LINE Messenger is increasingly becoming one of the most popular messaging apps across Asia. There are 86 million monthly active users in Japan alone, which constitutes 68% of their population. Out of these, 40% of users just use the LINE app, while the rest – roughly 60% of users, use it along with apps like Facebook and Twitter.¹
LINE messenger enables businesses to reach customers through in-app ads and provides automated customer service with the help of LINE chatbots. With the increasing popularity of LINE messenger, businesses planning to build a presence in countries like Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Japan, should definitely consider LINE messenger.
What is a LINE chatbot?
LINE chatbot is an automated software, programmed to chat with users through the LINE messaging app. LINE chatbots are capable of responding to customer queries, ask relevant questions, provide product suggestions and even hand over conversations to an agent when required.
What can LINE chatbots do?
LINE bots make it easy for you to help your customers with common queries while significantly reducing their wait time. Here’s a list of the top 10 things a LINE chatbot can do for your customers.
- Answer basic questions or FAQs 24×7
- Book tickets or appointments
- Confirm orders and track shipments
- Process return and exchange requests
- Collect customer feedback efficiently
- Assign customer requests to support teams
- Share directions to a shop
- Showcase products using images and carousels
- Share surveys with customers
- Send push notifications or broadcast messages to a list of LINE users.
Does LINE have an API?
LINE has a Messaging API, which allows integrations with a Customer Messaging Software and enables data to pass seamlessly between your bot server and the LINE platform. No matter how or where you build your bot, you’ll use the LINE Messaging API to connect to the channel and communicate with users through text messages, sticker messages, image messages, and more.
How does a LINE chatbot work?
In a human-to-human interaction, a user would message a brand, the conversation would be assigned to an available agent, who would then invest time and effort to converse with the user, find the most relevant solution, and offer an answer.
On the other hand, when you deploy a Line chatbot – when a user types in their query to your chatbot, the Messaging API grabs that message and sends it to your webhook ( a set of code to provide real-time information), and after being instantly processed, the bot responds to the user. This allows for the processing of multiple conversations at the same time, faster responses, deflection of common queries, and always-on availability.
Why do you need a LINE integration?
LINE chatbots require a Messaging API to work. Since API is just a set of code that enables data to pass seamlessly between your bot server and the LINE platform, it doesn’t have any user interface (UI) which your team can use to respond to customer queries. And for that, you need a Customer Messaging Software which provides a common interface to your team using which they can respond to customer queries.
In short, you need a LINE integration with a Customer Messaging Software to:
➜ Use LINE’s Messaging API, without which you can’t build simple or complex LINE chatbots.
➜ Give your support team a common interface using which they can respond to customer queries.
But even after integration, if you don’t have a bot builder within your Customer Messaging Software, you have to code your own bot and then integrate it within your software. And to do that inhouse you will:
➜ Require more time to develop and implement the chatbot.
➜ Incur additional cost of hiring developers for building and testing chatbots.
➜ Require additional people for maintaining and fixing issues in case of issues or downtime.
So an easier, faster, and cost-effective option is to have LINE integration with a Customer Messaging Software like Freshchat that:
- Provides native integration with LINE Messaging API.
- Have a simplified modern interface and agent-side automation to help your team work efficiently.
- Have a unified bot builder that enables you to build complex LINE chatbots with just a few clicks – no need to write even a single line of code.
- Saves the cost of hiring developers to build your chatbot and maintaining it for your company.
- Take the burden of downtime or other issues off your head. By just raising a simple ticket you can get the issue resolved and for this, you don’t have to hire extra staff.
- Gives added advantage of building and integrating chatbots for messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, in case you want to support your customers on these popular messaging apps in the future.
How to create a chatbot for LINE Messenger?
Now we have a good understanding of LINE Messaging APIs and how a LINE chatbot works. Let’s look at how you can integrate your LINE account with Freshchat and build your own codeless LINE chatbot.
Steps overview
1. Prerequisite
➜ LINE Business Account
➜ LINE Developer account
➜ LINE Channel ID and Channel Secret
2. Integration of LINE with Freshchat
3. Recommended settings for Messaging API
4. Creating your codeless LINE chatbot
1. Prerequisites
a) LINE Business Account –
To create a business account, go to:
1. Line Business page
2. Click Create an account
3. Then click ‘Sign up with email’, enter your email address and then click Send sign up link
4. Upon receiving the email, click continue in the email. You will be redirected to the sign up page to enter your name and password to finish the sign up process.
b) LINE Developer Account –
To create a developers account, go to:
1. LINE Developers portal
2. Login with LINE business account and register as a developer
c) LINE Channel ID and Channel Secret –
To get the Channel ID and Channel Secret, you need to create a channel. To do that:
1. Go to the LINE Developers portal and login with your business account
2. Select Create a new provider. Enter the name of the provider (a provider is an entity that offers your app) and click Create.
3. Click ‘Create a Messaging API channel’. Fill the required fields and click ‘Create’
4. From the next window, you can get your Channel ID and Channel Secret.
2. LINE Integration with Freshchat
To integrate your LINE account with Freshchat
1. Sign up for Freshchat.
2. Go to Admin > Integrations > LINE MESSENGER
3. Click on Add account
4. Enter LINE Channel ID and Channel Secret
5. Create a Topic and assign it to a Group. Suppose you will use this channel for your North America region’s support team. In that case, the topic can be ‘North America Support,’ and you can assign it to the North American support group.
6. Click Edit and copy Line Channel URL.
7. Log in to your LINE developer account and go to Messaging API > Webhook settings > Edit
8. Paste the URL in the LINE Webhook settings and click Update.
9. Click Verify to get the URL verified. And toggle Use webhook to enabled.
If the webhook URL verification is not successful the first time, try verifying it a few times until the success message appears.
3. Recommended Settings for Messaging API
For the integration to work seamlessly, make sure you configure the below settings in your LINE account. Click Edit next to the Auto-reply messages option.
And configure the following under Response Settings.
➜ Response mode to Bot
➜ Greeting Message to Disabled
➜ Auto Response to Disabled
➜ Webhooks to Enabled
4. Building your codeless LINE chatbot
Once you have integrated your LINE account with Freshchat, you can create your no-code chatbot even during your tea break.
1. Go to the bots section and click on New Bot.
3. Build the custom flows. Custom flows are the automated messages that gets triggered when a user sends a message or selects an option. Refer to this support article for step-by-step instructions on creating a simple bot flow.
4. Select Messaging Channels from the Deploy section and add a new messaging channel by clicking Add. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the process.
Artificial + Human Intelligence = Future proof chatbots
Freshchat offers chatbots powered by the Freddy AI engine. It supports chatbots on LINE messenger and on messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Apple business chat, Facebook messenger, your website, and even inside your app.
With Freshchat’s unified bot builder you can:
1. Build your own bots without writing a single line of code.
2. Train your bots to answer FAQs using artificial Intelligence and the machine learning capabilities of the Freddy AI engine.
3. Easily integrate with your favorite messaging apps and tools.
4. Create a bot in 47 languages.
5. Get started with bot templates for your business use-cases.
6. Customize the look and feel of your chatbot to match your brand.
7. Track and optimize performance with detailed reports.
8. Configure conditional flows using IF-ELSE & AND-OR conditions
Here’s a video that showcases these and many more features.
To deliver effortless, personalized, and automated customer service on LINE messenger and achieve all your customer messaging goals, try Freshchat.
Source
1. Marcomill Internet survey Jan 2021
