Business owners who are the most adaptable to change are still profitable during the pandemic's quarantine. They all focused their energies on how to better serve their customers online. Unfortunately, there are business owners who are lagging to the pandemic's changes. They are still stuck on how to establish their web presence. Hence, we wrote this article to guide business owners on how to establish their web presence that best fits their business.

The Requirements

1. Domain Name - This needs to be purchased from a domain name registrar such as GoDaddy and is usually renewed in an annual basis.
2. Hosting - You need a server to host your website. Old school IT boys will recommend you to buy a physical server which will cost you at least $1,000. However, maintaining your own physical server requires an IT Department to maintain it properly which will add to your overhead costs due to the salaries of the IT Infrastructure Specialists. The more affordable alternative is to subscribe to a cloud provider such as GoDaddy, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform which will only cost you at least $10 monthly. It really depends what is your website's infrastructure requirements. The more features you website can do and the more concurrent users you have, the higher your infrastructure requirements will be.
3. Web Development Skills - A web developer usually has a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills. The more markup and scripting languages the web developer has, the better. These languages are responsible for the UI or User-Interface Design which is responsible for how your website will look like.
4. Computer Programming Skills - A software developer is usually fluent in one of the computer programming languages such as PHP, C#, Java, Python, and Kotlin. These languages are responsible for the logic of your website. Logic algorithms could include what happens when a user clicks a button or redirecting a user to a new webpage when they click a navigation link. Websites that are dynamic based on the user's actions are usually called web apps because they include algorithms of logic. Web Apps like Facebook are able to do something when a user does something while websites that are static only displays information and will never accept any user input.
5. Database Administration Skills - A database administrator is usually fluent in a relational database language such as Structured Query Language or SQL. Modern database administrators are also fluent in a non-relational database language such as NoSQL. These languages are responsible for managing your data. They could save strings of text into a relational database while saving image, audio, and video files into a container. Most successful companies are data-driven and they value these skills the most.

That is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to running a website smoothly. The modern approach is hiring a fullstack developer who has web development, computer programming, and database administration skills. However, fullstack developers are rare pieces of gem in the tech world and are usually contracted by the Fortune 100 companies already. You will be lucky to come across one which increases your chances of launching a successful website.

The Weakness

The costs associated to develop and maintain a successful website is usually outside the price range of small business owners. The domain name and hosting are probably manageable but the huge chunk of budget really goes to the professional fees of the developers.

The Strengths

1. User-Experience - You have complete control of the User-Experience which includes the UI Design all the way to how the data is managed. You can customize your website in whatever manner you want. This is great if you are selling a product or service that needs to be conveyed in the best visual manner.
2. SEO - The Search Engine Optimization will make you accessible to the web. When users search for keywords associated with your website, chances are those users will land on your website. The SEO also helps you find qualified leads because companies like Google only shows relevant results on a user's search queries.

The Requirements

1. Facebook Account - You can sign up for FREE.
2. Facebook Page - You can create one for your business for FREE.
3. Chatbot Tech Provider - Your costs will depend on your chatbot provider. If you choose to code your own chatbot using a programming language, you will need to host it on a server. Else-if, you can choose a Chatbot Platform such as ManyChat and Chatfuel which requires 0 programming language skills but you have to pay their monthly subscription fee.

The Weakness

1. Limited UI - A Facebook chatbot resides on the Facebook platform. Hence, it must comply with the standards and User-Experience limitations provided by the Facebook web and mobile apps.
2. Bad Practices - You must always follow the Best Practices of operating a Facebook chatbot or it will end up being disruptive and an annoying experience to your customers. Since chatbots responds instantly after a user inputs something, this could be annoying if the chatbot responds irrelevant things to the user. The Best Practice is to pause the chatbot when it does not understand the user's input and turn over the conversation to a human admin.

The Strengths

1. Instant - A Facebook chatbot can provide answers to FAQs right away. Your customer does not have to wait long to get answers to his or her inquiries. According to SalesForce, 55% of the customers surveyed appreciates chatbots because it answers their inquiries instantly.
2. Available Always - A Facebook chatbot never sleeps, it is available 24/7 to answer inquiries and entertain all clients. The limitations of a human support specialist is that they can only work an average of 8 hours a day. There are some customers who do their shopping after office hours which is usually not covered by a human employee but the chatbot can.
3. Available to All - Multiple customers can be accommodated by a single Facebook chatbot at the same time. This means you can say goodbye to wait times, lines, or long queues. Unlike a human support specialist like a phone banker that can only accommodate one customer at a time, a Facebook chatbot can process everyone in one go.
4. Simple UI - It's weakness of limited UI can also be a Facebook chatbot's strength. Whatever the Facebook Messenger app can offer can also be offered by your chatbot. The Facebook Messenger app is easy to navigate because majority of the users are familiar with it which means the same users will be able to familiarize your chatbot in no time.
5. Data Source - Your chatbot is great in collecting all sorts of data from the users. As a business owner, you would know which of your products or services your customers are interested in based on what they are browsing or conversing with your chatbot. A chatbot can automatically sort which leads are warm, hot, qualified, and which ones turned cold so you can focus and retarget properly. Become a data-driven company by using your chatbot as one of your reliable data-sources.
6. Personalized - Since your chatbot is great in collecting all sorts of data, you can further personalize the chat experience of your customers. Little things like making the conversation more human by greeting the customer using his or her first name and have the right follow up replies based on a customer's inputs. This data-driven chat experience eventually predicts or discovers the intents of your clients and your business will be able to better serve them.
7. Innovative - Managing your own Facebook chatbot shows that your business is progressive and innovative. A chatbot differentiates itself from the old school software apps by knowing the intent of the user. Let's use phone banking as our example. You will be asked by the software to press a number to process your transaction. Sometimes, you make a mistake and you have to start from the beginning again. Poof - 20 minutes of your time gone and wasted by this software. Another pain will be waiting for an actual phone banker to be available to entertain you. In the Philippines, the average wait time will be at least 20 minutes. That is a huge waste of time!!! Here comes a Facebook chatbot, you don't have to press a combination of numbers to get what you want, you simply write your input and it understands what your intent is. If you lose your credit card, just type I lost my credit card and it will automatically proceed to the right process in fixing your problem. This is just one of the innovative use cases on how a chatbot can help your business.

We covered quite a bit on what is a website and a Facebook chatbot. We hope this helps you choose which one to setup first. Both have its weaknesses and strengths and Resabal Data Labs OPC hopes you will be able to leverage it in growing your business. If you need help in setting up your website or chatbot, feel free to just book an appointment with us.