Introducing Botkit with bCRM

This new plugin for your bot enables seamless, smart broadcast messaging and customer management

Ben Brown
Howdy

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Hotels.com just announced that they’ve launched a chatbot-powered, GIF-enabled charades game as a holiday promotion on Facebook Messenger.

This bot was built with the pre-release version of Botkit Studio, and takes advantage of our latest integration partner, bCRM, in a way that will give them two key advantages:

With Botkit Studio’s authoring and content management tools, they can continue to update and add content and interactions to their bot’s brain without writing additional code or managing software deploys during a high profile campaign.

And with bCRM, they’ll be able to stay in touch with their users through the bot, but with a distinctly personal touch. All Botkit developers can now take advantage of this integration through this new plugin.

One of the key features required to run an engaging bot like this is the ability to have your bot send regular news, updates and enticements to its users. Sending a broadcast notification to bot users is much more challenging than sending an email announcement or simply putting a banner on your website — and don’t even get me started on supporting users in timezones around the world! Developers need a tool that handles this job for them — a smart Mailchimp for Bots.

Enter bCRM, a great tool that enables a developer to send out messages to users of their bot in a variety of ways. bCRM lets you schedule announcements to arrive in the user’s local timezone, and also provides ways to segment and target your users with different messages. This is super useful!

The features bCRM provides are so useful, we think almost every bot will need them. We’re partnering with bCRM to provide a seamless integration for Botkit developers — the first part of that is available today with the brand new botkit-middleware-bcrm module.

To turn on automagic support for your Slack App or Facebook Messenger bot, install the bCRM middleware into your Botkit project:

npm install — save botkit-middleware-bcrm

Then, once you’ve created your bCRM account, add the following
lines of code to your app:

require(‘botkit-middleware-bcrm’)({
bcrm_token: ‘my_bcrm_token’,
bcrm_bot: ‘my_bcrm_bot’,
controller: controller
});

Once configured, your bot will automatically sync with bCRM and your bot will have gained an enormously helpful new feature!

Sign up here to get early access to Botkit Studio.

Botkit is the leading open source tool for developing bots for Slack, Facebook and other major messaging platforms. Dive into our extensive documentation, examples and starter projects, then join 3500 other bot developers in our community chat room.

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Editor for

I’m a designer and technologist in Austin, Texas. I co-founded XOXCO in 2008.