Conversocial, a provider of social messaging for customer care, and some of its customers are among the first to gain early access to the closed beta of Facebook Messenger customer chat, a new capability that enables people to talk with businesses across web and Messenger.
Messenger customer chat allows consumers to chat with businesses on their websites and in Messenger (across web, mobile, or tablet) and transition back and forth seamlessly without losing the conversation's history and context. With early access to Messenger customer chat, Conversocial customers can more broadly promote Messenger as a customer support channel.
"The future of customer service is messaging. It's more effortless and convenient for customers and more efficient for brands. With Messenger customer chat, the benefits of messaging can now be expanded to include live conversations on their website," saidConversocial CEO and founder Joshua March in a statement. "We're excited to be one of the first customer care platforms to offer preferred access to this game-changing format for Messenger to our clients, who can now promote private messaging and create a truly seamless, effortless customer experience, ushering in the next generation of social messaging for customer care."
Among the select Conversocial clients invited to pilot Messenger customer chat are U.K. retailer Argos, Latin American airline Volaris, and German fashion retailer Zalando, all of which have launched seamless chat with customers in-app and web via Messenger.
Since initially promoting Messenger across customer service touch points, Argos has instantly seen a significant increase in daily incoming messages via Messenger, while email volumes have simultaneously dropped.
"Our customers clearly prefer using personal messaging apps like Facebook Messenger to reach out to us for assistance. Messenger customer chat supplements existing live chat and gives our customers a familiar and convenient way to contact us, while allowing Argos to further promote private messaging as a channel, reducing instances of public complaints while increasing customer satisfaction and convenience," said Chris Tomlinson, digital product owner of the Customer Management Centre at Argos, in a statement. "The increase in messaging volume is allowing us to address broader types of issues without hampering our ability to deliver good service. Conversocial's intelligence, automation, and workflow truly enables us to meet our [service-level agreement] benchmarks while handling increased messaging volume."
This announcement comes on the heels of Conversocial's recent launch of platform enhancements enabling companies to conduct social messaging for customer care at scale, including the ability to survey customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores via Facebook Messenger.