Wherever there is proper communication there is no place for doubts or some sort of confusion. They are rapidly becoming a huge part of our daily lives. Driven by round-the-clock consumer support, more companies are investing in this platform. Many companies nowadays are using chatbots alongside other channels of communication like email, phone, and social media.

A recent study found that 53% of service organizations expect to use chatbots within 18 months — a 136% growth rate that foreshadows a big role for the technology in the near future. Conversational AI boosts productivity in a range of ways. They help workers set meetings and reminders, and ask simple questions without stopping what they’re doing, to name just a few use cases. At the same time, all-purpose virtual assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant, are fast becoming the preferred interfaces for consumers to engage with brands across every industry.

Are they really so impactful when it comes to the digital experience of users? Let’s find out.

What is Conversational AI?

To speak in a technical language conversational AI is a computer program that helps artificially communicate with users via text or voice. Additionally, chatbot facilitates immediate response, this quality of being spontaneous helps the brand to retain and gain customers. 

Over the years, developers have incorporated more sophisticated techniques to enable chatbots to better understand people’s questions and provide more useful responses. They are designed in a way so that they can respond to frequently asked questions. 

The simplest form of a chatbot system tackles such tasks by parsing customer input, then scanning its database for articles related to certain words and phrases. In short, it operates like a document retrieval system, based on keywords. For example, a cosmetics company might create a chatbot that engages users with set questions about their makeup preferences, then recommends products and offers that match their responses.

In these cases, the computer program behind the chatbot works to a rigid set of predefined rules and has little ability to recognize the way people naturally speak. Think about the times you may have typed a question into a website’s dialogue box and received an answer that doesn’t make sense. That’s likely because the chatbot program recognized keywords in your request, but not the context in which they were used.

There have been significant advances in the field of Artificial intelligence. By harnessing enormous amounts of data and cheaper processing power, AI and related technologies such as machine learning are helping to dramatically improve chatbots’ quality of understanding and decision-making. In particular, developers are using natural language processing (NLP) or natural language understanding (NLU) to build bots that can better understand human speech (or typed text). These technologies also make it possible to better discern the intent behind what someone is saying — and to respond more intelligently.

When chatbots are connected to technologies like NLP and NLU it helps them better understand human conversations. An AI chatbot can be efficiently trained to improve conversation every time it interacts with a user. 

How does Conversational AI Help in Business?

Conversational AI can be custom-built to meet a range of specific business needs in both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) environments. The most widely used business cases include:

• Providing call center support. By interacting with an AI chatbot via a call center application, customers can perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting an account balance, or scheduling an appointment — all without speaking to an agent.
• Providing enterprise support. Chatbots can be integrated with a company’s back-end systems such as inventory management or customer relationship management. An AI chatbot can help sales reps quickly access phone numbers or help a human resources team perform faster employee onboarding.
• Acting as digital personal assistants. Chatbots can help consumers navigate their daily lives and expedite activities such as ordering groceries or booking a vacation from a mobile device, browser, or chat platform. Apps such as Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, or products like Amazon Echo with Alexa or Google Home all deploy chatbots to play the part of a personal assistant.

How does Conversational AI Improve Consumer Experience?

• Chatbots reduce customer waiting time by being there every single moment.
• Chatbots resolve support cases by responding in a straightforward way to the questions asked.
• Handling efficient redirects for customer inquiries. This is another AI chatbot strength: bots can instantly welcome customers with a branded greeting in a chat window, for example, and quickly direct them to the resources they need.
• Chatbots help improve user experience by being there and providing initial leads to the consumers before taking the conversation further human. This helps in retaining the traffic to the website.

No wonder conversational AI is being widely used these days. It is built to enhance the digital experience of users and be there instantly to respond to their queries or requests. This is just the beginning of chatbots offering assistance and efficiently managing conversations by saving time. The future of AI seems lit in every sense.

With evolving times, Facebook Messenger is rapidly becoming a vital marketing tactic for businesses across all sectors. Having more than 1.3 billion users globally, and expectations for the number to grow close to 2.4 billion users by 2022, it is an invaluable channel for enterprises.

