Bots that can send automated messages to common inquiries can be a great help in customer service. For example, they can send consistent answers, relieve pressure off your customer service team, and categorize conversations according to subject.

Through Facebook's conversation routing, Social Media Management supports these kinds of automated bots. The conversation routing handles the three-way interaction between a bot, your customer, and your customer service team.

This article helps you understand how the conversation routing works, how you can set it up, and how you can work with it in Social Media Management.

About conversation routing

If your company uses a chatbot to handle Facebook Direct Message (DM) conversations, there are three parties involved in one conversation: you, your customer, and the bot.

Conversation routing takes care of who controls the conversation. This ensures that the bot won’t send messages while you were planning to send a message of your own, and in Engage we ensure that you won’t get distracted by conversations controlled by a bot.

About handover protocol (deprecated)

Facebook is in the process of migrating handover protocol users over to conversation routing. However, if you haven’t been migrated yet, you can continue to use handover protocol in Engage. You may notice small changes in Engage as the handover protocol experience now matches the experience of conversation routing as described above.

Configuring your Facebook Page and chatbot for conversation routing

To ensure an optimal experience with conversation routing in Engage, you will need to configure each of your Facebook Pages as described below.

Configuring your Facebook Page

1. In Facebook, click your profile icon in the top-right corner and make sure you are switched into your Facebook Page. Then, select Settings > Page setup > Advanced Messaging. Make sure you have connected the Brandwatch app to your Page.
2. On the Brandwatch app, click Edit. Make sure Access standby channel and Take control of conversations are enabled for conversation routing to work as intended.
3. Go back to Page setup > Messenger conversation routing.
4. Select Brandwatch as the Default routing app. This ensures that when your bot is not in control of the conversation, then Brandwatch will be in control. From here, you can define different routing rules for link routing, social routing, and campaign routing. This is where you’d select your bot tool if you would like any incoming customer messages handled by a bot.

Configuring your chatbot app

For your chatbot, we recommend the following configurations:

• Respond to any incoming messages with at least a delay of 1 second.

• When the bot has completed its interaction with the conversation, there are two options:

  • The bot decides that a human needs to interact with the conversation and it passes control to Brandwatch. It will show the conversation as unread in Engage.

  • The bot decides that the conversation is done and no human interaction is required and it releases control. The conversation will remain read in Engage.

Using conversation routing in Engage

Once your Facebook pages and your chatbot have been configured properly, you can use conversation routing to coordinate between your bot and Social Media Management.

To illustrate the use of the conversation routing, here’s an example of a typical Facebook direct message conversation involving a chatbot:

• A customer sends you a direct message through one of your Facebook pages that has a chatbot active.

• The chatbot takes control of the conversation and sends an initial response.

• The customer sends a reply. The conversation appears as read in Engage.

• The chatbot determines that a human agent should handle the conversation further and passes control of the conversation to Brandwatch.

• The conversation appears as unread in Engage, ready for a Social Media Management user to take further handling actions.

• On sending the message that completes the conversation, the Engage user can opt to reset control so if customer messages again, the flow will again start with the chatbot. Alternatively, if the control is not reset when sending the final message, the control will automatically reset after 24 hours.

While a chatbot has control of the conversation

Within Social Media Management, the conversation appears as read in Engage. Your bot will reply to new messages in the conversation. A small lock icon appears on the message in your feed, which indicates the control of your conversation is with your bot.

In Detail View, any bot answers appear in green.

If you have configured the Brandwatch app as recommended, at any time, can you manually take over from the bot by sending a message in the conversation. However, be aware that interrupting a conversation while messages are being sent by a bot may be confusing for the customer.

If, as an Engage user, you want to confirm what app is in control before sending a message, you can click the Re-sync button before sending a message.

While Brandwatch has control of the conversation

Any new messages in the conversation will appear as unread in Engage. If you have configured your chatbot correctly, the conversation shouldn’t be responded to by your bot and is expected to be handled by a human agent.

In Detail View, your own messages appear in blue with your name underneath it.

After you are done, you can decide to reset control as explained above.

FAQs

If I use a third-party bot tool, can I still use Social Media Management’s built-in automated messages?

We do not recommend using automated messages in Social Media Management in combination with any third-party bot tool. If conversations arrive unread in Social Media Management after a bot tool has released control, any Social Media Management automation will still send automated messages. Therefore, we recommend only using one automation tool at a time for all your automations.

Any internal automations in Social Media Management, such as automated assignment and labeling, can be used without issue in combination with a third-party bot tool.

Does the Team Performance Report include conversations handled by a bot?

The Team Performance Report (TPR) will always include conversations handled by a bot in the total incoming messages count. If the bot handled a conversation from start to finish, no messages have been sent by a human agent in Social Media Management, so the TPR will not count any messages sent for that conversation. Similarly, if a bot handles the full conversation, no mark as read actions are counted either, since the message appeared and remained marked as read in Engage.

If a Social Media Management user takes control of the conversation, any actions by that user are of course included in the TPR from that point onwards, until the bot might take over the conversation again.