Pros and cons of automated chat: Facebook and SMS Messaging

Marketing automation is a marketing technique that has become increasingly popular over the last few years as technology continues to advance. With automation, marketers can customize and personalize their campaigns to each specific customer and satisfy everyone’s needs rather than only a certain few. But as with almost every marketing technique, marketing automation has its pros and cons. It can have some amazing benefits and applications, but it is certainly not perfect for every company or situation.

In our previous post, we discussed how you can effectively automate online chat in general. That post came with some great tips that will certainly benefit your business, regardless of your industry. But this post will be a little more specific, focusing on pros and cons of automating Facebook and SMS messages. These messaging platforms are some of the most popular and wide-reaching out there. Consider these pros and cons of automated chat as you decide if marketing automation is the right choice.

Pros

Personalization options

One of the benefits of Facebook and SMS messaging automation is the personalization and customization options. You can single-handedly write all the responses that will be sent in the automation if you so choose. By writing your own messages, your chatbot will have a human feel rather than a generic pre-written feel. Advanced options even allow your chatbot to remember people that have visited your website or page before. This is a positive because people enjoy being recognized, especially by businesses they support.

Engagement/conversion rates are high

For the most part, the common person enjoys sending a quick message whether that be on Facebook or their SMS texting app. If they want to contact a business and there is a texting option available, many will more than likely choose it rather than give the business a call. The best method is to craft short text messages as that increases your chances of getting a response. When a message is too long, response rates drop quite a bit. Keep your messages to-the-point and concise for the best results.

Quick responses

If your customer is in a hurry, they will appreciate the capabilities of an automated chatbot. The chatbot can provide information in a hurry if you program it to do so, so be sure to consider this as you are creating responses that you want to include. Unlike a human, the automated chatbot does not have to take extra time and manually type each response. These quick responses can alleviate frustration and influence your customers to use your automated chat services again in the future.

Cons

It’s close, but it can’t fully replace humans

Even though automated Facebook and SMS messaging can feel very close to humans, it will never fully replace authentic human touch. Fully human chatbots should not be the goal as they function to simply to assist customers and engage them with your business. More specific questions are best answered by a real human, so your customer gets the best experience possible. Depending on the situation, it may be better to have the option to allow a human to takeover the messaging. You can program this capability into your chatbots by using communication platform Slack as well as SharpSpring.

Harm potential can be high

If a customer is looking to talk to your company about something while they are upset, they are going to talk to a real person rather than a chatbot. This is because they will know that a bot cannot understand the emotions they are feeling and may raise these emotions even more. These potential bad experiences could possibly negatively affect your business if the frustrated customer goes on a rant about your business in a public place, all because of your automated messaging bot. A tip that may help you alleviate frustration would be to include your phone number in the introduction messages so that the customer can call you if they need to.  

You still need to monitor it

As mentioned earlier, automated chatbots are a technology that is still being perfected. It is not perfect, so issues often happen. You must monitor the program to be sure that no negative issues impact your business. This technology is sure to keep advancing, but for now you should keep an eye on it for your business’s sake.

Are you ready to Facebook and SMS messaging automation?

Regardless of the pros and cons of automated chat, look no further than Focused Engagement for all of your marketing automation needs! We specialize in creating chatbots and integrating them for a variety of applications including online chat, Facebook chat, emails, and much more. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you.