Facebook Messenger for Business provides infinite opportunities and massive potential for companies worldwide.

Convert AI, a conversational Sales AI engine can be used in sync with Messenger to personalize engagement at scale, acquire new customers, and generate valuable customer insights which will further increase conversions and improve the ROI for your brand.

In this guide, you’ll get a deeper look at how the integration of messenger with a conversational AI system can lift conversions for you, as well as get insights as to how you can take advantage of it to increase your sales.

Why Use Facebook Messenger for Business?

Messaging is one of the fastest-growing modes of communication for friends, family, and increasingly, businesses. Facebook Messenger for Business is one of the messaging apps companies are using most often to communicate and connect with customers and potential prospects. As it allows enterprises to create rewarding and friendly conversations with their customers.

Rather than a “one to many”, impersonal and ineffective approach to consumer marketing, Facebook Messenger enables businesses with a one-to-one approach to marketing which provides brands the opportunity to personalize every touchpoint, even before they connect with your website or mobile app.

The ability to directly message your audience holds much importance, especially when Facebook can have users stay on their platform. More than 89% of users access Facebook on their mobile devices and they check Facebook an average of 14 times a day. This proves that people have an intimate relationship with Messenger.

When your company starts conversations with users, you’re befriending them on that level. This is how you can change business relationships into personal ones.

Though Messenger offers immense opportunities for businesses to engage customers, generate sales, and increase profitability. These are some of the reasons why you should be using Facebook Messenger for business in 2025 :

Generate high-quality interested leads:

When a person as a consumer reaches out to you through Messenger, it creates an opportunity for you to follow up, which causes a substantial increase in the amount of lead generated.

Fosters consumer trust in your brand:

Your organization becomes easier to trust if it always remains open to dialogue. The fact that a customer can message a business anytime makes them feel more confident and attracted to it.

Derives a hike in marketing performance and enhances your marketing funnel:

As a business, you would always be focused on meeting your performance marketing or sales targets. Messenger for business helps in actually turning those numbers on paper into reality.

Influence consumer’s intent to purchase:

Research suggests that 65% of the consumers are likely to purchase from a business they can connect with (via chat).

Provides quality customer service:

A survey conducted by Facebook revealed that 75% of the respondents feel comfortable reaching out to businesses via chats for support which provides brands the opportunity to establish credibility.

What is Conversational AI & How Can It Prove to be Beneficial for Your Business?

Conversational AI is the technique of using AI to communicate with users in natural, human-like conversations. This is done by understanding their text or speech inputs, identifying the intent behind them, and responding with relevant information. But due to the increase in competition in the modern world, businesses nowadays don’t have much time. And the usage of traditional marketing techniques takes up an ample amount of time. This is where the use-case of Convert as a conversational AI lies.

Convert by ORI is changing the way businesses used to interact and engage with their customers. It not only helps organizations meet customer demands – be available 24×7, respond quickly, personalize the interaction but also provides options for customers to choose their channel and language of communication as per their convenience. These aspects combined with that of the messenger are definitely the key to driving sales. Let’s understand how in the below section.

Ways to Use Facebook Messenger with Convert for the Purpose of Driving Sales

There are many ways you can use Messenger in sync with Convert to increase sales and boost your ROI. These are some of them :

1. By automating the sales process: With Facebook Messenger, you can engage with consumers and prospects at scale. You can conveniently guide customers, offer responses, personalize experiences, provide recommendations, drive business outcomes, and much more.
2. Personalize the customer experience by using the collected data: Facebook Messenger merged with the powers of Convert AI has the ability to provide personalized customer experiences by using collected data. Convert identifies customer intents and responds accordingly, and helps customers find products that are most likely to convert quickly, especially in the case of large product catalogs. This hyper-relevant and effortless personalized shopping experience increase the chances of conversion by three times.
3. Enhance customers’ shopping experience using conversational intelligence: Convert is revolutionizing the online shopping experience of consumers by improving it substantially. Having the feature of context management it recognizes customer needs and initiates personalized conversations, suggests products, replies to queries, and returns prospects to the buying process. Hence using the services of Convert along with messenger can prove beneficial.
4. Using Social Data to refine Marketing: Messenger powered with the capabilities of Covert collects vast amounts of declared data from customers via questions which can further be used by businesses to improve their retargeting efficiency alongside optimizing their marketing strategy.

