When Facebook announced its Messenger 2.2 update last week, most headlines zeroed in on the new Customer Chat plugin, which allows businesses to embed their Facebook Messenger experience directly on their website.

Still in closed beta, the feature allows customers to connect with brands while browsing the web, with the same personalized and rich-media experience they get directly in Messenger. With chat histories synchronized across the chat plugin, Messenger app and messenger.com, customers benefit from a continuous experience across all Facebook channels.

From Facebook’s perspective, it’s an opportunity to make Messenger for business more discoverable as a B2C communication channel at a time when both Google and Apple are making messaging plays with the advantages of search, maps and device dominance (Google with RCS, Apple with Business Chat.

By giving businesses the ability to embed modern messaging tools on their websites, for free, Facebook may have also dealt the final death blow to traditional live chat.

The problem with live chat, explains Kemal El Moujahid, the lead product manager for Facebook’s Messenger team, in an interview with Ad Exchanger’s Allison Schiff, is “a lack of identity and a lack of continuity.” As Schiff writes:

Even if a customer has a pre-existing relationship with a brand, that person needs to log in or self-identify in some way for the brand to be aware. And if the customer closes out the chat or leaves the website without completing the interaction, the thread is lost.

“The experience is broken and having to log in or give credentials wastes time trying to establish context,” El Moujahid said.

The idea with the plugin is to allow businesses to keep the chat going regardless of platform with “identity built in,” he said.

In other words, Customer Chat solves live chat’s identity problem and provides a seamless experience for customers across their web and mobile devices. It gets rid of the antiquated notion of chat “sessions,” freeing up both the customer support agent and customer to respond to messages at their own pace, on whichever platform is most convenient at the time.

We’ve been singing this tune at Smooch for years and, as always, we’re proud to support this latest platform update out of the box. You can sign up to get notified when Customer Chat becomes widely available.

Businesses that have connected Facebook Messenger to Smooch will be able to manage and reply to messages sent to Customer Chat widgets in the same way they manage all their Smooch channels - from Messenger proper to Twitter, Line, WeChat, Telegram and Viber, to SMS, and soon Apple Business Chat, RCS and WhatsApp.

But brands need to know that going “all in” on Facebook Messenger for customer conversations comes with some tradeoffs.

Do you really want to outsource your customer messaging to Facebook?

While Facebook’s reach is undeniably huge, it’s still Facebook’s messenger, requiring both customers and businesses to opt in to conversations over the channel in accordance with Facebook’s policies and privacy terms. Facebook will have the ability to mine all conversational data, control the user experience and available messaging features, and even control access to these users, even if they arrived via a business’ own website.

One reason Facebook Messenger for business has yet to take off is that companies are barred from proactively messaging users. Consumers need to make first contact, opening a 24-hour window for businesses to engage.

By getting brands to use Messenger as their de facto chat widget, Facebook makes it relatively frictionless for customers to log in — assuming they have Facebook, but who doesn’t? — and initiate a conversation. However, the 24-hour rule still applies and once the customer stops replying, that conversation – and relationship – is frozen in a channel the business doesn’t own.

Unless, that is, the business is willing to pony up. A few days after the Messenger update, Facebook announced plans to expand its sponsored messages feature, which allows businesses to re-open conversations with customers they’ve previously messaged. Recall how Facebook once convinced brands to build followers, only to later charge for access.

This may be good news for businesses eager to leverage Messenger as a new marketing channel, but it also reveals the extent to which Facebook wants to control – and monetize – the entire B2C messaging experience.

So where does this leave your web chat strategy?

Like Facebook, we believe traditional, session-based live chat is a thing of the past and that conversations with businesses should offer the same personalized and rich experiences we enjoy when chatting with friends and family. That’s exactly why we created Smooch Embeddables, our messaging SDKs for iOs, Android and web.

Like Facebook’s Customer Chat, Smooch Embeddables bring persistent, asynchronous and rich messaging to a business’ website or mobile app. They solve the “identity problem” for businesses — even authenticating users via Facebook, among other options — and allow customers to have seamless conversations regardless of which device they’re using.

But they’re also tailor-made for enterprise software makers and the amazing brands they serve.

They’re bot-ready, packed with brandable components to tailor the customer’s experience, backed by high-performance infrastructure and end to end encryption-ready for companies that need full privacy and security. They can also be configured to capture any metadata and user behavior from a brand’s web site or mobile app.

Most importantly, they give brands full control over the customer experience and the treasure trove of data these conversations provide. Download our Embeddables Datasheet to learn more.

Either way, we’ve got you covered

There’s no right or wrong answer here. For some brands, the advantages of using Facebook Messenger as their web and mobile messaging platform will outweigh any concerns about privacy, branding, customer experience or data ownership. In that case, Smooch can help you connect your software to Messenger and take care of all further updates to the channel.

For brands that need a more secure and customizable solution, we’re confident that Smooch Embeddables are the best modern messaging SDKs on the market.

No matter your messaging challenge, Smooch is here to help.

Today we’re launching a new capability in Smooch that empowers businesses to create custom interactive experiences inside the chat window of any messaging channel — reducing friction for customers and making the promise of conversational commerce into a reality.

Over the past few years there’s been a ton of chatter about the transformative nature of messaging technology. From essays on the rise of conversational commerce, to think pieces on conversational design, to pronouncements about messaging apps becoming the new browsers, plenty of pixels have been filled with claims that messaging will change the digital world as we know it.

But here’s the thing. While the messaging space has gotten increasingly crowded and consumer adoption has surged, the so-called conversational revolution still feels more like a prediction than a reality. In some ways, the messaging industry has been a victim of its own success. This is a severely fragmented landscape, with global users dispersed across dozens of messaging apps, each with its own separate ecosystem.

Conversational interfaces have proven to be challenging real estate for designers and developers, particularly when it comes to enabling complex transactions like making a purchase, completing a long survey, or booking an appointment. Within the stingy canvas of a chat window these types of tasks can be tedious for the end-user. After all, who wants to wade through an endless list of questions or chit-chat with a cutesy-named bot in order to book a flight or order a pizza?

From a business perspective, these friction-filled experiences translate to aborted conversations, poor reviews and missed revenue opportunities. We’re as bullish as anyone about the future of messaging but we’re also clear-eyed about the technical challenges that have stymied innovation. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce a new capability within Smooch that we believe represents a giant step toward making the promise of conversational commerce into a reality.

Conversation Extensions: Create better in-chat experiences

Conversation Extensions give companies a powerful new toolkit to create custom interactive experiences that sit on top of the chat window and work across all messaging channels. Powered by standard web technologies (HTML, JavaScript and CSS), Conversation Extensions combine the intimacy and contextuality of conversational interfaces with the richness and flexibility of traditional UIs.

For example, using Conversation Extensions, a hotel brand can create (or repurpose) a reservation tool that allows users to make a booking without ever leaving their messaging app of choice. From selecting a room, to picking dates and paying for the reservation, Conversation Extensions allow multi-step tasks to be carried out seamlessly through an intuitive workflow, enhancing the experience for the customer and increasing revenue opportunities for the business.

Built with Conversation Extensions in Smooch, this hotel reservation tool opens on top of the chat window when the user clicks a call to action. Once the customer selects a date, chooses a room and makes a booking, the confirmation is posted back into the conversation.

Conversation Extensions can be especially powerful for customer-centric brands and software providers. By building an NPS survey right into the conversation, for example, they can significantly improve survey response rates. Businesses can also feed the data collected through these conversations into their existing CRM and marketing software and then use it to tailor their customer interactions and offerings going forward.

Conversation Extensions can be used to build NPS surveys and other tools to augment the customer experience through messaging.

Because Conversation Extensions leverage familiar web standards, they can power an infinite variety of branded tools, apps and workflows. Developers can easily repurpose code from their websites and web apps to bring tried-and-true customer experiences and revenue streams into the conversational space.

This makes it super simple to modify and update your Conversation Extensions; design and A/B test multiple experiences for different customer segments; add analytics to track browsing behaviors, form completion rates or cart abandonments; and integrate them with the rest of your tech stack.

Unlike traditional web apps, the applications running in Conversation Extensions benefit from the context of the conversation itself. They can authenticate users, tailor offers to them based on the preferences they’ve expressed and post messages back into the conversation. More than just "an app inside a chat window," they’re true extensions of the persistent, omnichannel conversations that Smooch makes possible.

