Facebook has recently dealt with much criticism and backlash for how they have handled user privacy and data thus far. It’s no surprise that this concern and backlash is being followed up by their desire to completely revamp applications like Facebook Messenger.
Announced directly at the F8 conference, the overhaul of the messenger app won’t just be in the form of benefiting the individual users but also to benefit businesses who utilize the social media platform as a means for marketing and customer relations.
Here are two key changes to Facebook Messenger that businesses could directly benefit from in the future.
Connecting Employees
Facebook has always been geared towards engaging with the individual users themselves, but it looks as though they are wanting to step up to the plate on helping businesses communicate internally. By announcing new features that will allow group calls, project and task collaboration and the ability to place the messenger app on a desktop PC means they are now directly competing with popular business services like GoToMeeting and Skype.
With the additional launch of their Workplace tool, this only adds more to the blow being delivered to other similar business services. While the workplace tool has a free or paid version, it works relatively fine as the free out of the box version, in fact, most comparisons to services like GoToMeeting, show Facebook’s Workplace as offering more to users in their unpaid version.
It would seem they are entering into a new market of business communications and no longer just focusing on individual private user communication.
Connecting Businesses to Customers
Time and resources are limited to businesses and affect how they choose to communicate with their customer base. A lot of the time staff are put in charge of handling social media communications and responding to inquiries that really could be handled by a more automated process to free up wasted employee time, that could be benefited elsewhere.
Facebook Messenger will be revamped to help free up communication time in two very direct ways through the app.
Lead Generation Ad’s and Templates
Facebook has announced the addition of lead generation templates found within the Ads Manager. These templates will prove successful in getting customers to come from an Ad into a quick Q&A chat within the messenger app. This helps businesses get more leads from their facebook marketing tactics and drives the customer into potentially scheduling a service or converting directly to purchase right within the app.
One way to helpfully manage this kind of service is giving businesses the ability to completely automate it with responses that make the customer feel as though they are chatting with an actual representative when really it’s a bot. Not to worry though, if a complex question comes through, the chatbot has the ability to pass on that question to a live person instead.
Scheduling Services
This directly ties into the Lead Generation Ads. This Q&A process has the potential to send appointment booking requests directly to customers from within the messenger app. They can book their appointment through the facebook messenger service and they’ve done it with very limited influence directly from the staff themselves. This frees up a lot of business resources and allows for faster customer conversions.
The idea behind these significant revamps stems entirely from a consumer standpoint that customers want to be able to get their answers, information and booking services without leaving one platform for another. This ease of use pertains to increased popularity in increasing positive user experience.