Facebook Looks To Provide A Unified Customer View 

Facebook has acquired Kustomer, a company that aims to provide customer service agents with the tools to do their job more effectively.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook spent $1 billion on Kustomer, which uses data to provide customer service agents with a complete picture of users by bringing together their social media and interaction history with the company.

Kustomer is all about providing customer service agents with additional information so they can increase the quality of their service.

Dan Levy, VP of Ads and Business Products, Matt Idema, COO, WhatsApp

“Kustomer is an omnichannel CRM platform that brings customer conversations from various channels together into a single-screen view.

It helps businesses automate repetitive tasks so their agents can maximise the time and quality of interactions with customers.”

Given Facebook’s recent pivot to messaging and its popularity for brand service enquiries, it should come as no surprise that Facebook looks to make investments in this area.

Why Has Facebook Gone Big For Kustomer?

Facebook has been placing more of an emphasis on providing customer services to business that use its platform, especially via WhatsApp and Messenger

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO January 2019

"Our approach to monetisation anywhere is always very cautious and we are very – moving very slowly on Messenger, where we remain primarily focused on consumer growth and engagement.

Our real focus has been on the organic connections between businesses and consumers, where this is a really strong channel for customer service."

While Facebook proper generates its income via News Feed ads, Messenger Ads have yet to really move the needle, while WhatsApp has none.

In fact, with talk of a longer-term Facebook break-up mooted by both the FTC in the US and the European Union, the topic of WhatsApp monetisation has recently reared its head, should it need to be divested.

Having Kustomer as part of its offering could enable Facebook not only to diversify its revenue streams but also to begin tying in with broader customer relationship management offerings within both enterprise and SMB clients.

Dan Levy, VP of Ads and Business Products, Matt Idema, COO, WhatsApp

"Kustomer is one of many solutions in this arena, and we’ll continue to support the numerous options that businesses have to integrate their CRM platform of choice with our messaging services.

We want businesses of all sizes and across all industries to discover the value of messaging — and having a vibrant partner ecosystem is critical in providing our customers with choices."

It’s within this context that we can see this is a massive move by Facebook to deepen its offering to business.

How Can This Impact Brands & Marketers?

Messaging, in all its various forms, has surged in usage through 2020, with COVID as the primary catalyst. Although, even before the pandemic, the long-term messaging outlook was rosy.

Top Five Messaging Apps Worldwide

1. WhatsApp = 2 billion monthly active users
2. Facebook Messenger = 1.3 billion monthly active users
3. WeChat = 1.26 billion monthly active users
4. QQ = 648 million monthly active users
5. Snapchat = 433 million monthly active users
6. Telegram = 400 million monthly active users

As market-leader, WhatsApp welcomes 69% of global internet users globally (excluding China) as members, while 61% are users, according to GlobalWebIndex.

WhatsApp for Business is an incredibly popular app, and it’s primed to grow. Over 175 million people use it every day, and new updates to the platform will help businesses to provide fast, reliable and intuitive services to their customers.

In addition, there are more than 40 million active businesses on Facebook Messenger, exchanging over 20 billion messages monthly with customers and Facebook users, according to Facebook.

However, Facebook hadn’t really provided marketers and brands a way to do omnichannel customer service within their apps. Until now.

Which is where Kustomer comes in.

Omnichannel means that Kustomer gives customer service agents an overall view of the many different places their customers might be having conversations – such as social media, websites, in apps, email or with chatbots.

Having this information will make the agent more efficient in their response, but it’ll also give them a better indication of how business is doing across all channels, as well as provide a deeper context about the customer.

Businesses and marketers who use Facebook’s suite of apps should now find interacting with their customers a lot easier.

However, you won’t be forced to use Kustomer if you don’t want to. Facebook say they value choice and will allow businesses users to exercises their judgement.