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Facebook Messenger Chatbots API supported by Cloudagent

By C Chaitanya
Chatbots are great. But they are not perfect. Chatbots have been glorified as the next coming of customer service. And why not. The thought of humans interacting with AI to get things done is sexy. Only problem is that level of tech, especially in AI, is not up there yet. I have no doubt we will get there soon. But we are not there yet.

So when Facebook announced their send/receive API at their F8 conference we at Ozonetel knew we had to integrate it with our cloud contact center solution,Cloudagent.

Luckily, our system is very loosely coupled with clear interfaces and we were able to get the integration done in a couple of days(our engineers are not too happy as they had to pull an all nighter :))

So, when your chatbots get stuck and are not able to answer your customer queries, connect your FB messenger with Cloudagent and provide help from real agents. It works almost like a live web chat system, but over FB messenger and all the regular features like routing to agents, queuing etc are available. So now, your customers can ask you questions using their FB messenger and your agents can answer their queries using Cloudagent system. All the advantages of using a full featured contact center solution exist like monitoring agent performance, setting disposition, getting screen pops etc.
You can use FB plugins and add the messenger support on your web pages. Your customers can also use the FB Messenger app on your mobiles.

This is a huge step for us to move from a cloud "telephony" company to a cloud "communication" company. We already support email and chat agents along with voice agents. Now we have made an entry into the social media space too. Will blog about this in more detail in another blog post.

When you have a huge customer base, it works as a huge advantage. Because of our customer base, we already have more than 10 signups for our new product. Will share the press release soon.

Will also do a separate blog post on the technical challenges and issues faced so far while working with Facebook Messenger API.

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