Experiences built in Conversation Extensions are informed by – and feed back into – the conversation via your server as actions are taken and preferences are expressed by the user.

Here are some examples of what brands can empower their customers to do from the comfort of their favorite messaging app:

• Set a date and time for a spa appointment
• Book a flight and select a seat
• Order a pizza and choose their own toppings
• Reload a bus pass
• Make a restaurant reservation and pre-order a meal
• Book a hotel and upgrade their room
• Complete a survey
• Fill out a multi-step form

Anything you’d normally put on a website or landing page can be built with Conversation Extensions, so the possibilities are limitless. We can’t wait to see what our customers create as the future of messaging finally comes into focus.

If you’re already up-and-running with Smooch, check out our technical guide or take a look at some examples we've created to help you get started with Conversation Extensions.

New to Smooch? We’re here to help solve your messaging challenges. Let’s chat.

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in November.

This month, we added new typing indicators, timestamps and business read receipts to our SDKs; launched a new method to enable business-initiated conversations via our SDKs; and built an example repo for Conversation Extensions to inspire you. By the way, we're sharing Conversation Extensions with the world today on Product Hunt. Take a look here and let us know what you think!

What’s new 🎉

SDK support for typing indicators, timestamps, and read receipts

At Smooch, our goal is to help you power the ultimate end-user experience. That same, modern real-time messaging experience we’ve all come to expect from the leading chat apps. This past month, we added new features to our SDKs to help you deliver an improved messaging experience.

We added a new typing:appUser webhook trigger to let agents know when users start and stop typing. Read the release notes for our iOS SDK 6.4.0, Android SDK 5.5.0 and Web SDK 4.3.4 to learn more. We’ll add this feature for other channels as soon as they make it available.

Timestamps and asynchronous messaging go hand-in-hand. They’ve been supported for a while in our iOS SDK, but we’ve now released the feature on our Android SDK 5.4.1 and Web SDK 4.3.0.

We shipped read receipts for our mobile SDKs so businesses can notify users that they’ve read their conversation. Check out our API documentation here, and read the release notes for our iOS SDK 6.5.0 and Android SDK 5.6.0. We’re currently working on adding this feature to our Web SDK.

Conversation Extensions examples to inspire you

ICYMI, we introduced a new capability in Smooch that we believe is a total game-changer for B2C messaging. Conversation Extensions enable you to create custom interactive experiences that sit on top of the chat window and work across all messaging channels.

We built examples of what you can do with Conversation Extensions to inspire you and help you with implementation. Check out our brand new Github repo to view how Conversation Extensions would work in the case of a hotel room booking, a restaurant reservation and a service subscription. Keep an eye on this repo as we add more examples in the future.

Business-initiated conversations via the Smooch SDKs

Usually in Smooch, conversations are initiated by the end-user. Whether they’re reaching out on Facebook Messenger, or contacting a business via one of our SDKs, the user typically needs to send the first message. But in some circumstances it’s necessary for the business to proactively reach out to the user and engage them in a conversation.

We’ve just released a new method for initiating a conversation with a user via our SDKs for iOS, Android and Web. In order to proactively reach out to a user, the application or website must signal their intent to do so via the startConversation method. Once called, a new user and conversation will be created in Smooch and a conversation:start webhook will be triggered. The business can then use this signal to send a message to that user via the API.

Read our new guide to learn more on how businesses can initiate conversations in Smooch.

Smooch SDK & dashboard updates ⚙

• Support for Android notification channels: We’ve completed our support for apps targeting Android 8.0 (Oreo). Read the release notes here.
• Smooch Log tab dashboard update: All failed webhook delivery attempts are now displayed. Previously, webhook failure logs would only show up after retry attempts were exhausted.

Community challenge: show us your best Conversation Extension

We’d like to throw out a little challenge to you all 😛

We’d love to see what you can create with Conversation Extensions. Over the next few months, we’ll be showcasing some of the best examples on the Smooch blog, website and in our newsletter, which goes out to more than 30,000 software executives, product strategists and developers. Show us what you’ve got! Once you have a working example, submit your Github repo link via this form. We’ll pick the best ones to share with the world and we’ll have some awesome prizes too!

Plenty of companies today boast about providing "omnichannel" experiences but what they usually mean is simply “multi-channel.”

Multi-channel means being everywhere your customers are. That’s table stakes. Omnichannel means going a step further and providing a consistent communications journey for your customer, one where the conversation history and context travels with them from channel to channel.

Context — about who your customer is, where they’re coming from and what they’ve talked to you about in the past — is crucial for delivering the sort of messaging experiences customers have grown accustomed to in their personal lives.

But context is frustratingly tricky to maintain in a world of countless disconnected communication channels, from chat apps like Facebook Messenger, WeChat and WhatsApp, to email, SMS, mobile and web chat, not to mention the growing legion of voice assistants.

While it’s tempting for businesses to view the proliferation of channels as an inconvenience, the truth is, not all channels are created equal. In real life, a crowded bar might be a good place to start a conversation but it's nice to be able to move somewhere quieter for more privacy.

In other words, every conversation has its proper place. True omnichannel means giving businesses the ability to talk to the right customers, in the right place, without sacrificing context along the way.

Keep context at the center of every conversation

Last year, we introduced the ability for end-users to move conversations from Smooch’s Web Messenger to a more mobile-friendly channel like Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Viber, Telegram or SMS with the click of a button.

Today we’re giving businesses the tools to invite users to move a conversation to a channel that is better suited to the topic at hand.

By posting a link or call to action into the conversation, businesses can invite customers to join them on a more secure channel, a cheaper channel, one with a richer experience or one that’s simply more convenient for the user.

This new set of APIs allows businesses to easily transfer the conversation from a chat app to in-app or web chat, from an email to SMS — or any other combination that makes sense. In fact businesses can provide customers with a set of choices for where they'd like to continue the conversation or get notified of a reply later on.

As always with Smooch, when the conversation moves, the chat history and context moves with it, so both the business and its users benefit from a single, continuous, cross-channel conversation thread. Meanwhile, the user’s identity is unified in the business’ software, allowing brands to provide a truly omnichannel and personalized experience.

When companies know who they’re talking to and what information that customer (or prospect) has already shared with them, they can resolve issues faster, deliver more personalized experiences and better identify opportunities to satisfy customers, reduce churn or increase revenue.

It's a better experience for everyone.

Change the channel, continue the conversation

It’s not difficult to imagine why customers and businesses would be interested in having seamless conversations across channels, but it’s perhaps less obvious why they would proactively move a conversation from, say, Facebook Messenger to their own mobile app, or from their website to WeChat.

Here are a few scenarios where changing channels might come in handy:

When businesses want to authenticate customers to perform sensitive operations

Consumer chat apps like Facebook Messenger and WeChat are great because they’re so accessible, but sometimes brands need to have private conversations with their customers.

Let’s say you’re a bank or insurance company and need to authenticate your user before exchanging sensitive information. Using a call to action, you can prompt the customer to sign in to your own mobile app and continue the conversation there.

When a user wants to be notified that the business has replied to their message on a more convenient channel

Let’s say someone is browsing your business’ website and pings you with a question via your custom web messenger. Maybe your agent isn’t able to answer right away or maybe the user has a little back-and-forth with a bot, but has to run before the issue is resolved.

Rather than hang around your website, the customer would probably prefer to receive a notification via Messenger (or email or SMS) when you’ve replied to their message.

Most web messengers prompt users to enter their email address, but in the modern messaging age it’s nice to give customers more options. And if the customer is available to keep chatting, they can do so on the new channel without skipping a beat.

When businesses want to move the conversation to a channel that costs less or to provide a better user experience

Being wherever your customers are is important, but that doesn’t mean channels are interchangeable.

Chat apps offer richer user experiences than SMS and they’re also free (depending on the country, SMS costs can really add up for businesses and consumers alike).

Email conversations may beat phone calls by a longshot but they don’t hold a candle to the rich messaging experiences users have come to know and love.

And in some cases, the secure, branded environment of a business’ mobile app or web chat may be the best place for a conversation to flourish.

No matter the case, Smooch lets you to move a conversation from email, to web messenger, to messaging app to SMS with the click of a button. You never lose track of who the customer is, where they came from and why they came to you in the first place. Because that context is precious.

