In one of our previous blogs, we walked you through the benefits and limitations of Google Business Messages. There are two main limitations with common implementations of Google Business Messages. The first limitation is that it takes a lot of money and time to pay a professional consulting agency to create a customized virtual agent for your business from the ground up. The second limitation is that business owners are not able to talk directly to customers unless the consulting agency provides a live-chat feature as part of their implementation.

Now you might be wondering, is there a solution to overcome these barriers but still gain the benefits of Google Business Messages? That is why we want to introduce Near Me Messaging (Update: We’ve since pivoted the product to be an omni-channel chatbot builder. Now called SeaChat!).

About Near Me Messaging

Near Me Messaging integrates state-of-the-art Conversational AI with Google Business Messages, allowing customers to reach your business anytime in the day via the chat button on your Google Maps profile. This way, you can focus on taking care of your business while Near Me Messaging handles your customer inquiries. What sets Near Me Messaging apart from similar services is the 5 minute set-up time, self-serve customization, and built-in live chat support.

Near Me Messaging integrates Google Business Messages with the chat button on your Google Maps Profile.

First of all, when businesses integrate Google Business Messages, they need to pay a professional consulting agency to create a fully customized experience for them from the ground up. These are usually expensive and take time. We understand that the typical time and resource investment to take advantage of Google Business Messages is a barrier to entry for a lot of small businesses. Near Me Messaging solves this limitation by providing an affordable solution for SMEs. You can get a working virtual agent in less than 5 minutes. Moreover, you can continuously update and customize your virtual agent anytime from the Near Me Messaging website. The changes you make on the Near Me Messaging site take effect right away for customers who are interacting with your agent.

In addition to that, when you enable the chat button on the Google Business Profile, you have the ability to reply to your customers whenever you are available. But when you integrate Google Business Messages, your incoming messages are routed to your live agent, and you lose your ability to chat directly with customers within Google Business Profile. Near Me Messaging solves this limitation by providing a live agent feature with no additional cost or set-up time. With the live agent feature, customers can request to be transferred to a real person at any time. When you see a live agent request, or if you want to take over for the virtual agent, you can join the conversation and directly talk to your customers.

Benefits of Near Me Messaging

1. Saves time and manpower in delivering excellent customer service

When you use Near Me Messaging, responses to the most basic questions are handled automatically based on the information from your Google Business Profile. The more information on your Google Business Profile, the better the agent can respond to basic questions. And if you ever want to update your Google Business Profile, you can sync your changes with Near Me to automatically update the bot responses. The virtual agent will also generate responses from relevant user reviews on your Google Maps profile that have a high star rating. Beyond the automatically generated responses, you can add more custom content via FAQs and the knowledge base, which we will discuss in more detail in the next section.

Within 5 minutes of logging into the Near Me website, you can test out your own working virtual agent. Your virtual agent can deliver instant answers to customers’ repetitive inquiries 24/7. This way, you can build and maintain your relationships with your customers.

Example from our Custom FAQ feature.

2. Self-serve and customizable capabilities.

In addition to generating responses from your Business Profile and customer reviews, Near Me Messaging is equipped with self-serve customization capabilities. In order to personalize your virtual agent, some of the basic features you can customize are the virtual agent name, welcome message, and logo. More importantly, you can craft custom responses to user queries that are specific to your business. This is done by creating frequently asked questions (FAQs) and adding more information about your business (such as the text from your website) to the knowledge base.

After customizing your agent, you have the ability to privately test it until you are satisfied with the performance. When you’re ready, you can then launch it to the public directly from the Near Me Messaging website. Once you publicly launch your virtual agent, you have the ability to continuously improve your virtual agent such as adding more FAQs and changing the welcome message. Every time you improve your virtual agent, you have the opportunity to test the changes and then re-launch the agent. When you re-launch the agent, the changes you made will be visible to users right away. As business owners, you truly have the freedom and power to build and improve your virtual agent without extra cost or communication time with our team.

The interface of Near Me Messaging Overview page where business owners can modify the welcome message and improve their virtual agent.

3. Gain insights through Near Me Analytics.

Near Me Messaging also offers an analytics feature to help you gain insight into your virtual agent performance, busiest hours, and customer messages. You can also gain insights about questions that your virtual agent couldn’t find a response for so that you can add them to the Custom FAQ. Finally, you can also learn more about the most mentioned topics from Google Reviews.

Near Me Analytics gives you insights into your customer messages.

Near Me Analytics allows you to see your virtual agent’s busiest hours and unanswered questions.

Near Me Analytics allows you to find the most mentioned topics in Google Reviews.

4. Understand what your customer needs through conversation history.

Near Me Messaging allows you to see conversations between your virtual agent and your customers. This can help you know who is interested in your business and how your virtual agent is performing. In addition to that, you also have the ability to create labels, apply them to conversations, and then filter based on the label.

Near Me Messaging conversation history feature.

5. Ability to chat directly with your customers with our live agent feature

Near Me Messaging is also equipped with a live agent feature. Customers can click “request a live agent” via GBM. When a customer requests a live agent, the owner will get a notification from the Near Me website.

Customers can request a live agent through the chat button on the Google Maps profile.

The owner can join any conversation at any time as long as the user has sent a message within the last 30 days. The customer will get a notification when the live agent joins/leaves the conversation. As soon as the live agent leaves the conversation, all messages will be routed back to the virtual agent again. From the Near Me site, all the conversation events can be seen - so you can see when the user requests an agent and when the agent joins/leaves, in addition to all the messages from the bot, user, and agent.

A notification will pop up on Near Me website when a customer requested a live agent.

Interface of Near Me live agent feature.

Are you ready to get started with Near Me Messaging? Stay tuned for our next post about how to launch your virtual agent with Near Me Messaging. Book a demo with us today and be among the first to get a free trial of Near Me Messaging!