Icebreakers for Messenger Business

Problem Overview

Let’s say you wanted to message Macy’s inquiring about an undelivered package. In an ideal world, you would fire up the their Facebook page, hit the Messenger CTA if you can find it, land on the welcome page interstitial, hit "Message," and start a conversation to asking about your order. We though so, too, but it didn’t quite work like that. Over the period of a few months, we were seeing a 54% drop-off rate from our welcome interstitial to the user actually sending their first message to a business page.

Tackling the Problem

This was a problem for us because it meant that the current welcome page/landing experience was a barrier for people trying to start a conversation with a business. And that’s what we wanted to solve for.

Designing Icebreakers

As I worked on a variety of different concepts and through my conversations with PMs, immediate design partners, and other engineering stakeholders, we were able to reconcile constraints and appropriately select, modify, and leverage design patterns and interactions to work on a systems-level solution. Through this process, we gained quick alignment around our principles and landed with the concept of “icebreakers.”

Automated Responses

Based on the information that we could pull from the Page itself, we decided to pre-populate these icebreakers by default and generate automated responses. These icebreakers are tied to relevant information from that specific Page ensuring customer initiated conversations with a detectable outcome.

Other Examples

In addition to the data that we pull, we took a step further and also pre-populated responses with recently shared promotions or events from the brand.

While this is something we pre-populated by default, brands are also able to create custom icebreakers on their Messenger profile using Facebook’s API.

Impact and Big Wins

Icebreakers were shipped to over 7 million businesses in October 2019 and I am convinced that it was easily the most large-scale project I have been a part of. Through our work on this project, the Messenger Design team was able to achieve some big milestones in the P2B design space.

• Efficiency: Icebreakers help save time and effort for both brands and customers.

• Increased MAP: Because of increased conversations with detectable outcomes, Messenger noticed a spike in Monthly Active People.

• Increased VBT: Increased MAP is driving Valuable Business Threads — user initiated threads with real businesses and a meaningful outcome.

The launch was featured on multiple news outlets including MarTech Today and Facebook’s own Newsroom.

Team

A survey we conducted of more than 11,000 people ages 18 to 24-years-old revealed that 60% wished they could message more businesses. Icebreakers are doing just that — helping create more opportunities for brands to communicate directly with users. And this is the team that made it happen.