When a business doesn’t want third-party platforms eavesdropping on the conversation

Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Twitter — these channels are great for discovery, but they’re still Facebook’s Messenger, Tencent’s WeChat and Twitter’s Twitter. Many businesses aren’t keen on sharing conversations with the Big Tech companies for them to mine and monetize.

Now you can engage customers on a popular platform and then get down to business on a more private one.

Bring true omnichannel conversations to your enterprise software

Over the past few years, there’s been a ton of hype around messaging technology and how it's transforming the customer experience. But the fragmented nature of the space makes it complicated for businesses to harness messaging's full potential.

Our mission at Smooch is to provide enterprise software companies with the infrastructure to power these experiences in their own software so they can turn the promise of truly omnichannel communication into a reality.

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in December.

We finished the year on a high note by expanding the omnichannel experiences supported by Smooch. This included launching a new set of tools that enable businesses to invite end users to transfer their conversation to another channel without losing context or history. We also added email as an alternate channel to which Web Messenger users can transfer their conversations with a business. And finally, we introduced a brand new product demo video collection to help you get a better understanding of various use cases Smooch can help with.

What’s new 🎉

Move the conversation, keep the context

In December, we launched new tools to allow businesses to move conversations to channels that are better suited to the topic at hand, supporting a vast set of omnichannel experiences.

By posting a link or call to action into the conversation, businesses can invite customers to join them on a more secure channel, a cheaper channel, one with a richer experience or one that’s simply more convenient for the user.

This new set of APIs allows businesses to easily transfer the conversation from a chat app to in-app or web chat or any other combination of channels that makes sense.

As always with Smooch, when the conversation moves, the chat history and context moves with it, so both the business and end user benefit from a single, continuous, cross-channel conversation thread. Meanwhile, the user’s identity is unified in the business’ software, allowing brands to provide a truly omnichannel and personalized experience.

Read more about these new capabilities on our blog.

Transfer conversations from Web Messenger to email

One of the most requested features for Web Messenger has been to give end users the ability to continue their conversation with the business over email. This capability is now available and users can easily transfer their web chat conversation over to their inbox. Read our guide for more info on this.

Smooch demo videos

We’ve created a series of product videos to give you an overview of how Smooch can help you with various use cases. They cover topics like how to transfer a conversation from a chat app to the Smooch iOS SDK, how bot-to-human handoffs work, and how to authenticate users with Smooch. Be sure to bookmark this page as we’ll keep on adding more to it.

Smooch API & SDK updates ⚙

• Web Messenger configuration API: We added a new API endpoint to programmatically configure the Web Messenger UI. You are now able to customize colors, display styles, buttons, icons, etc. See the full list of configuration options here.
• Business read receipts for Web Messenger: Read receipts are now available on our Web SDK 4.5.0 so businesses can notify users that they’ve read their conversation. Check out the release notes and API documentation.
• Update Integration API: We released a new API that allows you to customize the order that channels are displayed to end-users on the Web Messenger UI. Find out more here.

Community challenge: show us your best Conversation Extension

In November, we launched Conversation Extensions, a new capability in Smooch that empowers businesses to create custom interactive experiences inside the chat window of any messaging channel.

We’d love to see what you can create with Conversation Extensions. Over the next few months, we’ll be showcasing some of the best examples on the Smooch blog and in our newsletter, which goes out to more than 30,000 software executives, product strategists and developers. Show us what you’ve got! Once you have a working example, submit your Github repo link via this form. We’ll pick the best ones to share with the world and we’ll have some awesome prizes too!

Chatbots sprung up like mushrooms. Voice assistants chimed in millions of households. More than 330 million people contacted a businesses for the first time using Facebook Messenger alone.

2017 was a big year in the messaging space.

To kickstart the new year, we asked 17 experts from leading software companies including Drift, Lithium, LiveChat, Lithium, Oracle, Sparkcentral, Slack and Uber to reflect on the past year and share their messaging predictions for 2018.

Global leaders in messaging, bots and conversational interfaces descended on Tel Aviv today for the third annual Chatbot Summit. IBM, Google, Oracle, LivePerson, Genesys, SAP, Amdocs, HP, Lenovo, Vonage, Deutsche Telekom and over 1,000 participants came together to share, discuss and debate the future of conversational computing.

Our Co-Founder and CTO, Mike Gozzo, delivered a keynote address on the future of messaging platforms. While it’s easy to get caught up in the latest technology advances, Mike reminded the audience that if conversational technology is to reach its potential, it won’t be about the bots, or the AI, or the voice interfaces, but rather will have to be about us, the people, the users of this technology.

The winning conversation platforms of the future will succeed not because of their raw (artificial) intelligence, but by intimately knowing their users and their context. Without context, all the AI in the world isn’t worth much when applied to customer engagement.

For the past 2+ years at Smooch we’ve been focused on working with customer engagement platforms to help humanize the relationships between businesses and their users, a mission we are passionate about. From helpdesks, live chat and social support, to CRM, call center and marketing platforms, Smooch is known for bringing the power of modern, persistent, omnichannel conversations to other software makers.

Quietly, we’ve also been working with bot platforms, developers and agencies like Oracle, Meya.ai, Pronavigator, Sciensio, Clare.ai and Commons, seeking to understand how we can best help these players humanize B2C interactions, even through automation.

That’s why we’re happy to announce today, from the Chatbot Summit, our brand new offering specifically designed to meet the needs of bot makers. Smooch for Bots enables bot companies to instantly deploy their bots wherever users are. Whether that’s on the most popular chat apps, mobile apps and web messengers or SMS. Smooch for Bots empowers bot makers to:

• Reach more customers by being wherever users are, regardless of channel;
• Leverage each messaging channel’s best native features to optimize the user experience;
• Orchestrate and integrate bot conversations with helpdesks, live chat, CRMs and other enterprise systems;
• Bring contextual awareness to every interaction with access to historical conversation records and user profile metadata.

Meya.ai, which powers bots for brands like Mercedes and Vodafone, had this to say about our platform:

“Smooch allows us to increase our messaging channel coverage with very little internal engineering resources. We’re happy because we can focus our efforts on our core competency. Our customers are happy because they can deploy their bots to the channels their customers prefer.” - Erik Kalviainen, CEO, Meya.ai

By leveraging every messaging channel’s best native features automatically, Smooch helps bot makers deliver a rich and interactive experience for users — no channel-specific code required. Rich message types like emojis, images, carousels, quick replies, postbacks and buttons to name a few, can be easily supported.

Integrating with Smooch allows bots to transfer the conversation to a human when it can’t handle an inquiry. Bots can seamlessly escalate inquiries to customer engagement platforms, passing on the critical information a live agent needs to take over the conversation.

Sciensio, best known for their market leading event bots, uses Smooch to deploy their bots to the world’s messaging channels and orchestrate conversations between bots and live agents:

“Smooch provides two key features that are critical to our business: multi-channel messaging and the ability to smoothly transition to live human support. Their technology, backed by an incredible team, has enabled us to focus on the features needed to be the first to market with our award-winning product.” - Chris Colleran, Chief Technology Officer, Sciensio

By giving your bots access to contextual data like conversation history and user metadata, Smooch helps your bots to be even smarter, allowing them to propose more personalized and effective recommendations to customers, and ultimately helping to humanize the relationship between businesses and their consumers.

That is a future we look forward to.

"In a world where customer experience is paramount, bots need to be wherever a brand's customers are, which is everywhere! As we dedicate our efforts to our own AI solution, Smooch’s enables us to deploy our solution faster and is a great conversation platform for our needs." - Liri Halperin Segal, CEO, LeO

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in January.

It’s been a big month! Our Product & Engineering teams have been heads down in planning mode working on some key projects we’re sure you’ll find exciting. We released a report on the State of Messaging in 2018, leading the way for the upcoming launch of our new industry newsletter. New guides were shipped to help you get started on building your own custom UI for each of our SDKs. We also got the chance to deliver a keynote at Chatbot Summit in Tel Aviv this week, where we launched our new offer for bot makers. Finally, we’re excited to introduce our newest integration partner, Botanalytics.

What’s new 🎉

New report: The State of Messaging 2018

2017 was a big year in messaging. Chatbots surged. Voice assistants spoke up. Conversational commerce came of age. We kicked off the year by asking 17 experts from leading software companies like Oracle, Lithium, Sparkcentral, Slack, Drift and Uber to reflect on the past year and share their messaging predictions for the year ahead. Check out the report.