Advantages of Using FB Messenger with Convert

Though the integration of Messenger with Convert has many large-scale advantages in the coming times. The following are to name a few:

• Offers Intelligent AI assistance: Convert as a conversational AI analyzes consumers’ varied replies and answers accordingly within no time, reducing customer service costs and improving your customer experience. It also makes product recommendations and closes sales.
• Alerts at appropriate times: Inventory and pricing changes can comfortably be taken care of by using Convert. Customers can opt into intelligent reminders in Facebook Messenger with little effort, and you can leverage inventory restocks or price changes to bring customers back to complete purchases.
• Helps in Reflecting Brand personality: Nowadays, people don’t usually prefer talking to chatbots. As they are pre-filled with data and cannot counter human conversation variance. In this case, Convert not only helps brands by being an AI that can counter any variance in conversation but also reflects the brand personality involved with the businesses.
• Cart Recovery: Convert boost sales by re-engaging with customers in Facebook Messenger if they abandon their shopping cart. Bringing customers back to complete their purchases is seamless with Convert (contact us for a demo and we’ll show you how).

Conclusion & Key Takeaway:

After knowing all this, it’s very clear that Facebook Messenger is becoming a key channel for the future of marketing. With billions of people on Messenger and more projected to use it in the near future, Messenger offers a huge opportunity for the growth of companies worldwide.As now you have the top to bottom course knowledge about how Facebook Messenger teamed up with Convert can be a boon for businesses, we hope you will give your business brand the advantage of reaching out to your audience before they even know that they are your future customers. For more info related to Convert and its features, do visit www.oriserve.com.

In today’s time where 61% of the people give priority to messages and updates before and after going to bed is an indicator of how written conversations have become the most preferred medium of interaction over time. 

And when talking about written conversations what surely chimes into one’s mind is WhatsApp. Having a huge base of more than 2 Billion users out of which  1.6 billion interact through the app every single month makes it the most trusted and leveraged messaging platform. And with the introduction of WhatsApp for business and API, it has served the same purpose for businesses. Also, the role it has played in the tough times of the pandemic makes it an integral channel for businesses in 2022.

The WhatsApp Business solution not only allows businesses to send usefully, templated notifications to their customers but also to respond and support those who reach out to them on the channel. However, WhatsApp has recently announced changes in its pricing model which has been made effective from Feb 2022. Though to some of you, it might be clear but for most of them out there the changes remain blurred and unclear. This blog is a guide to all the changes that WhatsApp has made effective from February and will also let you understand how it will impact your business in the long run.

The Fundamentals of WhatsApp API

WhatsApp Business API is an application program interface that allows medium and/or large-scale businesses to interact with their customers in a secure, private environment along with allowing a more friendly, leveraging, and informal way of communication. The main idea of the WhatsApp API is to take the WhatsApp API endpoint and integrate it into their business software. This way, the businesses can interact with the customers without any hassle.

To access WhatsApp API, you need to go through an intermediary also known as WhatsApp Partner or Business Solution Provider (BSP) to get a WhatsApp API account because WhatsApp doesn’t give direct access to end-users.

And now that you have a WhatsApp API account, you can further connect the WhatsApp API endpoint with Conversational AI like Convert to start messaging. You can choose the plan that suits your current need and can even shift it to another if needed in the future. But how exactly are the prices decided? and what are the associated costs that play a major role in the same? We’ll be understanding all of this in the next section.

Who are Business Solution Providers? How do they impact the pricing?

To understand the pricing game what needs to be understood is how WhatsApp provides its services to the businesses. And to recognize the same, you must first be acknowledged with business solution providers (BSP) and their role.

