The 1–800–Flowers Facebook chatbots was one of the first bots we looked at that and one that takes a “Purchase First” approach. For readers who have subscribed to this thread, this is part of our ongoing series on Chatbot applications.
For those unfamiliar with our terminology, by “Purchase First” we mean that the application assumes that the first thing a user wants to do is to purchase a product or service. For 1–800–Flowers, an e-commerce leader in its category, this approach seems natural and overall we were impressed by the bot performance (5 Stars).
NOTE: This post is part of an ongoing series on chatbot applications. You can subscribe to updates if you want to follow the entire series.
Below is a transcript of a conversation with the bot:
Links:
Functionality:
- Allows users to purchase flowers
- Allows users to get support questions answered
Positives:
- Best practice: The bots collect information to create and save a profile of the user for later use (probably extends to saving payment information as well, but we didn't follow through with the purchase so we can't confirm).
- Workflow is logical and familiar to users who have made online purchases before.
- Best practice: Bot prepares the order then “breaks out” into a stipe-powered payment engine (outside of Messenger).
- Best practice: Good use/integration of product imagery, very important for this type of product
- Best practice: Good support for the HELP keyword, allows you to connect to support doing regular business hours
- Best practice: Users personalization (user's name) when possible
- The number of confirmation and suggestions is probably about right.
- Remembers workflow status if you return later.
Negatives:
- Minor: The number of questions could be reduced (slightly), more information could be collected during each interaction.
Platform and Technology: