5 Simple Steps To Empower Your Chatbots In The New EU Facebook Policy Situation

As of December 16th, 2020, Facebook made updates to its Messenger API and placed some restrictions on its use for developers and users from EU countries. Since the chatbot service operates based on the Messenger API, the changes affect strongly on how businesses use Facebook chatbots, causing somewhat confusion to chatbot builders and marketers.

If you’re in the affected area, you might find yourself searching for ways to adjust your chatbots to deal with the new changes.

In this post, I’ll show you 5 simple steps that make your bots not only compliant with the new rule but also powerful despite several restrictions.

Let’s check them out!

Step 1: Use auto Fallback when chatbots cannot respond

It’s extremely troublesome that your chatbots sometimes cannot understand users’ responses and give misinformation. The best solution, in this case, is to let your chatbot refer to human support for direct assistance.

Fallback is an action that pops up when a chatbot cannot recognize the user’s input. It helps control the conversation flow by showing a message when the bot cannot be able to solve users’ requests. It then will suggest them to rephrase the request or send them other options.

You can make your chatbot smarter by combining Fallback with the Human Takeover option. Human Takeover notifies a human operator via email and lets your customer support team handle the complex action that the bot cannot resolve. Omnichannel communication with both chatbots and human is perfect for higher conversion rates and better customer experience, thus increasing sales and customer satisfaction.

Step 2: Remove blocks containing videos and audio

Right after enabling the Fallback and Human Takeover option, you can rest assured that your chatbot can handle almost 90% of all the conversations. Now it’s time for you to go through all the blocks and check if there are any images and audio blocks. If it happens to have one, simply remove it and you’re good to go!

In case you want to show pictures or audio files, insert links on your text message and invite your customers to click on it.

Step 3: Replace buttons with “Quick Replies”

After December 16th, 2020, buttons used to trigger action are no longer available except on mobile devices. No worries, you can always use “Quick Replies” then connect it to other blocks as shown in these pictures below.

Here you may have a question: What if I use Button with links to direct users to my website?

That’s simple as well. You just need to create a text block and put the link inside. Don’t forget to add some CTAs to make it more attractive.

Since the Persistent Menu is not available also, you can consider putting your Menu in the Welcome Message under the Quick Replies format, so that people can see it right away when start chatting with the bot.

Step 4: Kindly ask for users’ information

After a user from EU countries subscribers to your Facebook page, you won’t get or see their first and last name, profile picture, or location on your audience list. This means that you won’t be able to personalize campaigns as personal data won’t be shared.

Our tip is to ask for your chat users’ information, such as names, phone numbers, and emails. This not only makes your conversations friendlier but also gives you contacts to stay in touch with them for future campaigns, making use of omnichannel marketing.

Step 5: Train your bots with NLP

Completing the 4 above-mentioned steps, you can be confident that your chatbots almost regain their powers like before the Messenger API change. This last strategy will definitely make your bot much smarter by giving the users suitable answers without using Quick Replies options.

Keyword is the feature that helps your bot handle the conversation flow when users disrupt the chat with random questions or sentences. By recognizing the main keywords, your chatbot can give out appropriate responses, even to the blocks or texts not existing in the flow.

Moreover, integrating your chatbot with Dialogflow will take you a step further in creating an engaging conversation with your customers. Dialogflow translates human language into computer language and vice versa, making your bot much more human-like.

We put this step at last, since training your chatbots with Keywords and NLP can be time-consuming. But with just only 5–10 minutes per day playing with some blocks and texts, your chatbot can become super powerful and effective. Little effort makes a huge difference!

5 simple steps above, hopefully, can facilitate your building chatbot process and remove the barrier that you might face with the new EU Facebook change. If you need a hand for training your chatbot, or you’re even a bot builder newbie and need some help to start, try BotStar for now!