WhatsApp is very significant with the companies it grants direct API connections to. For most companies, the only way to connect to WhatsApp API is via Business Solution Providers (BSPs). But what exactly do they do?

The answer to this is simple. WhatsApp Partners provide you guidance at every step of registering your business on WhatsApp. From figuring out messaging rules to porting numbers to verifying your WhatsApp Business API account they’ll be there providing you with a helping hand all the way through. Your experience with WhatsApp API mostly depends on the BSP you choose. 

Now talking about the pricing, WhatsApp doesn’t directly charge its fees from the businesses BSPs are the source of revenue for them. As BSPs are liable for providing API services and assistance to businesses that are borrowed by them from WhatsApp API directly, WhatsApp charges them for the same. But how do the BSPs get paid?

So, the BSPs pass on this charge to the end-users which in this case are the businesses taking its service by adding certain costs which include set-up fee, markup per message cost, and their cost of services, etc. And this is how the BSPs get paid and also becomes a key aspect of the pricing model. Knowing all of this, let’s dive deeper into the way how all of this comes into play.

Know-how of WhatsApp Business API Pricing

WhatsApp API pricing has evolved. Starting in 2018 with charges based upon notification basis it has now switched to a conversation-based model where it is charging businesses based upon the number of times it interacts with its consumers. This new model of pricing has been made effective from Feb 2022. 

Where earlier session-based messages were free and the cost of template messages sent to customers varied by region now WhatsApp will be charging the businesses based on the number of conversations initiated by users or businesses in a specified period. Let’s take a closer look at how these models work.

Understanding the Conversation-based Model

Talking of WhatsApp business API, there are two types of conversation models brands/businesses interact through. The first one is based on per-message/notification sent or received and the second one is session-based.

Now the first model i.e, based on the number of messages sent/received is the model that was used earlier where businesses were charged for every message sent. The second model is session-based where businesses are charged for messages sent/received over a time slot of 24-hours. An example of a session-based message could be if a user asks you for more information regarding a product/service. Or if a user follows up on a sale, or a customer care issue, etc. This model of pricing has been deployed by WhatsApp as of now.

How does Conversation-based Pricing work?

Conversations are the key to building effective consumer relations. In comparison to traditional methods of customer resolution, conversational methods provide a fast and effective consumer experience.

Just like notification-based pricing varies across different countries and regions the same applies to Conversation-based pricing. But conversations carried on in WhatsApp business API can be categorized into two categories which include:

• User-initiated conversations: A conversation that initiates in response to a user message. Whenever a business replies to a user within the 24-hour customer service window, that message will be associated with a user-initiated conversation.
• Business-initiated conversations: In this, the business sends the first message or continues a conversation outside the 24-hour session. One should keep in mind that this type of conversation can only be started with pre-approved message templates as suggested by WhatsApp official notice.

The prices for the user and business-initiated conversations are different for every region as notified in the official statement which can be checked here.

Key Changes after February 2022

The following changes have been introduced for businesses using the services of WhatsApp API after the recent update:

• Key Change 1: As WhatsApp has moved towards a conversation-based model, WABA API conversations will be priced differently towards user-initiated and business-initiated conversations.
• Key Change 2: Each WhatsApp Business Account will receive 1000 Free tier conversations monthly, which can be either user or business-initiated. If you have more than one number linked to your account, these are shared between all your numbers.
• Key Change 3: Businesses can send free-form messages within the 24-hour customer service window at user-initiated conversation price. If the company does not respond to the user-initiated message, it will not start the 24-hour conversation session and the company will further not be charged.
• Key Change 4: After collecting customers’ WhatsApp contact through different channels, you can encourage the customer to Opt-in (agree to receive messages), and then you can update the company’s news or send a quality-based message to the opt-in customers anytime through WhatsApp. You should keep in mind that in this case, you can only use pre-approved message templates for sending messages.

How WhatsApp Integrated with Conversational AI Delivers Value

Having known all the changes that have been introduced post-update, you should also understand the role Conversational AI like Convert plays in maintaining large-scale customer relations through the channel which is widely used across the globe.