Smooch at Chatbot Summit: Announcing Smooch for Bots

Global leaders in messaging, bots and conversational interfaces descended on Tel Aviv this week for the third annual Chatbot Summit. IBM, Google, Oracle, LivePerson, Genesys, SAP, Amdocs, HP, Lenovo, Vonage, Deutsche Telekom and over 1,000 participants came together to share, discuss and debate the future of conversational computing.

Our Co-Founder and CTO, Mike Gozzo, delivered a keynote address on the future of messaging platforms. While it’s easy to get caught up in the latest technology advances, Mike reminded the audience that if conversational technology is to reach its potential, it won’t be about the bots, or the AI, or the voice interfaces, but rather will have to be about us, the people, the users of this technology. Read more about his talk here.

Chatbot Summit was the perfect occasion for us to launch our brand new offering for bot makers. Smooch for Bots enables bot companies to instantly deploy their bots wherever users are. Whether that’s on the most popular chat apps, mobile apps and web messengers or SMS. Smooch for Bots empowers bot makers to:

• Reach more customers by being wherever users are, regardless of channel;
• Leverage each messaging channel’s best native features to optimize the user experience;
• Orchestrate and integrate bot conversations with helpdesks, live chat, CRMs and other enterprise systems;
• Bring contextual awareness to every interaction with access to historical conversation records and user profile metadata.

Build your own custom UI with Smooch’s SDKs

Each Smooch SDK comes with a pre-built UI that you can configure using the Smooch Dashboard or the REST API. But if you want, you can also completely replace Smooch's default UI with your own. If you want to move down that path, take a look at our new guides and code samples for our Web, iOS and Android SDKs to get started.

New integration partner: Botanalytics

Botanalytics is a conversational analytics tool focused on analyzing engagement and retention metrics for chatbots. It’s available for bots on many channels, including Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Line, Viber, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Twilio SMS and more.

Discover bottlenecks, identify your most engaged (and churned) users, and watch conversations unfold along the way. With comprehensive, visualized data at your fingertips, you can gain key insights about how well your bot is performing—and how it can get even better. Visit our integration directory to learn more.

Industry intelligence 📰

Get The Message

😏 Pssst! Our brand new editorial newsletter, The Message, is just about to launch. It will cover the rapidly-evolving state of messaging, bots and conversational commerce and will be packed with original insights, the latest industry research and a little experimentation. Watch your inbox in February for a special preview of the first edition and sign up for The Message if you like what you see!

New projects on our drawing board 👀

Our Product & Engineering teams are in full-on planning mode these days. Here’s our short list of potential projects:

• Configure and send canned messages (handy for hard to craft messages like carousels)
• Bring your own messaging channel to Smooch
• Allow SDK users to have multiple conversation threads
• Enable user-to-user conversations on Smooch SDKs
• Allow businesses to join group conversations on social chat apps
• Allow bots to join conversations in group chat apps like Slack, Cisco Spark and Microsoft Teams

If any of these projects resonate with you, we’d like to hear from you. Register your interest here and let us know about your specific use case.

It’s been dismissed as a "zombie technology" and anticipated as the saviour of SMS. After 10 years of fits and starts, RCS — the next generation text messaging technology — may have finally found its champion.

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week, Google and key partners will showcase how businesses can send more interactive messages to their customers, many of which have already started rolling out in the US. RCS gives businesses a new way to text customers, while offering the sort of modern messaging experiences people have come to expect from popular over-the-top (OTT) chat apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and iMessage. Think interactive features like GIFs, read receipts and typing notifications.

Many see the campaign as part of Google's effort to challenge Facebook and Apple in the ongoing business-to-consumer messaging wars. Joining Google in their Early Access Program is Sprint in the US and Telcel in Mexico, along with big-name brands including Booking.com, 1-800 Contacts, and Subway.

For the telecoms, RCS business messaging is an opportunity to stave off insurgents like WhatsApp, who have already stolen a massive share of SMS, in the lucrative battle for the application-to-person (A2P) messaging market. A2P messages include receipts, flight notifications, banking updates and other alerts businesses send to subscribers. The A2P industry is worth roughly $55 billion and is expected to reach $70 billion by 2020.

At the moment, A2P messages are sent almost exclusively via SMS, with businesses footing the bill. This makes A2P one of the last fronts on which carriers are still beating the OTT channels and monetizing text messaging. But with the upcoming launch of WhatsApp’s enterprise API and its early focus on ticketing applications, from travel to entertainment, Facebook appears to be eyeing a slice of the A2P pie.

With Mobile World Congress around the corner, here’s an overview of what RCS is, what the technology is up against and why it matters to businesses and the software makers they rely on to communicate with customers.

What is RCS and why has it taken so long?

If it feels like you’ve been hearing about RCS for a decade, you’re not wrong. Back in 2008, a group of 30 telecommunications carriers and device makers, under the umbrella of the GSMA, announced the Rich Communication Suite (RCS) initiative. It’s mission: to enable "interoperable enriched communication including in-call multimedia sharing, conversational messaging and presence-enhanced contact management for mobile and fixed customers."

This meant developing and adopting a new generation of text messaging standards — an SMS for the modern messaging age.

The timing was right. As industry analyst and RCS skeptic Dean Bubley has noted, this announcement came only a few months after the launch of the first iPhone and before Apple introduced the App Store. It was also the same month Facebook unveiled what would become Messenger.

But the industry consortium wasn’t able to move nearly as fast Facebook or Apple and "interoperability" proved hard to realize among a group of global competitors more interested in distinguishing themselves than playing nicely together.

Over the course of the past decade, the effort has ramped up and stalled on numerous occasions. Needless to say, widespread adoption of RCS remains a dream deferred.

Meanwhile, OTT services like Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, Telegram and others have won over billions of consumers, offering a modern messaging experience far superior to SMS at relatively no cost to users. Consider that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger alone carry trillions of messages per year, far eclipsing the total P2P SMS market.

Taking a cue from Research in Motion and the one-time popularity of its exclusive Blackberry Messenger (BBM), Apple made iMessage the de facto messaging service across its devices, helping to earn the loyalty of a generation of customers.

Google strikes back

Then, in late 2015, Google entered the fray. They announced they were "committing to RCS" and acquired a startup called Jibe to help bring RCS to Android products and carriers worldwide.

Last year, Google made RCS the default standard in its rebranded "Android Messages" app, which comes preloaded in most — though not all — Android phones.

The company also announced that carriers across the world including America Movil, AT&T in Mexico, Celcom Axiata Berhad, Freedom Mobile, Oi, Telia Company and Telefonica joined Deutsche Telekom, Globe Telecom, Orange, Rogers Communications, Sprint and Telenor Group in their commitment to launch RCS messaging, powered by the Jibe RCS cloud from Google.

This meant messages sent between people using both RCS-compatible phones and RCS-enabled service providers would be sent using the richer standard, rather than SMS. However, if anyone in the conversation used a phone or carrier that hadn’t adopted the new standard, the message would still fall back to SMS or MMS.

As The Verge noted, "it’s complicated." And the most important phone makers, Samsung and Apple, were conspicuously absent from the announcement, as were the leading U.S. carriers, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.

RCS’ last stand

This brings us up to speed with what to expect with RCS at Mobile World Congress next week. Last year Google launched an Early Access Program for businesses to be among the first to offer their customers an upgraded messaging experience, highlighting enterprise-friendly capabilities like branding and verification.

Now businesses are starting to roll out messages to their customers with RCS in the U.S. and, soon, Mexico.

A growing list of device makers and global carriers have jumped on board as well, though key players like Samsung and Verizon remain elusive.

Amir Sarhangi, the Head of RCS at Google, told The Verge that the goal is to build "momentum" and bring on enough businesses, carriers and manufacturers that adopting the standard becomes a no-brainer.

With Android phones boasting 80% market share and OTT usage still fragmented across dozens of apps, it’s not a crazy bet. Still, mass adoption may depend on Apple adopting RCS (instead of SMS) as the fallback for sending and receiving messages with non-iPhones, something it may have little incentive to do. In fact, Apple may go in the opposite direction and make iMessage a cross-platform channel, challenging Google on its own Android playground.

