Much of Facebook’s opening f8 keynote on Wednesday was about Facebook Messenger, which the company has now turned into a developer platform. The other major piece of Messenger news was that users will soon be able to interact with businesses. For businesses, this means a new, direct, and very personal way to engage with customers.
Would you like to use Messenger to engage with customers? Let us know in the comments.
As a business, you can enable your customers to connect with you via Messenger. If they elect to do so, you’ll be able to send them personalized updates and talk to them in real time. A website integration might look like this:
You can use custom layouts for order confirmation, shopping updates, etc. As the company says, “This lets your customers keep all their order info in one place and reach out to you if they need to change anything.”
It remains to be seen whether or not people actually want to engage with businesses via Messenger. There is something to be said about being able to get customer support in real time, but I don’t know how I feel about giving every site I buy something from free rein to send me messages as they wish. Email still works pretty well for that.
As Messenger’s David Marcus explained in the keynote, it does have the potential to make the customer service aspect more convenient as the company already has all of the relevant information about who you are and what you bought right from the get go. Everything takes place in the same discussion thread as your receipt. It’s unclear how the opt out process works.
Facebook has already partnered with Zendesk on customer support in Messenger, and is calling on additional partners to sign up.
The whole thing is just in preview status for the time being. Facebook does have a form where interested businesses can sign up for more details about getting involved.
Do you expect your customers to want to engage with your business through Messenger? Discuss.
Images via Facebook