WhatsApp API allows third-party integration into its channel which is a great opportunity for brands/businesses to create meaningful relationships with their customers. Convert as a Conversational AI, automates lead generation, helps in generating interest, provides efficiency along the process of sales, improves sales and marketing ROI, and much more.

Summing up, it can be said that it is a one-stop solution for all your needs related to customer acquisition in modern times.

To Conclude:

After knowing all the key changes introduced by WhatsApp for businesses these are some of the things that should surely be taken into account while opting for a BSP post-update:

• Paying a monthly fee is a far better choice than paying per message.
• Choose a BSP that doesn’t apply markup cost on messaging.
• Apply for a BSP that offers a proxy API.

And the service partner that provides all these services is Gupshup integrated with the services of Convert. It not only provides the best service considering sales, support and notifications but also provides the additional benefits catered by Conversational AI. For knowing more about how it can change the way your business used to function earlier, visit www.oriserve.com.

The one AI-powered messaging channel that has changed the marketing game entirely are the facebook messaging bots. Transforming businesses across the world, they wield enormous power for whatever business you’re in.

Facebook Messenger Chatbots allow an automated conversation with people who click on Facebook Messenger to start a dialogue.

Menus or keywords direct customers to the necessary steps, saving time and eliminating frivolous requests that don’t lead to sales. It’s an easy way to allow people to interact with businesses, self-serve or buy tickets for an event, get directions, see a menu, set up an appointment, or ask questions about a product or service.

It is a significant opportunity to display the brand on the screen and generate sales. Facebook Messenger users represent a large portion of the customer market in eCommerce — and linking to the business’s Facebook community with a Facebook Messenger bot is increasingly being considered an absolute win in terms of customer experience and customer effectiveness.

Here is how your brand can use Facebook Messenger to increase conversions:

Using Facebook Messenger Bots to Increase Conversion

On Facebook Messenger, businesses and users exchange more than 20 billion messages every month. By answering questions and performing most of the preliminary work usually performed by customer service staff, chatbots can help ease the buying process and increase conversions.

A Facebook Messenger chatbot is a must-have tool for someone doing Facebook marketing to increase conversion rate. Let’s see how a chatbot serves a business at its best.

Providing Instant Customer Service for Facebook Audience

The most challenging task is to satisfy customers and their needs. Once businesses do it, they win the game. Many AI tools increase conversions. However, on Facebook, there are 1.3 billion Messenger users globally, which provides marketers with a big platform to cater to the audience. As a result, Facebook Messenger chatbots work exceptionally well for marketers.

Facebook shows products, and instant messenger bots give support to the customers. While building chatbots, the focus should be on keeping the FAQs related to the product in mind. It is essential to have exceptional consumer care to improve retention rates and help businesses stand out from the competition.

High-quality content and to-the-point answers assure customers that the company is committed to providing maximum help in deciding whether they should buy.

Messenger Bots Helps to Generate Sales-Driven Results

Having a conversation with a Facebook Messenger chatbot helps uplift company product sales. When people experience good customer care, they usually stick around. Creating a great customer experience – also helps create a positive preference in the customer’s mind.

Facebook Messenger chatbots directly linked to websites can increase conversion rates with Facebook marketing and website marketing.

Many leading brands use Facebook Messenger marketing to provide instant help with chatbots that convince customers about their products and services. Facebook Messenger bots have reasonable click-through rates ranging from 70% to 90%, which is 2 to 4 times better than email.

Build Brand Awareness that makes People visit for Product

When a customer clicks the “send message” button, they expect a fully detailed view of the products or services offered by the brand. Hence, without wasting customers’ time, they know about the business by seeing the description when they click the button. Additionally, companies can also set the logo’s icon to memorize the brand at first sight.

Brands can also embed some quick and concise FAQs about the company to increase brand awareness.

From Facebook’s Comment Section To Messenger Bot

When it comes to increasing conversion rates, brands must capture the audience. The right combination of eye-catching products with exciting content will attract customers.