Later this year, Apple will launch Business Chat, enabling customers to message businesses through iMessage. Customers will be able to initiate conversations by clicking on links in Safari, Apple Maps and through Siri-enabled devices. Given Google’s search and map dominance (including on iPhone) and Android’s 80% market penetration, it’s not hard to imagine Google pursuing a similar strategy if it can overcome RCS’ adoption and interoperability obstacles.

For now though, Google seems to be seizing on the $55 billion A2P opportunity, which makes Facebook — via WhatsApp — its primary rival and the telecoms its key allies in the fight.

With 1.3 billion monthly active users on WhatsApp and Messenger not far behind, Facebook may be able to take a decent bite out of the A2P market. That makes next week's Mobile World Congress a crucial opportunity for Google and its partners to woo businesses before they abandon SMS altogether and throw their lot in with the chat apps.

The omnichannel dilemma

Perhaps the modern messaging ship has sailed, leaving RCS in its wake. Or maybe the situation is finally desperate enough for mutually interested parties to band together and make the great RCS hope into a reality.

At Smooch, we’re watching this battle closely but remain focused on giving software companies and their brand customers the tools to access users everywhere, regardless of which channel they’re using.

We’re proud to be joining Google's Early Access Program and our partner Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts in Barcelona next week to help demonstrate how businesses can leverage RCS. We’re also continuing to help software platforms and leading brands reach users on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat and whatever other communication channels their customers prefer.

Because even in this complex world, the customer is always right.

Are you going to be at Mobile World Congress? We'd love to meet you! We'll be at the Future Networks booth in the GSMA's Innovation City taking part in RCS business messaging experiences demos. Also don't miss the "Digital Transformation 2.0 for the Consumer" session on Tuesday February 27 at 11am where Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts will be showcasing their RCS business messaging experience powered by Smooch. Contact us to set up a meeting.

One of the most anticipated features of our Smooch Embeddables is finally available. Starting today businesses can send carousels as a native message type in their Smooch-powered iOS, Android and Web SDKs.

Carousels are an interactive way for businesses to present their products, services and features while messaging with customers. Now available in Smooch Embeddables, carousels allow you to deliver truly innovative and unique experiences through web and in-app chat that until now have only been available on leading consumer chat apps like Facebook Messenger. Together with our other rich and interactive messaging features, carousels help you bring the sort of modern chat experience that end users have come to expect to your customers’ apps and websites.

We’ve built our carousels to give you maximum flexibility in powering a wide variety of use cases. Carousels support up to 10 cards, with each card being comprised of a title and up to three calls to action. Descriptions can be added along with images, which can be displayed in either a horizontal or square aspect ratio. Supported calls to action include links, postbacks, buy buttons and Conversation Extensions. Take a look at our iOS, Android and Web SDK carousel guides for more details, and access our API documentation here.

We’re constantly evolving our SDKs to include all the little bits and pieces that make modern messaging so powerful. From typing indicators, to timestamps, read and delivery receipts, real-time notifications and all the richest message types like emojis, images, carousels, buy buttons, quick replies, postbacks and location sharing, our commitment is to ensure that you have everything you need to deliver an experience that stands out from the pack.

When you need to enable more complex workflows and use cases, take advantage of our Conversation Extensions that can enable purchases, appointment setting, surveys, bookings and other multi-step tasks, while optimizing the user experience and maximizing conversion rates.

As a reminder, we recently revamped our SDKs to better answer the needs of enterprise software makers. Smooch Embeddables now support full distribution rights with code-level branding so SDKs can be offered to your customers as your own, as well as the necessary UI customization options to satisfy all of your customers’ branding needs. Finally, for customers on our Enterprise pricing plans, we make source access available as an option for those wanting to further extend our SDKs and include custom features specific to their products.

To take advantage of carousels for Smooch Embeddables, make sure to update to the latest versions of our iOS 6.7.0, Android 5.8.0 and Web 4.7.0 SDKs.

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in February.

The Drop is packed with goodies this month:

• Carousels for SDKS are finally here!
• New channel alert: RCS business messaging
• Service Accounts: easily create and manage a subset of Smooch apps
• More customization options for Web Messenger
• Other API & SDK tweaks, see 👇 for more details

What’s new 🎉

Finally! Carousels in Smooch SDKs are here 🎠

One of the most anticipated features of our Smooch Embeddables has finally arrived. We’re thrilled to announce that carousels are now supported as a native message type in our iOS, Android and Web SDKs.

Carousels are an interactive way for businesses to present their products, services and features while messaging with customers. Now available in Smooch Embeddables, carousels allow you to deliver truly innovative and unique experiences through web and in-app chat that until now have only been available on leading consumer chat apps like Facebook Messenger.

Read all the details on our blog and start leveraging carousels by updating to the latest version of our SDKs | iOS SDK 6.7.0 | Android SDK 5.8.0 | Web SDK 4.7.0

New channel alert: RCS business messaging

Smooch has joined forces with Google as part of their Early Access Program to bring Rich Communication Services (RCS) to your software and apps. RCS business messaging is a new way for businesses to text customers on Android devices, while offering the sort of modern messaging experiences they've come to expect from popular over-the-top (OTT) chat apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and iMessage. Think of it as SMS 2.0.

RCS business messaging enables brands to send rich messages like high-res images, videos, GIFs, audio, files, location, buttons, suggested replies & actions, and more. The UI can be customized to the business’ branding with their name, logo and colors, and a verified business checkmark offers peace of mind to users. Each business gets their own detailed information page with additional ways users can contact them, and a hero image for additional branding opportunities.

Smooch was at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week along with Google and key partners to showcase the technology which has started to roll out in the U.S. and, soon, Mexico. Since its Jibe acquisition in 2015, Google has rallied 43 carriers and device manufacturers to bring better native messaging to every Android user. The list of Early Access Partners is constantly growing and we’re proud to be among the first to bring this new channel to you and your customers.

Read the story behind RCS and what it means for Google and the B2C messaging wars.

Visit our RCS business messaging integration page to learn more and request early access for your account.

Service Accounts: Easily create & manage a subset of Smooch apps

If you’ve been creating and managing multiple Smooch apps on behalf of customers or doing on-premise deployments that connect to Smooch, we’ve just made your life easier. With the launch of Service Accounts, a new feature of our Account Provisioning APIs, you’ll be able to create scoped credentials to create and manage a set of Smooch apps.

Ideal for enterprise software makers, service accounts allow you to securely isolate access to your customer’s apps and corresponding data. When using service account credentials, the Smooch API will ensure that access will be limited to the apps created by the service account only, and prevent modifying those of other deployments and other customers.

More ways to customize Web Messenger

We’ve introduced a new way to change the look and feel of the Web Messenger UI. You can now provide styling settings in the call to the Smooch.init method.

The settings included in the Smooch.init method override the settings that have been set on the Smooch server via the Update Integration API or the Smooch dashboard. With the Smooch.init method, you’ll be able to run multiple variations of the Web Messenger depending on the websites it’s integrated on, a user’s location or their preferred language. View all init options here.

New customization options are also available:

• You can now add a background image to the chat window | Web SDK 4.7.0
• You can customize the size of the Web Messenger button | Web SDK 4.8.0

Other API & SDK updates ⚙

• Initializing Android SDK from an Activity: This is useful if can’t specify your Smooch app ID at app launch or if you want to run many Smooch apps in the same Android app. For instance, say you want to enable chat for a directory or marketplace app where multiple brands are represented and each want to be able to talk directly to users | Android SDK 5.9.0
• WeChat channel update: We added native support for list messages. See our WeChat guide and List API doc for details.

Industry intelligence 📰

The Message: a conversational newsletter by Smooch

Our new editorial newsletter, The Message, is finally out! Check out our latest edition and subscribe to The Message if you like what you see.

This is an excerpt from The Message, Smooch's biweekly newsletter about the messaging industry, chatbots and conversational commerce. Subscribe to get the next edition delivered straight to your inbox.

Smartphone Pioneer Accuses Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram of Patent Infringement

An exclusive, proprietary, rich messaging app that works over the internet and allows customers on similar devices to chat with each other for free.
 
Before that description applied to Apple’s iMessage (among other contenders in the ongoing messaging wars), it belonged to BlackBerry Messenger, the once-darling chat app of the early 21st century.
 
How things have changed.

The dawn of modern messaging 🌅

The Canadian company formerly known as Research in Motion launched BlackBerry Messenger in 2005, two years before the first iPhone came out.

