Build a customer support bot for Facebook Messenger in minutes

Providing great customer support is not an easy task. With clients expecting 24/7 availability and instant responses, it’s no wonder that support teams are looking for novel technological solutions to relieve the pressure while maintaining high quality of support. In addition, as Millennials, accustomed to communicating on social networks and Facebook Messenger, in particular, gain purchasing power, support teams must now cover new channels.

Botfuel Answers allows your support team to start providing automated support on Facebook Messenger in minutes without the need for any technical knowledge or AI expertise. All you have to do to get started is to fill out the answers relevant to your business and follow the tutorial below. Let’s get started!

What you will need

• Botfuel Answers account (sign up here)
• Facebook Account and page
• 10 minutes of your time ;)

Connect your Facebook account

To start, we will connect your Facebook and Botfuel accounts and give the permissions required by the application to work.

To connect your Facebook account go to your account settings, in the External accounts tab click the Connect to Facebook button.

On the first screen, log in if your account is not already connected, then click Continue as XXX.

Then select at least one Facebook page on which you plan to use the bot and click Next.

Note: To connect more pages you will have to disconnect the Facebook account and re-connect, so plan ahead.

Then give Botfuel Answers the necessary permissions and click Done.

When everything is set up, click Ok to validate the login with Facebook.

That’s it, now you should see the email address you used to connect to Facebook.

Create a bot on Botfuel Answers

We will now create the bot that will be connected to your Facebook page.

If you already have one, you can skip this step.

• Click on the + button to the right of the Botfuel logo to create a bot.
• Name your bot, choose the language and the industry of your bot.
• Click Create bot when you are done.

Connect the bot to your Facebook page

We will now move on to connecting our bot with the desired Facebook page.

First, navigate to the Channels menu, then to Facebook Messenger channel.

In the Integration tab you will see the list of Facebook pages you previously selected when connecting to your Facebook account. Click the Configure button of the page where you want to use the bot, then click Connect to establish the connection.

Next, let’s configure the handover, a feature that gives the bot the ability to forward a request to a human operator.

Click the Go To Messenger Platform settings button to be redirected to Facebook page Messenger Platform settings.

Click Configure under the App settings section.

Select Botfuel Answers as the primary receiver of the page and Page Inbox as secondary receiver.

Go back to Botfuel Answers app and click Finish. You should see a green checkmark indicating that the bot is connected to the page.

Congratulations, you have just connected your bot to your Facebook page!

Test the bot

Now, let's test that everything works correctly.

Go back to Facebook page settings to get the Messenger link.

Then open the link in a new tab, hit the Get started button, if necessary, and send the first message to your bot, for example: Hello.

You can see all the questions the bot can understand and configure responses in the Knowledge Base menu of Botfuel Answers app.

Keep everything working smoothly

Once your bot is connected to the Facebook page, be careful not to make changes that break the connection:

• If you manually remove Botfuel Answers from business integrations on your Facebook account, your bot will not work. You will have to re-connect and setup a new connection between your bot and the Facebook page.
• If you remove Botfuel Answers as the primary receiver of the Facebook page, the handover will not work.
• If you remove the rights you gave to Botfuel Answers app at the login step, the connection between your Facebook account and your Botfuel account will be lost, and all bots connected to Facebook pages will be disconnected.