Facebook makes room for brands to simplify activities on their Facebook pages. Ads help brands to approach the audience quickly. When people see ads or wish to purchase a product, they will undoubtedly visit the brand’s page and engage with it.

While engaging, customers can be easily engaged via a Facebook Messenger chatbot. The Facebook messenger chatbot instantly replies to customer queries, and users can talk and get information about the product comfortably, ensuring a high conversion rate.

Send Product Videos to Maximize the worth of Customer’s Lifetime

Video marketing is another way to engage customers without making them feel bored. Video content on any website, Facebook page, or other channel makes the audience spend a minute watching it. So why not in a Facebook messenger bot?

As soon as the customer interacts with the Facebook messenger bot and wants a quick look at the product, brands can send them related videos using the bot. They don’t need to wander different channels as the bots make product demos just a click away.

According to the study, reasonable click-through rates are 28% to 48%, almost double the email click-through rates. Brands can also send new broadcasts, but they should be limited to once a week.

Messenger Bots Allow To Include Augmented Reality

It is high time to compete in this digital era. Many leading brands use Augmented reality in their Facebook messenger bots. This helps customers take a quick look at products through the chatbots and increases ROI and the conversion rate. 

Embedding virtual reality in chatbots makes shopping easy for people who have not trusted online shopping.

Many people are still unhappy with online shopping because they have had bad experiences with online retailers. It may be from customer support or product quality.

Immediate Feedback via Messenger Bots With Customers

To increase the conversion rate, brands need to optimize their service frequently. The key to success is understanding the audience’s needs, satisfaction levels, and what they want based on the changing demand patterns.

It will surely help businesses research business products by putting themselves in the customer’s shoes. Additionally, they can try to offer giveaways to customers in return for their time. The Facebook Messenger chatbots can offer giveaways to customers whenever the brands want. Facebook messenger bots can send exciting news to customers about seasonal sales, new arrivals, and any discount offers.

Further, brands can conduct Facebook contests through the messenger chatbot. Through this, they can engage customers in fun-loving activities to make them remember the brand and spread the word in the community.

Benefits of Facebook Messenger Bots?

Facebook messenger chatbot is an excellent tool for E-commerce marketing. Many people are using social platforms for shopping, due to which online marketing is expanding at a rapid pace.

A Facebook Messenger chatbot is computer software that can communicate like a human, but unlike humans, chatbots do not need to rest, break, and not be late. It works like a mimic boy who helps customers by giving responses exactly how the companies program them.

Eventually, it becomes an assistant to making good decisions throughout the buyer’s journey. When spoken to, the bot will automatically respond, gather data, and give users the necessary messages based on the user’s actions, which is not possible via emails.

For some people, a Facebook Messenger bot saves time. Sometimes users trust them and fearlessly shop while sitting at home. Therefore, brands must build trust among customers to go further with their products or services.

Let’s look at why brands should use Facebook messenger bots.

1. Ready To Go Replies:
   If the company wants to acquire customers, it shouldn’t make them wait for a long time. The customers expect the companies to provide information all the time as the customers can come at midnight or early morning or whatever time they get free.
   
   When they are scrolling on Facebook, and they see the desired products or services, they jump on the messenger to chat with the company and get information.
   
   The solution is Facebook chatbots that instantly reply to the customers as soon as they click on the “send message” button and give authentic replies in seconds. Facebook Messenger bots are programmed to instantly respond to any query, booking information, and assistance.
2. Reach Audience Faster:
   It is found that the open rate of Facebook messages is frequently higher than emails. As soon as the user comes to the brand’s page through any referral link or ad, the Facebook Messenger bots can assist the visitors.
   
   In addition, Facebook Messenger has paid advertisements that can be showcased to someone who has been recently in contact with the brand’s profile. This implies that there is access to a readymade user list. To attract high-quality clients, brands should use these ads in addition to the chatbot.
3. Save Time And Money for Customer Agents:
   Every day, companies have to tackle the same queries and issues like tracking the product, cancelling the booking, refund procedure, etc. It takes time, and if there are not many agents to resolve the customer issues, the customers can have a bad experience.
   
