Salesforce and Dropbox are two of the first to launch service offerings on Facebook’s new messenger platform.
According to Facebook, Messenger is one of the industry’s fastest growing apps, increasing user rates from 500 million in 2014 to 900 million today. The company have now introduced a number of bot services on the app, allowing businesses to communicate with their customers providing anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages.
“Using Salesforce, businesses are now able to engage with their customers on Facebook Messenger in a whole new way – in fact, Salesforce enables each Messenger interaction to be specifically tailored, based on the context of the entire customer relationship,” said Paul Smith, GM of Salesforce Marketing Cloud in EMEA. “When you remember that most companies are now competing primarily on the customer experience they can deliver, you can begin to see the massive impact of opening up this new channel to businesses: brands will be able to create deeper, more personal 1-to-1 customer journeys within chat. It’s another way in which we’re helping companies to succeed in the Age of the Customer.”
Powered by Salesforce Lightning, the platform will enable customers to deliver personalized engagement at scale with CRM data. The company claims that each message can be linked directly to a customer’s history in the Salesforce CRM platform, enabling brands to deliver personalized messages to customers. The news builds on trends within the industry as vendors aim to create increasingly personalized experiences for customers as a means of meeting the expectations of increasing demanding consumers.
“Now with Messenger, Facebook is inviting companies to engage their customers in new ways on its platform at scale,” said Alex Dayon, Chief Product Officer at Salesforce. “With Salesforce for Messenger companies will be able to easily connect their businesses to Messenger, creating deeper, more personalized and 1-to-1 customer journeys within the chat experience.”
Dropbox has also taken advantage of Facebook’s new platform to increase its own offering. As part of the proposition, users can share files stored on Dropbox’s cloud-storage service directly through Facebook’s messenger app.
“We want people to communicate just the way they want to on Messenger, with everyone they care about,” said Stan Chudnovsky, Head of Product for Messenger at Dropbox on the company’s blog. “Giving our users the ability to share their Dropbox videos and images in Messenger threads with just a few taps will help them bring more style and personality to those conversations.”
While the news has grabbed headlines in a very effective manner, it remains to be seen whether Facebook can police the platform in a way that satisfies consumers. The platform could essentially be seen as an upgrade on SMS advertising which was received coldly by consumers after the initial enthusiasm declined.