3 Ways Facebook Messenger can Benefit your Doggie Daycare

Facebook Messenger, the all-powerful instant messenger that seamlessly connects your phone to your Facebook world, is useful for more things than wasting time while you're waiting in line at the bank. It also serves as a useful tool for communicating with your doggie daycare clients. With nearly 2 billion people having a Facebook account (crazy huh?), there's a good chance that your pet hotel parents are going to have accounts as well. Use this fact to your benefit and put Facebook Messenger to work for your business.

1. Answer Messages Quickly to Build Your "Reply Reputation"

I'm sure you've seen the little info box next to a Facebook business page that shows you how long it takes them to reply. Facebook calls it their responsiveness. Well, this little information box plays a big role in the amount of people that communicate through your Facebook page. If you're slow to reply to messages, you're going to discourage people from communicating with you through Facebook. This means that your business phone might start ringing more, since they think you'll answer their questions faster over the phone than through Messenger. That said, make it a point to answer messages as fast as possible. Set your phone to vibrate, so that when someone messages you on Facebook, you can reply via your phone. This will keep your business phone from constantly ringing and will help you increase your responsiveness score.

2. Add the Facebook Messenger Widget to your Website

One thing that I've started to see a lot more are businesses using Facebook Messenger on their website. Using the Facebook Customer Chat Plugin, you can install a chat widget on your website where people can send messages to your Facebook business page, directly from your business's website. There are many other online chat tools out there, like oLark or Intercom, but Facebook is free and will help you better connect with your users. Let's be real, email is kind of "old school" now. People would rather instant message than send an email, so use Facebook Messenger on your website to get with the times. Once you have the customer chat plugin integrated, you can expect to start seeing a decline in the number of emails that you receive and an increase in messages. People, myself included, much prefer the faster turn around times of online instant messaging to the "wait a day or two" for most emails. If you're a techie and think you can do the integration yourself, here's a very nice tutorial for adding the Facebook chat widget to your website. It's honestly much easier than it sounds.

3. Set up Multiple User Accounts "Seats" So Your Employees can Answer Questions

I don't know about you, but lately, whenever I have a problem with a company, I head over to their Facebook page and send them a message. This seems to be the easiest way to get a response from big businesses these days, and people are starting to expect smaller businesses to do the same. Once your doggie daycare starts to grow in size, you're going to need to hire some employees. Make sure that you set up these employees as moderators/authors on your Facebook business page. This way, your employees can answer customer questions while logged into their Facebook account, and everyone can see who replied to which messages. You now don't have to share your business login with your employees. If and when you let go of an employee, you can simply remove their permissions from your business page. Anyways, if someone comes in and says they spoke with an employee on Facebook about an appointment, you can look into your history logs to see which employee the spoke with. You can also have your employees moderate blog comments and perform other jobs that are integrated into your Facebook page.

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