How to Setup Response Assistant For Your Facebook Page

Customer service should be a top priority for any company. Keeping customers happy improves retention and revenue. With the latest advances in technology, it's easier than ever to keep the lines of communication open between you and your customers.

Social media has made customers feel empowered -- and they expect you to be listening.

Today, most customers expect 24/7 service. We live in an age where virtually everyone has a Smartphone in their pocket. We are constantly connected to one another through email, text, and social media.

If you have a company with oodles of clients, and a Facebook Page that has been gaining a lot of traction, you’d know that it’s pretty tough to reply to messages promptly and consistently. Facebook now highlights the response-time and response-rate of pages, so if you are often late in replying to messages or you sometimes forget to reply, the poor response-time and rate can affect your presence on the social network.

But you may not be available on social media all the time. You may be outside, you may be in a meeting, or a customer may reach out after working hours. So if someone sends a message to your Facebook business page, how would you let them know that you are not available at the moment but their message is important to you and you will get back to them as soon as possible?

It's really simple! The answer is Facebook Response Assistant. This tool will allow to you set up a custom message when you’re not available in order to improve your customer service. 60% of Facebook users are more likely to buy the products of brands they follow online, so it is very important to stay on top of your Facebook page and be quick to respond to messages that you receive. This is another aspect of your customer service reputation. So, without further ado, here’s how to setup Response Assistant on your Facebook Page:

Enable Messaging

To start the setup, you need to visit your Facebook page and go to the “Messages” section and enable the option “Allow people to contact my page privately by showing the Message button” and save changes. If you already have the Messaging settings enabled, you can ignore this step.

Once you save and refresh the page you will see the "Messaging" tab.

The “Messaging Settings” will open up, where you will see options for two sections: “General Settings” and “Response Assistant." Click on “Jump to Section” alongside Response Assistant to start fiddling with its options.

Send Instant Replies

Now that you are in the response assistant section of your page, it's time to set up response assistant messages. You can create a message including up to 250 characters.

The first response setting allows you to send a custom reply to anyone who messages your Facebook page. To use this feature, select “Yes” on “Send Instant Replies to anyone who messages your Page.” Your reply can even include the name of the customer who is sending you a message, your phone number and website URL, as well as any other important information.

Stay Responsive

The second option is the ability to set a custom message based on the hours that you set. Say, for example, if your business is only open from 8AM to 5PM, you can set a custom "away" message so that if somebody messages you outside of those specified hours, they will get receive a preset reply. To use this, turn the feature on, set your schedule and add your message as we explained above. That's it!

Messenger Greeting

The last Facebook response assistant setting is the ability to set a messenger greeting. This is extremely useful, for example, if somebody messages you through your Facebook page but you handle support questions through customer care. So, instead of somebody sending a message and expecting to get a response, you show them a custom message directing them on how to reach out to you. You have up to 160 characters to set up your greeting.

Before we conclude, I wanted to add some additional points:

• You can't use Facebook Response Assistant on your Facebook profiles, it only works with Facebook pages for now
• You can set up Facebook Response Assistant from your mobile, but you will need to have Facebook Page Manager, which you can download from your app store.
• At this time, you can only have a single language response. There’s no option to set up Response Assistant for multiple languages.

So that's it. That's how you use Response Assistant on your Facebook Page to better connect with customers. It's easy, right? This is how Facebook Response Assistant improves customer support. Try this on your Facebook Page and let us know what you think.