In a previous post, I wrote about the long and winding history of RCS, the rich communication standard that’s supposed to have supplanted SMS for over a decade now.

Most recently, Google stepped in to rally global telecoms to adopt the new standard in order to stave off WhatsApp and other social chat apps from eating their lunches.

Well, the saga continues...

Just “Chat”

Google’s new move, as reported by The Verge, is to rebrand RCS as “Chat” and bake it into the default messaging app in every Android phone.

What’s more, Google announced it will be pausing development on Allo, the latest in an embarrassing series of attempts by the company to launch a competitive OTT (over the top) messaging app.

Instead, Google’s going all in on Chat.

Chimes against humanity 🌎

Some see Google’s gamble as a sign that RCS may finally, eventually, become a thing. Others are more skeptical.

Amnesty International is furious. The human rights organization proclaimed that Chat “shows total contempt” for user privacy and amounts to “a precious gift to cybercriminals and government spies alike” since, unlike OTT apps such as iMessage and WhatsApp, it lacks end-to-end encryption:

Following the revelations by CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption has become recognized as an essential safeguard for protecting people’s privacy when using messaging apps. With this new Chat service, Google shows a staggering failure to respect the human rights of its customers.

The new standard

It’s a post-Cambridge Analytica world (literally) and standards are shifting. It remains to be seen whether users will demand end-to-end encryption as a minimum requirement for messaging.

This week WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum resigned from Facebook, reportedly due to clashes over encryption and privacy issues.

On his Facebook page, Mark Zuckerberg wished him well and assured followers that the values Koum brought to the company would “always be at the heart of WhatsApp.”

That would be good news for customers and businesses alike.

At Google’s developer conference last week, CEO Sundar Pichai demoed a new capability in Google Assistant that caused alarm bells to reverberate far beyond Silicon Valley.

Pichai played two recordings in which an eerily human-sounding Google Assistant engaged in phone conversations with actual people who had no idea they were talking to an AI-powered bot.

The demo spurred a flurry of debate over whether the experiment — which Google dubs “Duplex” — crosses ethical lines. In response, Google promised that whenever the technology goes to market it will have “disclosure built in.”

But for those of us tasked with building the future of conversational technology, the discussion is just getting started.

A radical rethink 🤔

While chat apps and voice assistants are celebrated for their convenience, the inconvenient truth is that they may be shifting our conception of “truth” itself.

The Verdict explores how, paired with another Google technology called WaveNet, which uses machine learning to synthesize human voice, Google may “irreversibly blur the line between human and computer.”

For example, if Google Assistant negotiates a fraudulent transaction on behalf of a person, who should be held responsible? If someone’s Google Assistant persona is hacked, is that considered identity theft?

These are the kinds of questions companies and governments will need to “radically rethink,” according to the piece:

Without such guidelines, the rapid rate of innovation as demonstrated by Google with Duplex and WaveNet may serve not to better society but instead to undermine our trust in one another.

What happens on chat… ⚖️

At least one judge has ruled that what's communicated through messaging — even in emoji form — has legal ramifications.

Last year an Israeli landlord won a case against prospective tenants who indicated they were interested in renting his property via a string of enthusiastic emoji ( 💃 👯‍ ✌️🐿 🍾 to be precise).

The landlord removed his ad based on their messages but the would-be tenants backed out and the landlord sued for damages. Here’s what the judge said:

The…text message sent by Defendant…included a smiley, a bottle of champagne, dancing figures and more. These icons convey great optimism. Although this message did not constitute a binding contract between the parties, [it] naturally led to the Plaintiff’s great reliance on the Defendants’ desire to rent his apartment.

I had my own reality check recently when corresponding with Quartz’s news bot on Facebook Messenger. The bot lets readers choose their own adventure by clicking on prompts or calls to action which, when selected, are posted into the conversation as messages:

Scrolling back through the conversation, I couldn’t help but feel as though the bot had put words in my mouth. I had clicked on the buttons but hadn’t actually typed those characters, even though it looks like l did.

If a more nefarious bot ever tricked me into “saying” something incriminating or embarrassing, and that transcript was used against me, how would I defend myself?

While this may seem like paranoia, researchers recently uncovered the ability to send audio commands to Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant that are undetectable to the human ear.

As the New York Times points out, the secret messages could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online — all under the presumed identity of the person linked to the device.

Meanwhile, Facebook recently allowed users to “unsend” messages after Mark Zuckerberg was caught deleting his own, suggesting Zuck himself sees the value of controlling his conversation trail.

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.

After 20 years, Yahoo Messenger will shut down

When Oath, the holding company that owns what’s left of the digital pioneer, announced it would discontinue Yahoo Messenger, the internet erupted in a fit of nostalgia.

Alongside ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger — which Oath shuttered last year — Yahoo Messenger was one of the original chat apps of the late ‘90s and early ’00s. It helped spark countless teenage flirtations and popularized many messaging hallmarks, like emojis and stickers.

It’s also a relic of chat’s early days, which are officially coming to an end.

A tough nut to crack 🐿

Yahoo Messenger has been in decline for a while, lapped by mobile-first messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, along with workplace chat platforms like Slack.

Oath is funneling users toward Yahoo Squirrel, a group messaging app it previewed last month. This suggests it may be targeting the Slacks of the world more than the WhatsApps and WeChats.

It also shows Oath understands people today are squirrelly about privacy. The key to Squirrel is that access is invite-only and doesn’t require users to share their contacts, as TechCrunch reports:

That is a critical detail, given both Yahoo’s reputation in the wake of its massive data breach a couple of years ago; and the fact that some may now be turning off to just how much data messaging-dominant platforms like Facebook might have about you, starting with your contacts.

The telecoms strikes back? ☎️

Oath is owned by Verizon and “it’s the telcos of the world whose revenues have been cannibalized in part by over-the-top messaging services,” TechCrunch notes.

Indeed, the threat of OTTs encroaching on the $55 billion-plus A2P messaging market is a key reason many telcos are rallying around Google’s efforts to establish RCS as a new text messaging standard. This model involves charging businesses for sending stuff like receipts, notifications and alerts to customers, currently via SMS.

Yahoo Messenger has been on the brink for years, but those of us who came of age at the dawn of the IM era are pouring one out for the messaging wars’ latest casualty. 🥃

Chatbots are dead. Long live chatbots.

Like the web, mobile apps and vinyl records, chatbots have been declared dead countless times only to prove very much alive (in that non-sentient way).

In April, Tech Republic blamed a lack of AI for why “basically no one uses chatbots.” Last week GrowthBot's Justin Lee singled out the “hype cycle” itself for inflating our expectations.

Meanwhile, The Information reports that bot development on Facebook Messenger is on the rise, and the Walmart-incubated Jetblack is threatening to make chatbots mainstream.

But what if bots are still falling short because we’ve been keeping them in the dark?

Context will save the bots 🤖

Writing for The Next Web, Smooch CTO Mike Gozzo draws on his own family story to explain the importance of context in designing meaningful chatbot experiences for customers.

What if a bot was informed not only by what’s being said in real time, Mike asks, but what’s happening around it? Because “like body language, sometimes what hasn’t been said is just as crucial.”

If a bot had access to both conversation history and metadata it could tailor its responses accordingly and pass on the info to a human agent, CRM or other software:

We need to think about every customer touchpoint across every channel as an opportunity to map out their identities to form a picture of who that person is and what they care about. This isn’t to sell them more stuff — it’s about helping them solve whatever problem or do whatever job they came to us to help them with.

Check out Mike’s full piece in The Next Web.

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.

Apple Business Chat Goes to Cannes

The Cannes Lions advertising festival came and went this week and amidst the awards ceremonies, celebrity sightings and free-flowing rosé, one of the most hotly-anticipated messaging platforms made its European debut.

ABC, baby you and me ♫

Still in beta, Apple Business Chat made a rare appearance in Cannes as the official concierge app for the ad industry event.

Manned by a mix of bots and human agents, Cannes Lions Concierge helped the festival’s 16,000-plus attendees get information about event happenings, restaurant options, after-parties and more, straight from their Apple devices.

The service was powered by LivePerson, whose CEO, Robert LoCascio, recognized that the relatively affluent and influential Cannes crowd was an ideal test market for Apple’s exclusive platform:

With the vast majority of Cannes Lions attendees using iOS, Apple Business Chat is the perfect solution for the concierge service.

WhatsApp, what’s that?

Apple Business Chat launched in beta earlier this year with select brands in the U.S. and Canada, including Home Depot, Marriott and Wells Fargo.

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.

As Beebom notes, this is happening as WhatsApp attempts to corner the business messaging market with WhatsApp Business App, which it’s expected to extend to large enterprises.

The Telegraph in the UK is currently using WhatsApp to deliver play-by-play analysis and notifications to soccer fans during the World Cup, another example of the technology’s potential to change how we experience (not to mention, gamble on) live events.

Messaging Beats Social Media for News

More people are getting their news from messaging apps than Facebook and Twitter, according to the 2018 Reuters Digital News Report.

The Oxford University study, which surveyed more than 74,000 people in 37 countries about how they consume news, found that people are “more comfortable” using “closed messaging apps,” as one survey participant explained:

Somehow WhatsApp feels a lot more private. Like it’s kind of a hybrid between texting and social media. Whereas in Facebook, for some reason it just feels like it’s public. Even if you’re in Messenger.

Good news, bad news ⚖️

In countries where free speech is threatened, notes Axios, encrypted messaging is a safe and private way for citizens to share news and information with each other.

It’s no accident that encrypted messaging apps like Telegram have taken off in authoritarian regimes like Iran, whose decision to ban the app last month has led to profound consequences for human rights in the country.

Closer to home, Facebook Messenger’s new auto-translation feature is being hailed as an antidote to the division at the U.S.-Mexico border.

