The Future of Customer Support Apps

As we reach higher levels of connectivity every day, our expectations in the realm of customer service begins to grow. There seems to be no excuse left for anyone in the services industry to not communicate effectively and in a timely manner with their customers. And with the fear of a social media backlash, resulting in poor PR or brand equity diminishment, businesses are constantly searching for more ways to connect, communicate and serve their customers better.

This has spawned a host of products available to facilitate this requirement. Some of the well known leaders in the space are Zendesk, Intercom, LiveChat & FreshDesk, to name just a few. However, their space is ready to be disrupted by a massive player entering the market — Facebook.

The Messenger Chatbots Experiment

Facebook began its foray into customer support with the introduction of Messenger Chatbots a couple of years ago now. While these Chatbots started out with a pretty narrow scope, and looked nowhere near the level they would need to be at in order to be a serious player in this space, the fact that it had Facebook’s infinite technical & financial resources at its disposal was a telling sign that it was a matter of time before Messenger would be a viable customer support option. That time is definitely upon us, as Messenger has made several advancements since its early days.

They now offer integration with web sites through which users can begin a live chat session with a representative. On the support agent side, fielding customers’ requests has never been easier. Just having the Facebook Pages or Messenger app on your phone (which a majority of people already have) will allow you to communicate with the customer on your web site. Not to mention, the Chatbots are still there — and they are way smarter now.

The web site owner can configure the bots to respond with certain pre-programmed phrases based on when certain criteria is met, such as a default Hello message, away message, or simply look for keywords in sentences to display a canned response based on the knowledge base at hand. And these bots are evolving at a rapid pace, so we can safely assume that AI and Machine Learning will allow us to have smarter and smarter bots working for us in customer support in the very near future.

Enter WhatsApp

This week, Facebook announced that its massive messaging behemoth WhatsApp would now offer Business APIs to aid in this very purpose. One might find it strange that Facebook would offer a competing product to its already present Messenger app in this space. Facebook however, has never been shy to do that, as we saw with its Stories strategy. They introduced Stories in Instagram, then Messenger, then WhatsApp, and then finally in the main Facebook app itself. The icing on the cake was when they provided users the ability to synchronize their stories between the platforms. A similar game might be afoot here, allowing customer support staffs to provide live chat assistance via whichever platform they prefer.

The introduction of WhatsApp to this space makes a lot of sense. WhatsApp is the most dominant chat application in the world (outside of China), with over 1.5 billion users. Borrowing a page from the only chat app that is larger than them, WeChat, WhatsApp saw the potential of tapping into the customer support market in countries such as India, Brazil and the Middle East, where WhatsApp is the default mechanism for communicating.

Chatting with customer support representatives is just the tip of the iceberg. Look for WhatsApp Business APIs to allow web app developers to integrate with their platforms and send out order shipment notifications and other alerts via WhatsApp text messages in the very near future. We find it to be extremely beneficial and having used Messenger Chatbots in an E-commerce project of our own, we highly recommend it.

What does this mean for the rest?

Unfortunately, it’s not good news. The competition will be scrambling to offer value added services and features with their support chat products in order to retain their existing customers or try to win new ones. Existing companies such as Intercom do provide fantastic analytics and funnel tracking metrics that allow you to visualize a customer’s journey from start to finish, giving you insight not otherwise easily available. They will need to stay creative and find other important ways in which they can add value to their customers in order to stay afloat against such herculean competition. However, it doesn’t look good for them, given what a natural fit Messenger and WhatsApp are to this kind of work.

Conclusion

All in all, for the customers and business owners, this is fantastic news. It allows them to have more convenient communication with each other to ensure that every transaction is a smooth one, and all parties are satisfied each step of the way, fostering better customer relationships. It remains to be seen how Facebook ends up monetizing these areas, but given their wealth of resources, it is probably safe to assume that the price-point will include a free-tier and the paid packages won’t break the bank for small-to-medium business owners, making it a very attractive option over the alternatives.

Enjoy reading about the future of customer support apps? Learn more about how to design amazing conversational interfaces & chatbots.