In the early smartphone era, the notoriously addictive “CrackBerry” was the phone of choice for business professionals — and BBM was a key ingredient in its secret sauce.

BlackBerry users loved that BBM was faster, cheaper, more secure and more sophisticated than SMS, the only real mobile messaging alternative at the time.

An epic fall 📉

In late 2013, BBM finally opened its gates to Android and iOs users. By that point, however, the company had fallen prey to its more innovative competitors and in 2017, BlackBerry’s share of the smartphone market officially dropped to 0%, dragging the messaging app down with it.

Now BlackBerry is taking aim at one the companies that supplanted it.

Revenge in motion 🔪

In its lawsuit, BlackBerry accuses Facebook of infringing several software patents in its Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram apps.

The patents cover a variety of concepts, including:

• Using icons with numeric badges to signal the arrival of new messages
• Tagging people in photos using an auto-completing search box
• Marking a significant lull in a text message conversation by inserting a timestamp reflecting the time of the next message
• Changing how a mobile device sends messages depending on whether they're being actively read by the recipient's device
• Muting a message thread

From ArsTechnica:

"In short, BlackBerry claims to own some of the most common features of modern mobile messaging apps, whether they're made by Facebook, Apple, Google, or anyone else. BlackBerry has asked the court to enjoin Facebook from infringing these patents, which could require Facebook to dramatically overhaul these apps or even shut them down altogether."

Facebook’s lawyer responded with guns blazing:

"Blackberry’s suit sadly reflects the current state of its messaging business. Having abandoned its efforts to innovate, Blackberry is now looking to tax the innovation of others. We intend to fight."

While most observers expect the matter to be settled out of court, BlackBerry’s lawsuit highlights how far the mobile industry has come in the last decade and how the once-novel touchstones of modern messaging have come to be seen as commonplace.

Of course, that doesn’t make them any less powerful.

Is Google Hangouts Chat the next Slack killer?

Another frontier of the messaging wars is heating up.

Most consumer chat apps are less than a decade old but workplace messaging platforms like Slack have transformed the way we work and communicate with colleagues in half that time.

Last week Google took Hangouts Chat out of beta and rolled it into its enterprise suite. The chat platform benefits from deep integrations with other Google productivity tools like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Hangouts Meet, its web conferencing software.

All about those bots 🤖

As Mac Rumors notes, Hangouts Chat also takes advantage of Google’s considerable efforts in artificial Intelligence:

"In one example, Google shows how one person could ask a @Meet bot to "Plan a review meeting next week," and then the bot would communicate with Google Calendar to find the best time for all employees involved in the chat, create the meeting, and then add it to each person's calendar."

According to Google, developers will be able to craft their own bot integrations using the Hangouts Chat developer platform and API.

It’s getting crowded in here 🙅‍

Hangouts Chat joins an increasingly fragmented space led by Slack, Atlassian’s HipChat and Stride, Facebook’s Workplace and Microsoft’s Skype for Business and Teams, which is poised to roll out a few key improvements.

No wonder startups like m.io, which announced $5.75 million in funding this week, are promising “universal messaging” across these siloed platforms.

Meanwhile, Newsday notes the rise of enterprise chat as a “modern-day watercooler” brings a host of new issues around privacy, security and harassment that businesses and employees will be wrestling with for years to come.

We’ll be watching closely. 👀

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch.

New in Smooch this March: the ability to whitelist domains for the Web Messenger, a better way to handle LINE users who block a business, typing indicators and business read receipts for Twitter DM, plus a sneak peek of what’s to come in April for our SDKs.

What’s new 🎉

Enhanced security for the Web Messenger

To help you keep user data safe, we’re giving you full control over which websites the Web Messenger can appear on. As of today, you can create a whitelist of specific domains the Web Messenger can be seen on, making sure it never appears in unintended places. Read our guide on domain whitelisting to learn more.

Other API & SDK updates ⚙

• LINE update: Users who block a business are now handled more gracefully. When a message fails to be delivered to such users, you’ll now be notified via a delivery:failure webhook.
• Twitter DM update: Typing activity and read receipts are now supported on this channel to provide a more modern messaging experience for users.

👉 Make sure you’re up to date with all our new features and bug fixes by keeping an eye on the Smooch changelog.

Sneak peek 👀

Uploading files to a conversation on mobile or web chat

Uploading files to a conversation can be pretty handy for users. Say they’re in a conversation with their telco and want to discuss their latest invoice, or they’re talking to a potential employer and want to send their resume. Sometimes, photos just won’t cut it and a PDF needs to be uploaded. We’re just about to ship an enhancement to our iOS, Android and Web SDKs enabling users to attach any file type to a conversation. Watch our iOS, Android and Web SDK release pages for more info once the feature is available this April.

Apple beta-launched its highly anticipated B2C messaging platform this week and their timing couldn’t have been better.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, Facebook is in full damage control mode, temporarily suspending new apps and bots from connecting to Messenger.

Facebook’s data woes have left an opening for encrypted chat apps like Wickr, Signal and Telegram — which has been in the news lately for its $1.7 billion pre-ICO rounds and for ticking off authoritarian governments — not to mention Facebook’s own insurance policy, WhatsApp.

But it’s Apple’s new messaging capabilities that savvy businesses and software makers should keep an eye on.

The discovery channel 🔎

Apple’s advantage is that it pretty much controls the mobile experience for more than 700 million iPhone users, who tend to be just the sort of customers businesses covet.

With Business Chat, iPhone users searching on Safari or browsing through Apple maps will be able to click “message” within a business’ profile and start a conversation through iMessage, much like how they would initiate a phone call.

A handful of brands in the U.S. and Canada have launched the channel as part of the early access program, including Home Depot, Hilton, Lowes, Marriott, Wells Fargo and 1-800-Flowers. Some brands are going it alone, while others are connecting through customer engagement platforms like Genesys, LivePerson, Salesforce and Zendesk.

Once it comes out of beta businesses will need to figure out how Business Chat fits into their mobile customer experience, and how to support the channel alongside RCS business messaging, the Android equivalent. For businesses who care about being wherever customers are, the answer is clear: you need both.

Messaging with Marriott 🏩

Curious about what the Business Chat experience feels like for users, I pulled out my trusty iPhone and started searching for businesses who were part of the program.

After Safari searches for 1-800-Flowers and my local Home Depot failed to produce that exclusive “message” button, I switched to Maps and eventually found a Marriott property in Florida inviting me to initiate a conversation.

When I clicked the button, I was taken to a lightly-branded iMessage chat, where my messages were distinguished by a darker shade of grey instead of the customary blue. My initial “hi there” was met by a canned response but another message quickly followed from a (presumably) human agent named Stephanie, asking me to identify myself.

Ignoring her authentication question, I asked Stephanie if I could book a room. I was curious to see if she would present some sort of date picker tool. But her response made it clear she didn’t even know which hotel I was interested in, even though I’d clicked on a specific property within Maps.

🤔 Hadn’t that context make its way to the agent through whatever platform she was using?

Apparently not. Stephanie explained she didn’t have access to any of my information. After a few more messages it became clear I’d be better off booking a room online.

She even suggested calling me to collect my credit card information. ☎️

Learning the lingo

It’s early days and the opportunity to create truly awesome conversational experiences is clear. But despite Stephanie’s best efforts, something about the interaction felt off, like a new coworker who shows up to a backyard barbecue in a double-breasted suit.

From the initial “An agent will be with you shortly” to the final “Thank you for choosing Marriott,” the exchange felt a lot like the phone-based customer experiences I’m used to — and not in a good way.

Messaging is an inherently casual medium, with its own tones, textures and rhythms. As the technology improves and more businesses jump on the bandwagon, it will be fascinating to see how brands adapt to this new paradigm.

This is an excerpt from The Message, Smooch’s biweekly newsletter about the messaging industry, chatbots and conversational commerce. Subscribe to get the next edition delivered straight to your inbox.

Why are financial chatbots still so dumb?

Banks weren’t always early adopters but the rise of fintech is pressuring legacy institutions to raise their tech game.

Over the past week a handful of consumer banks began rolling out chatbots that help customers check their balances, apply for loans and remember to pay their bills.

But what these bots can’t — or won’t — do is more interesting.

