What is a bot?

Chatbots (bots) are essentially a little bit of software that allows you to communicate with people, en masse, within a Messenger platform. Bots live in the same platform where most of us are spending more and more of our time so it makes sense to try and communicate in the same platform where your users/community already is. Using Artificial Intelligence with your bot allows you to create a very segmented, ‘personalised’ experience for your community members.

Why use bots?

They’re free and relatively easy to set up.

But more importantly, although they are very new, the research is showing some great results. For example, content delivered via Messenger has a read rate of over 90% (compared to 20-30% for email). Quality bots generate higher user retention rates. And importantly, a message sent from a bot appears on the user’s locked phone screen, just like a text message. Ofcourse this will all change as bots become more prevalent and popular. But right now, for early adopters, there are some great benefits to be had.

A customer service survey (venturebeat.com) found that 46% of people prefer messaging over email and 49% prefer messaging over phone. If you have teenagers at home like I do, you’ll know that they vastly prefer messaging to almost any other form of communication, including face-to-face!

Ideas for using bots in Community Engagement

1. At large events use the bot to send out information about the event, and engage with the event speakers (for example through asking questions). If you’re going to be at the IAP2 Engagement #NextLevel Forum in Melbourne on 19 October I’ll be showcasing the bot I built for the forum.
2. Once you build up a community within your Messenger application or Facebook page for example, you can use your bot to send segmented messages and updates to your project, at regular intervals.
3. Make FAQs on your project more ‘personalised’ and interactive with the use of Artificial Intelligence
4. Give your stakeholders a very easy way to communicate with you – but manage the complex response and resolution workflows in a smart way with artificial intelligence. For example, allow stakeholders to lodge a complaint via a message. Your bot would direct them to some information related to the issue they complained about, as well as sending that complaint directly to the relevant team member in a message or email.

Have a look at the Darzin bot we have created for Facebook Messenger. Use this link or scan in the image below. Open the Messenger app on your phone, tap on the icon for your image to open your profile page. Now tap on your image again. It gives you the option to scan – tap scan and hold it over the image below.

Use the bot to send us some feedback! If you’d like to know more about bots and artificial intelligence, and how it can be used in a community engagement process, please do get in touch and let us know.