Hamaisha Bot

Inspiration

There are so many small businesses in our country that are really struggling to reward their loyal customers. The biggest challenge being initiating a loyalty program within these small businesses. Most of them fear losing their money if they initiate a Loyalty program within their ventures. As with any business initiative, it all comes down to design and implementation. Your return on investment from loyalty programs will be dictated by how well they are constructed and executed, and if they are done in accordance with what’s best for your company and industry.

The other challenge is the difficulty in measuring a Loyalty Program Efficacy. Loyalty programs are difficult to measure the direct impact they can have on the business. Most small businesses don't have the resources to track, measure and benchmark against.

The solution

The Messenger platform from Facebook comes in handy with a lot of powerful and free features like One-time Notification and the Natural Language Processing (NLP) which allows you to understand and extract meaningful information (called entities) out of the messages people send. You can then use these entities to identify intent, automate some of your replies, route the conversation to a human via live chat, and collect audience data. Using the messenger platform, I was able to build a bot that solves this problem.

What it does

This messenger bot helps small businesses reward their loyal customers via royalty points and product offers across multiple categories. With Hamaisha bot Customers can collect points from partner stores throughout the country. With the messager app, you simply ask at the checkout whether they have an account with Hamaisha, scan QR code and benefit from loyalty discounts. With Hamaisha bot you can discover attractive offers from different categories in your area and buy them directly from the messenger app and redeem coupons or points locally.

How I built it

This Bot is built with Node-JS and express-JS. I used these tools to create a webhook endpoint that receives webhook events from the Messenger Platform. I built most of the features as guided by the beautiful documentation on the messenger platform available here [https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform].

Challenges I ran into

Scanning QR code from Messanger is not currently possible. this forces you to use a third-party API.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The bot having the capability to show offers and demonstrate what's possible with the messenger platform.

What I learned

What's next for loyalty Bot

Making Hamaisha available in production. to be used by real users

Built With

• express.js
• i18n
• messanger
• natural-language-processing
• node.js