Treading carefully ⚠️

Bank of Montreal launched a new AI-powered chatbot on Facebook and Twitter last week. Then it was Bank of America’s turn to unveil Erica, an in-app chatbot that’s currently available in Rhode Island, the country’s smallest state.

For now, both bots are focused on answering questions rather than enabling transactions, like paying bills or transferring money.

They join Germany’s DKB, which announced a chatbot called Herbie earlier this month, and Nigeria’s Diamond Bank, whose bot Ada is available on Facebook Messenger, among the growing list of banks experimenting with conversational tech, albeit cautiously.

BMO’s chief digital officer, Brad Pitts, explained their approach:

“We’re not starting in a place where people are entering personal information, or making payments or balances or any of those type of things… We have to be very thoughtful about those elements before we are comfortable rolling out the next generation of features.”

Insecure

While a global chat app like Facebook Messenger is great for discovery and acquisition, banks realize it’s still Facebook’s Messenger (and WhatsApp and Instagram, for that matter). So they’re understandably anxious about trusting it for sensitive conversations and transactions, especially in light of Facebook’s current crisis.

If banks want to provide true omnichannel customer experiences with chatbots and messaging apps, they will need to authenticate users and transfer them from public channels like Facebook and Twitter to their own secure web and mobile properties.

Luckily, I know some smart people who can help with that. 🔌

Feeling the heat 🔥

As banks navigate these complex waters, a growing number of Fintech startups are gunning for their customers.

Less than a month after launching in the U.S., London-based chatbot Cleo is signing up 1,000 users per day, according to TechCrunch.

Cleo allows users to send money to Facebook Messenger contacts, donate to charity and find better deals on credit cards and other financial products. And they’re not shy about their intention to disrupt:

“Nobody needs to be a bank to replace your banking app”
- Barney Hussey-Yeo, Cofounder, Cleo

Meanwhile, in an interview with Forbes, Craig McLaughlin, whose company Extractable helps financial institutions build their digital strategies, explains what banks are up against:

“Some are challenged with growth, some with scaling, but they are all dealing with infrastructure that is dated and vendor systems that have locked them in. They deal with a spaghetti of technology, vendors and internal IT groups where, in many cases, they are encumbered with 75% of their annual budget going to maintain existing code bases and patches, not new stuff.”

Time for everyone to put their money where their mouth is. 🤑

The GIF Economy

One of the strangest byproducts of messaging’s rise is the resurgence of a once-obsolete image format dating to the late ‘80s.

57% of people have responded to a message with a GIF, according to Facebook Messenger, and we’re not just talking about millenials: 53% of folks over the age of 55 use GIFs to communicate with friends and family.

So it was only a matter of time until someone found a way to monetize.

This is an excerpt from The Message, Smooch’s biweekly newsletter about the messaging industry, chatbots and conversational commerce. Subscribe to get the next edition delivered straight to your inbox.

Chatting with customers through messaging apps and voice assistants means surfacing a treasure trove of data businesses can use to make their customer experience more personal. But processing all that data requires automation.

This is the great paradox of conversational technology: If we want it to humanize the customer experience, we need to call in the robots.

Microsoft’s breakthrough 🤖

Earlier this month Microsoft announced that Xiaolce, its popular Chinese chatbot, had achieved what’s known among AI wonks as “full duplex.”

That means the bot can both listen and talk at the same time, mimicking real human chit-chat. The bot can even predict what the person it’s chatting with will say next.

Microsoft’s developers see this as a huge win for man and machine alike, saying it echoes “the art of conversation that people use in their daily life.”

But not everyone is cheering them on.

The uncanny valley 😱

Hollywood animators and roboticists have dreaded falling into it for years.

Studies have shown that when non-human characters look too real, it creeps people out in a visceral way.

Writing for Slate, Rachel Withers wonders whether Microsoft’s AI risks crossing the threshold of a “new, aural frontier of the uncanny valley, talking in a way that is almost but not quite right:”

“Microsoft wants to make conversation with robots more like conversation with humans, more flowing, more natural. But “less stilted” seems closer to “more eerie” to me.”

But as uncomfortable as bots make some people, others are trusting them with the most intimate aspects of their lives.

Bots for humanity 🤗

An Australian tax lawyer has created a chatbot that will help write your last will and testament for $150. Marketed as a time and money-saving device, the bot has led some to wonder why anyone would outsource such an emotional task to a non-human.

But as we’ve discussed before, people can appreciate the anonymity of sharing sensitive information with a non-sentient being. Bots don’t judge — at least not yet.

In the meantime, bots are helping out with very human causes like fighting disease, reporting sexual harassment in the workplace and even detecting mansplaining.

One digital artist even created a CAPTCHA that filters out humans but welcomes bots, toying with our perceptions of who the bad guys really are…

Can’t we all just get along?

Dystopian visions aside, customer-focused software makers believe the future won’t be a matter of human vs. machine but humans and machines, working together, to power amazing experiences that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

Apple, for example, won’t allow bots on its Business Chat platform unless human agents are on hand to take over the conversation if needed.

It’s our job to create tools that help businesses make customer experience more human, even when it’s powered by non-humans.

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch.

New in Smooch this April: tools available to help you comply with the GDPR; our new European Union instance, which allows you to host your data entirely in the EU; native support for file uploads in all our SDKs; and a few other tweaks and polishes.

What’s new 🎉

Smooch is ready for the GDPR

Many companies are focused on May 25 because that’s the date the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect. Smooch has been preparing for over a year, and we are ready. Not only are we a compliant data processor, our software platform includes features that will help you comply with your controller obligations. Read more on our blog about the tools available in our platform to help you comply with the GDPR and what Smooch has been doing to be ready for this new regulation.

New! European Union Hosted Region

We’re pleased to announce that you now have more options when it comes down to where your data is hosted. Enterprise customers with operations in Europe will have the option of having data on Smooch hosted, stored and backed up entirely within the European Union. Check out our blog to learn more about Smooch regions.

Uploading files to a conversation on mobile or web chat

Our iOS, Android and Web SDKs now have full native support for sending and receiving files. Documents like PDFs, spreadsheets, presentations or zip files can be uploaded by users, making it more convenient for them to share information with a business. Read the release notes for our iOS 6.9.0, Android 5.11.0, and Web 4.10.0 SDKs.

Other API & SDK updates ⚙

• Web Messenger is now CSP compliant: Content Security Policy (CSP) is an added layer of security that helps mitigate attacks, including Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and data injection attacks. If your deployment requires CSP compatibility, upgrade to our Web 4.9.1 SDK and read our guide to learn more.
• Store metadata for apps: Just like you can store metadata on users and on messages, you can now add metadata to each of your apps. Add custom info associated with the app like a customer name or a unique identifier. Check out our API documentation to learn more.
• Delete a single message: Want to delete a single message without deleting the whole conversation? We’ve just added a new Delete Single Message API to help you do just that.
• Updated image library for Android: Our latest Android 5.12.0 SDK release replaces the aging image processing library we were using internally to load cache and display images. Bonus! With this update, animated GIFs sent by a business will now be rendered in the conversation view.

Other polishes ✨

Boom! We’ve added search to our Smooch Guides docs so you can more easily find what you’re looking for. Thank you Algolia!

With the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect on May 25, Smooch is pleased to announce that our customers will now have more options when it comes down to where their data is hosted. Enterprise customers with operations in Europe now have the option of having data on the Smooch platform hosted, stored and backed up entirely within the European Union.

Data privacy is vital to Smooch, which is why we built our platform to the highest standards of privacy and security. The GDPR is an important measure to protect user privacy but for some businesses, it's not enough. Many enterprises have strict data residency requirements which is why we’re happy to offer these companies the opportunity to host their data in Dublin, Ireland.

This new Smooch region service, available to Smooch Enterprise Plan customers, allows software makers to provision apps and store all related customer data on either our European Union or United States infrastructure. The full suite of API endpoints, channels and SDKs are available on our EU instance, just like on the US one. As a Smooch customer, you will be able to select a region for each app you create. You can either provision all your apps in a unique region, or use both regions if you have customers located in and outside the EU.

We value your trust and understand your concerns over the privacy of your data. This new offering underscores our commitment to serving customers with European operations and to provide more tools to protect your data. To guarantee adequate privacy protections when personal data is moved outside Europe, Smooch is certified for international data transfers with our compliance to the E.U.-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield frameworks. We have also taken great steps to ensure our customers are able to comply with any privacy framework, including the GDPR.

