SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook think that there is a big communication gap between the business and consumers and the bridge has been fundamentally broken between them. To overcome this issue Facebook aimed to introduced a new Business conversation messenger so that this gap can be rolled out.
There are now 600 million people using Facebook’s chat application, Messenger, each month. At its F8 developers conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, the social network sought to bring a new member into the conversation: businesses.
Messenger is one of several standalone consumer-facing apps in Facebook’s portfolio, which now includes Instagram (photo-sharing) and WhatsApp (mobile chat). It’s one of the company’s most widely used products and one that has probably evolved the most in the last 12 months. Last year, Facebook split Messenger from its core Facebook mobile app. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, also appointed a new executive to lead the effort: former PayPal CEO David Marcus.
The biggest strategic shift for Facebook FB -2.59% has been creating a family of apps for its users, Zuckerberg said on Wednesday, rather than shove ever more features into its namesake app. Messenger has matured into a multipurpose tool—users use it to dispatch messages, photos, and videos between them—that functions as the social fabric that connects users on the Facebook network. Zuckerberg and his team are betting that people want to use Messenger for all kinds of transactions—as a conduit to call people, for example, or send money. And, interestingly, as an inbox to connect directly with businesses.
Facebook seems to believe that communication between businesses and consumers is fundamentally broken. In an e-commerce purchase, for example, the buyer is typically sent multiple emails—a receipt, a shipment confirmation, updates along the way. Often the buyer must log-in to the e-commerce site in question to access this information. And all of those interactions lack any real, natural communication, says Marcus.
“Commerce is conversational,” he said, speaking to software developers at the Fort Mason Center. It is more natural, he maintained, for businesses to converse with customers rather than broadcast to them. Messenger fits the bill.
Facebook used two launch partners—clothing site Everlane and mom-focused deals site Zulily—to show off the dynamic. Everlane incorporated Facebook’s services in its checkout page to allow consumers to opt to receive updates after making a purchase. From there, a mobile push notification and an opportunity to continue the conversation—from gleaning shipping information from UPS to modifying an order or purchasing another good—within the Messenger app. (Businesses see a customer service portal powered by Zendesk.)
Engaging the buyer at the point of sale was purposeful, Marcus said, because there is a high probability at that moment that the user is willing to interact with the brand. “It’s reintroducing personal back to shopping,” he said. “This is about creating rich content and interactions between people and businesses. You could imagine that in the future, a customer could have have multiple threads open with businesses that you care about, and you could transact and buy things.”
