2016 was a year of growing difficulties for businesses using chatbots on Facebook Messenger. But in 2017, things have changed.
On average, 2 billion messages were sent between businesses and customers, each month on Messenger. The messaging platform from Facebook is particularly popular with users in the U.S., Brazil, Thailand, Mexico and Vietnam.
Messenger is also popular with businesses that work in the fields of professional services, retail, local entertainment, public good and media industries.
That number of messages was made possible because nearly all Millennials say that messaging apps are their preferred means of customer service interaction. And Facebook here, is taking advantage of this increased reliance on messaging platforms.
Out of those billions of messages, include conversation messages from chatbots. There are more than 200,000 bots on Messenger. This is twice as many bots as Messenger featured in April 2017, the time when the company introduced the Discover tab to make it easier for people to find bots and businesses to message.
"Businesses are already using [messenger] to engage with their consumers in a personalized, powerful way," said Stefanos Loukakos, Head of Messenger. "This can be the new paradigm of how businesses communicate with their customers. Twenty years ago, they… started building a web presence; now is the time for businesses to build a presence on messenger."
Not only businesses and businesses’ bots that people are chatting with. There’s also Messenger’s own chatbot, M.
In November, more than 100 million people used the Messenger’s virtual assistant.