Interested in hosting your data in the EU? Smooch’s European Union instance is offered to Enterprise Plan customers upon request. Learn more about Smooch regions, how to request access, and SDK & API region configuration here.

Many companies are focused on May 25 because that’s the date the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect. Smooch has been preparing for over a year, and we are ready. Not only are we a compliant data processor, our software platform includes features that will help you comply with your controller obligations.

ICYMI, here’s what the GDPR is

The GDPR is the EU’s new data privacy law. Its goal is to give Europeans more control over their personal data and hold companies accountable.

Most aspects of the GDPR are not new. Individuals still have the right to access and correct their personal information. Companies are still obligated to provide adequate notice and choice.

There are, however, some new data rights that companies need to be prepared for. In some cases, individuals have the right to delete, object to or restrict the processing of their personal data, and the right to port it to another business. There are also strict guidelines for how companies need to get their customers’ consent to use their data, and how this data needs to be protected.

When the GDPR takes effect on May 25, it will be the most comprehensive data privacy law in the world, and it will impact how businesses collect and handle personal data.

Smooch’s commitment to data protection and the GDPR

As a provider of messaging services, data privacy is vital to Smooch, which is why we built our platform to the highest standards of privacy and security.

We’ve designed our platform, as well as our internal Privacy Program, to meet the requirements of European, Canadian and US privacy laws. Our customers are located around the world, so we design for a global standard.

We also recognize that protecting your data requires an enterprise-grade security program. Whether it’s granular access restriction or encrypting data in motion and at rest, you can have full confidence in how your company data, as well as the personal data of your users, is being processed, transferred and stored.

Smooch is ready for the GDPR

Because we could not be successful without our customers’ trust, we have been thinking about privacy and security since day one. To prepare for the GDPR, we expanded our existing privacy program, which was already compliant with Canadian privacy law (PIPEDA) as well as the EU-US Privacy Shield.

Here’s why we are ready:

• Our Chief Privacy Officer works with our engineers, sales, technology, and security teams to oversee our Privacy Program. She actively monitors the latest guidance coming from regulators to make sure we’re up to date and using best practices in protecting data.
• Privacy by Design is a core part of our software development process. Everyone from the engineering team to the CEO are trained on Privacy by Design.
• Our platform includes features that help our customers easily respond to an individual’s request for access, correction, erasure, restriction and portability.
• We hold our third-party service providers to the highest standards. We use EU Standard Contractual Clauses/Model Clauses with all third parties who process personal data.
• We clearly outline our commitments in our Privacy Policy, Privacy Statement for Service Data and our Data Processing Agreement (DPA). This makes it easy to understand the ways we both follow industry best practices, and exceed the minimum for legal compliance.
• Our corporate Data Privacy Policy governs our Privacy Program. We train all employees with access to personal data annually on the Privacy Policy and Privacy by Design.
• As a Canadian company, the GDPR’s Adequacy provision allows companies to transfer data to Smooch for processing. We went a step further, and self-certified to the E.U.-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Frameworks.
• Our robust Information Security Program is audited by an independent third party: our SOC 2 Type 1 certification process is under way.
• Our Incident Response Plan and Data Breach Policy are based on the definitions and timelines required to comply with the GDPR. Our team is trained on how to put these plans and policies into action if needed.
• Finally, we are happy to announce a new EU instance of our platform. GDPR does not require data localization but some customers have reasons to keep their data in Europe. Now their data can be processed and hosted by Smooch entirely in the EU.

A conversation platform for GDPR compliance

Our omnichannel conversation platform is architectured to make it simpler for you to comply with GDPR requirements.

People who communicate using the platform have rights under the GDPR. It is your responsibility to communicate these rights to them and be prepared for their requests to exercise those rights. We have built features that make it simple and fast to do so.

The first thing you need to do when a user submits a request is to identify the data you have about them. The Smooch platform makes that easy by using unified customer profiles where channel identities, channel supplied metadata, application and other custom metadata, and conversation history are stored.

You can respond to the request to access, correct, or delete personal data through our Get App User, Update App User and Delete User Profile APIs. User message content can be extracted and provided to the individual, or you can Delete Messages.

More specifically, here’s what we have in place in our platform to help you be GDPR compliant:

Access control

Smooch authenticates callers to its API using JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) that allow access to be scoped to several different levels and set to expire at a specific date and time. Access to Smooch data through JWTs can be limited to access to an individual user’s conversation history and metadata, access to a single business account (app) and all of the user data contained within it, access to a group of business accounts (i.e. parent company and divisions) as well as global access for all business accounts provisioned on the software provider’s system.

Data deletion

Smooch gives you full control over app, user and message deletion. You can easily delete a single user profile along with the conversation history attached to it and you can also delete single messages. Smooch also supports the deletion of an app. This means you can delete a customer (a business) and immediately delete all associated data of that business' users.

Data access and portability

Customers can easily export data about users, including metadata and conversation history as required by GDPR, to another system. The feature exports data in a commonly used machine readable format (JSON), which can then be imported into another system. The Get App User API allows you to retrieve all of the metadata (including channel-specific metadata) Smooch stores on a user. The Get Messages API retrieves all the messages exchanged between your software and a user, across any channel the user has used to communicate. If you want to make direct calls to a messaging channel API, you can also use the Get App User Channel Entities API to retrieve the channel-specific identifiers that can be used to make these direct calls. If your software takes advantage of Smooch’s built-in business system integrations, you can use the Get App User Business System IDs to find the business system entity (i.e. ticket ID, Slack channel, etc.) associated with the user.

Security of customer and user data

The Smooch platform encrypts all data both in transit and at rest. All communication to and from Smooch, as well as between Smooch’s various infrastructure components, is secured by SSL/TLS transport over public networks. Access to the Smooch production system is restricted by an explicit need-to-know basis, utilizes least privilege, is frequently audited and monitored, and is controlled by our Production and Security teams. Employees accessing the production system are required to use two-factor authentication.

Audit and logs

All generated logs are transferred and stored in a secured and encrypted location. In the event of suspected or confirmed access to data that is unauthorized, Smooch can provide audit logs to help you investigate, respond to, and remediate the issue as soon as possible.

We understand your concerns about the GDPR — we’ve been there! Keeping your data safe and secure is our top priority, and we’re committed to maintaining the highest standards.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about Smooch’s Privacy and Security commitments or practices. You may contact us at privacy@smooch.io.

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch.

New in Smooch this May: more customizable options for our Office Hours integration; a sticky intro pane for the Web Messenger and an updated guide to view all its capabilities; plus a few tweaks to our APIs and SDKs.

What’s new 🎉

New customization options for Office Hours

Office Hours is an add-on built by Smooch that lets you send an automatic reply to users who message a business outside of their preferred work hours. It works with all messaging channel integrations, including our iOS, Android and Web SDKs.

We’ve added support for new customization options. You can now upload a custom avatar and edit the business name for your out-of-office auto-reply messages. Read our Office Hours guide to learn more.

Sticky intro pane for the Web Messenger

You can now set the introduction pane to "fixed" mode on the Web Messenger 4.12.0 which will pin it to the top of the conversation instead of scrolling with it. Check out our how-to guide to set this up.

Detailed capability guide for the Web Messenger

💥 We’re super excited to launch a new section in our docs that details the capabilities of every messaging channel. This will help you visualize all the different content types, actions, structured messages and indicators that are supported by channel, on top of showing you the support level (full support, partial support or not supported).

We’re in the process of building detailed guides for each channel. Our Web Messenger capabilities guide is available right now. Stay tuned as we ship more guides in the near future.

Other API & SDK updates ⚙

• Delete attachments: It’s now possible to delete files or images that were previously uploaded using the Upload Attachment API.
• Android SDK updates: We added support for Android Studio 3.2, fixed a serialization crash on certain devices and fixed files and images delivery and read state not being displayed.
• Web SDK updates: We fixed a compatibility issue with Firefox where Smooch.open() would fail. Read the Web SDK 4.12.0 release notes to find out more. We also improved local storage handling, and fixed a bug where the webview progress bar would never disappear in embedded mode.

Smooch and the GDPR 🇪🇺

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has finally come into effect. We’re a compliant data processor and our software platform includes features that will help you comply with your controller obligations. Read more on our blog about the tools available in our platform to help you comply with the GDPR.