The Future of Chat Is Here

Web chat is a great customer service channel. There’s a huge amount of data that proves that it is lower effort for customers than phone or email, resulting in higher NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scores. And it’s much more efficient for agents, who can handle multiple concurrent conversations at once, making it a lot cheaper than phone calls.

But there are a number of challenges which have prevented web chat from really transforming customer service:

1. Lack of identity: when you start a chat, the company has no idea who you are. Even if you chatted with the company 30 minutes ago, you’d have to start over from scratch. Some chat vendors can solve this if you are chatting within a logged-in experience; but this only works in a minority of situations with brands that have a means and reason for consumers to log in.
2. Lack of persistence: just as web chat today doesn’t remember who you are, it doesn’t remember your conversation either. If you have a long chat conversation about a particular subject, then come back a few days later to follow up on it, you have to start a new conversation with a new agent. How frustrating.
3. Tethered to the desktop: web chat works great if you’re sitting at your computer with the chat window open. But, this is proving less and less convenient in the age of the “always on” customer experience. If you have to leave your desk or you close your screen, the chat is lost. And while a live chat conversation is great on your laptop, it doesn’t work well on mobile, where the experience pales in comparison to social messaging apps like Messenger, Twitter and WhatsApp. 

Imagine just how powerful web chat would be if all of these issues were solved.

Well, now they have been.

Announcing Messenger Customer Chat

Today, several of Conversocial customers—Volaris, Argos and Zalando—went live with the exclusive, closed beta launch of Facebook Messenger customer chat, the latest major move by Facebook in the customer service market which provides the capability for people to initiate a dialog with brands from the web and take the conversation with them via Messenger (announcement here).

Over the last couple of years, Messenger has become a significant customer service channel. Many major organizations actively promote Messenger on their ‘Contact Us’ pages; for some of our clients, messaging already makes up 20%+ of all of their inbound customer service volume.

Messenger (like other social messaging platforms) is an incredible service channel for many of the reasons that hold back traditional web chat:

• In Messaging, you always know who the customer is: Once you’ve authenticated who a customer is once, you always know who they are, whenever they reach out.
• Conversations persist over time and over channels: Start a conversation today and continue it tomorrow, or in a week, without missing a beat.
• Messaging is multi-channel and built for mobile: you can start on the web then transition to mobile seamlessly. And messaging is the natural way that people communicate on a mobile—in text based bites, with phone notifications whenever a new message comes in.

Now, all of these benefits can be applied to the chat experience on your website as well.

Messenger Customer Chat live on the Volaris website, powered by Conversocial

The new Messenger Customer Chat widget can be used on your website just like a live chat experience today—but with all of the benefits of Messenger. Conversations can start on your website, then move seamlessly to mobile. They can carry on over time, amazing for following up on issues. And customers will never have to repeat themselves. Additionally, any automation built on the Messenger platform (like the Visual IVR systems we build for clients) will be able to work seamlessly whether a conversation starts inside the Messenger app or on your website.

The future of chat is here. Message us now to learn how you can get Messenger Customer Chat live on your website. Click here to learn more.