Messenger
Payments
How we helped Facebook and Subway invent
retail payments within chatbots.
Facebook Messenger is a messaging platform with over 1.3 billion users globally.
Business Need
The Facebook Messenger team was announcing Messenger Payments at their annual developers conference and wanted to showcase how consumers can purchase from brands directly from within Messenger. They invited 6 national, e-commerce enabled brands to integrate their brand and offering in Messenger while allowing for mobile payments via a chatbot. Facebook gave Subway and Agilitee an opportunity to be showcased at their developers conference. We had 60 days to define, design, integrate, develop and launch the Subway Order Not using Facebook Messenger and Messenger Payments.
Approach
Agilitee started by engaging directly with the Facebook Messenger product team to understand the capabilities of the yet-to-be-announced Messenger Payments and Bot capabilities. In parallel we conducted heuristic audits of best in breed AI driven chat bots, at the time there we almost none. Agilitee combined with this research our knowledge with the Subway APIs required to allow for product configuring and ordering. In addition we had to partner with the MasterCard team to enable MasterPass payments. There was no time for prototypes so we built the actual Order Bot and used it as a means to conduct user research and confirm with all involved it would pass the stringent expectations all parties were holding.
Outcome
THE FIRST EVER LAUNCH OF A FACEBOOK MESSENGER PAYMENTS ENABLED, AI DRIVEN CHAT BOT
The Subway Order Bot on Facebook Messenger integrated with Payments was the first of its kind. Of the six brands invited to build and launch at Facebooks Developer conference Subway was the only one who had a solution launched and available for use.
“This is truly a dream team that crossed the finish line!”