   While hiring customer support agents, companies must pay them or sometimes hire agents for night shifts to assist customers round the clock.
   
   Therefore, to avoid such situations and provide timeless services at reduced costs, Facebook messenger bots are the go-to tool. A Facebook messenger bot works 24/7 efficiently. It responds almost instantaneously and reduces the burden of customer support agents to maximize sales.
4. Messenger Bot like a Lead Finder:
   When supporting companies to attract customers and prospects, Facebook messenger bots can acquire leads by giving a personalised touch to the customers and trying to build loyalty. They fetch the basic information from targeted customers so that the business can easily find a way of reaching out to them in the future. Companies can also make a user-friendly lead generation chatbot to get the information quickly without bothering the customers.
5. A Reasonable Suggestion with Bots:
   It’s impressive to see the suggestions that bots provide to customers. It works like, which flavour do you need”? Or have some fries with that? Or Do you want to try our new flavour?
   
   These look super cool and a worthwhile suggestion for the foodie customers. Not only do foodies customers, even in the clothing business, transportation business, or any other, but brands can also make their own suggested in-line products.
6. Engage And Re-engage Customers:
   It is vital to understand and focus on the sales funnel process. How efficiently do companies use sales funnels to track customers buying journeys? Suppose they are stuck on any of the funnel processes. In that case, the Facebook messenger bot reminds the customers that they didn’t complete their purchases (or they can remind them with some discount that was not initially offered to them).
   
   Chatbot also works to re-engage the customers to let them complete their buyer journey. With their content and whenever new arrivals come, they remind them to buy new products. Facebook Messenger bots can engage them with some personalised offers at different events, so they can enjoy buying. 
7. The Bot can be where the Customers are:
   For business running in the US and a customer who wants to buy its product in Germany can be efficiently solved by communications and assistance from the Facebook messenger bots. Meanwhile, the Facebook Messenger chatbot sends a notification if customers need any human assistance, and thus, brands can easily communicate with them. Even if the customers want to book a service or buy a product, they can do it instantly by staying on the Facebook page and interacting with the Facebook Messenger bots.
8. Bots Can Be Traced:
   While using a chatbot brands can get all their customers’ data as a chatbot owner. Not only this, but brands can even verify whether their chatbot is working as per the programming or it is encountering any technical difficulties.
   
   Further, brands can keep a check on the bots daily or weekly, as they want. Brands can also understand how many people use the bot and what chatbot responded to them thus giving them access to powerful analytics.

Hence, Facebook Messenger Bots help brands avoid long calls and save time and money with repetitive queries.

A step closer towards effective Facebook Messenger bot integration

The following are a few things that must be taken care of to ensure the bot is as effective as possible:

• Give the bot a unique name: A unique name helps customers find the bot easily. Therefore, giving the bot a unique and distinctive name that stands out is essential.
• Make it conversational: The customers will be talking like humans, which means the bot must mimic human conversation as much as possible. This will make the conversation awkward, the customer will not get their questions answered, and things will go nowhere.
• Help customers out with prompts: A Facebook bot isn’t like a website, and the customers may not be aware of its usage unless the brand drops hints and prompts about it. Therefore, it is vital to set up automatic prompts so that the bot can lead conversations and guide customers along the way.
• Keep things simple: The bot should avoid big words and awkward grammar as it is likely to confuse and alienate people. Also, the options offered to the customers should be simple. Giving everything at once will be confusing and overwhelming for customers.

Wrapping Up:

After having a long read, we are sure you are willing to build Facebook messenger bots for increasing your conversion rate as soon as possible. Using a chatbot offers you a lot more benefits.

It is important to find out the best platform that gives you many resources to make the best messenger bot. You will explore many other resources like plug-ins, conversational forms, analytics, live chat, etc.

Maybe we missed something that could help increase your conversions, so log in to Facebook Messenger Chatbot and explore by yourself and let us know what we missed.