Chatbots are in high demand, but not everyone has the resources to build one. Basing the actual development process within the conversational interface of Facebook Messenger is an intuitive and easy way for any business to build and optimize a chatbot without any initial or ongoing expertise needed. This makes chatbots and their benefits of improving customer service and growing sales at scale accessible to even the smallest of businesses, not just large enterprises.

Building upon and integrating many existing platforms is BotBot’s notable innovation. Expanding on a back end data management system, integrating with third party data services, and basing the business builder and consumer interactions within Facebook Messenger allows the product to be feasibly built in the first place. The familiarity of Messenger allows intuitive use by businesses and consumers.

Businesses visit the BotBot educational site to learn about chatbots and select a template. Facebook Messenger launches to customize, launch, and promote the newly created chatbot to customers. Customers can then interact with the chatbots in Messenger to access information and make purchases, while businesses can continue to interact in Messenger to access usage data, or visit a dedicated site for in-depth analytics and to optimize the experience. BotBot is publically accessible and new templates are continually being launched.

There are three notable components integrated by BotBot

1. A backend system that captures and delivers data for the full experience, and delivers analytics for experience optimization

2. Third party data services already in use by the business

3. Facebook Messenger, which captures data from the small business owner during setup, delivers data for consumer interactions, and captures consumer responses back into the backend system.

By templatizing the development of chatbots to serve all common business communications and services needs, any business will be able serve their customers on Messenger, and other chat channels. There is no cost, no expertise to build, and the Messenger interactions are largely automated, so the scale of BotBot is hoped to be boundless. BotBot helps any business in any industry easily setup and conduct communications on Messenger.

The foremost target of BotBot is making chatbots easily, and freely accessible to small businesses. A process that used to takes months, now takes less than three minutes. The expense has been reduced from six figures to zero figures. Development of BotBot has been a partnership between two organizations sharing an investment of resources. BotBot soft-launched on March 17, with promotion forthcoming in mid-April, so no sales results at time of submission are yet available.

Extensive integrations facilitate a complex exchange of data. For users – businesses building bots and their customers – the interface is a simple conversational exchange on Facebook Messenger, requiring no technical expertise and mere minutes to build or use.

BotBot finally makes chatbots accessible to the masses. Websites used to be hard to build, until elegant templates came along. BotBot does the same for chatbots.

Chatbots are becoming mainstream, and BotBot strives to accelerate that process. Technologies and processes like system architecture, site development, and Natural Language Processing are utilized, but the leap is packaging all of this in an accessible form.

With chatbots’ growing popularity, they’re starting to mature into more strategically executed channels, offering real utility for business owners and customers. However, chatbots being relatively new, rapidly evolving, and requiring highly specialized skillsets have made them inaccessible to all but the most well-funded and resource-rich businesses. BotBot aims to democratize chatbots by making them easily and freely accessible to any business.

There are no explicit limitations unique to chatbots as a communications channel. The data served and collected must be secured based on its nature, and the interactions must be strategically designed to serve their intended purposes and be complementary to a business’ integrated channels. BotBot was built on a budget of $400K.