Twitter has introduced chatbots to help brands to communicate with customers on its platform.

They take the form of two new features called welcome messages and quick replies. Welcome messages enable businesses to set up welcome messages to automatically send to people who enter a Direct Message conversation with them, before the person has sent them the first message.

Businesses can create multiple welcome messages and deep link directly to a specific greeting from Tweets, websites, or apps. In a blog post, Twitter’s Ian Cairns said that welcome messages “help businesses demonstrate their commitment to service and help people learn what options exist to engage with a business in Direct Messages.”

Quick replies enables businesses to prompt people with the best ways to reply to a Direct Message, whether by choosing from a list of options or guiding users to enter specific text values.

“When quick replies and welcome messages are used together, businesses can reduce wait times and educate people on the best ways to interact with them,” said Cairns. “For example, they can enable faster resolutions by helping customers more easily provide information to solve problems before an agent sees the first message, or they can simplify automated services and transactional flows that were difficult in the past.”

Pizza Hut, Tesco, Airbnb and Evernote are among the first companies to start using the bot services.
“The new Pizza Hut social ordering platform is another example of making it easy for our customer to order their favorites from Pizza Hut,” said Baron Concors, global chief digital officer at Pizza Hut. “We are constantly pursuing ways to simplify our ordering experience. This platform allows our consumers to quickly order or get information within Twitter where they are already spending a great deal of their time.”

Businesses that provides support in Direct Messages can set a default welcome message in the support settings page of the Twitter Dashboard to greet people when they start a conversation.