On the other hand, some fear chat apps have become a “black box” for the spread of false news and misinformation.

Like social media and pretty much every new technology that came before it — television, video games, the humble printing press — messaging apps are being celebrated and vilified in equal measure.

Just another sign that they’re a cultural force to be reckoned with, in business and in life.

This is the first post in a series looking at how innovative brands and bot makers are using Smooch to make the dream of conversational commerce into a reality.

When you think insurance, you probably don’t think digital innovation.

For most of us, shopping for home or car insurance is a tedious process, filled with never-ending forms, repetitive phone calls and a nagging sense that things could be a lot simpler.

But a new generation of insurance industry professionals are trying to change that, with a little help from a chatbot.

For the past two years, a Canadian startup called ProNavigator has been building an AI-powered “conversation engine” to make the experience of buying insurance “faster and more convenient,” as co-founder and CEO Joseph D’Souza put it.

Thanks to ProNavigator, whose bots are deployed on its customers’ websites and chat apps via Smooch, forward-looking insurance companies and brokers are generating more leads, engaging more customers, and finally bringing the insurance industry into the 21st century.

ProNavigator CEO Joseph D'Souza

A changing industry

Like most industries, the insurance space is going through a “massive change” right now, explains Joseph. A new breed of “InsureTech” startups like Lemonade and Trov are putting legacy companies on alert.

Insurance companies realize they need to adopt new technology to attract the next generation of customers, while brokerages are struggling to stay relevant and not get cut out of the deal.

ProNavigator is building its bots for both sides of the equation and has signed almost 70 customers across the U.S. and Canada. Embedding a chatbot on their websites allows brokers and insurers to respond to the roughly 30 percent of conversations that take place outside of work hours, according to Joseph.

It’s also helping them transform the customer experience.

From forms to conversations

Most insurers and brokers today have a “quoting engine” on their websites. These are long, multi-step web forms that collect a bunch of information from the user in exchange for a quote, which is usually delivered by email. Often, the business follows up with a phone call. This experience is far from optimal, for both customers and businesses.

“Nobody wants to fill out a web form just to wait for someone to get back to them,” says Joseph. ProNavigator takes that experience and translates it to a conversational interface. This allows customers to ask clarifying questions along the way, such as, ‘Hey, do I put down the zip code for my business or my home?’ or ‘What if I occasionally use my car for work?’

“We can say, okay, the user’s not understanding, let me answer the question and then, more importantly, bring them back to where they left off and let them complete the quote,” says Joseph.

ProNavigator also allows for bot-human handoff, meaning real brokers or insurance agents can jump into the chat if the bot is stuck or the end user requests assistance.

With traditional quoting engines, less than 50% of users (sometimes as low as 10%) complete the flow and submit their email, according to Joseph. ProNavigator is seeing an average form completion rate of 78% with its system, meaning some brokers are generating almost 30% more leads by embedding a chatbot on their website.

“The minute a customer lands on the site we engage them through chat,” explains Joseph. “That’s a much more powerful experience.”

Bots as brokers

Excalibur Insurance is a digital brokerage whose CEO, Jeff Roy, describes himself as “a Millennial trapped in a Gen X body.”

Excalibur uses a ProNavigator-powered chatbot named Aiden to generate leads, serve customers and “stay ahead of the curve,” says Jeff.

Aiden, the Excalibur chatbot, is powered by ProNavigator using Smooch’s web SDKs.

Customers can also interact with Aiden on Facebook Messenger

Aiden is featured on Excalibur’s Twitter feed, where customers are encouraged to chat with Aiden on their website and through Google Voice. You can ask Aiden questions like, “What’s the most expensive set of teeth ever insured?” or “What’s the highest speed ever recorded on a motorcycle?”

Jeff thinks chat will transform the industry as soon as major insurance companies allow brokers to access their APIs and sell insurance directly online. For now, Aiden can provide a quote but a human broker has to follow up to close the deal.

“My chatbot would become like another broker but would always answer the right question, not get distracted, record everything, and talk to 15 companies at once,” imagines Jeff. “The sky’s the limit.”

Making technology more human

The ProNavigator team is busy honing their AI and natural language processing engine, building more voice integrations and “working alongside the customer support agents using the tools we’ve built” to understand how to make them better, says Joseph.

So far they’ve been surprised to see people interacting with bots in an unmistakably human way — even thanking them for their help at the end of a conversation.

“When’s the last time you thanked an app on your phone for showing you the weather or Microsoft Word for sharing a document?” says Joseph. “By humanizing technology we have this golden opportunity to reimagine how we interact with machines.”

New in Smooch this month: carousel support for Viber; pre-filled message copy for mobile SDKs; a new blog series featuring our customers and the amazing products they’re building on Smooch; and a few tweaks and updates to our APIs & SDKs.

What’s new 🎉

Carousel support for Viber

Already supported on Facebook Messenger, LINE, Telegram and all our SDKs, carousels are now also supported by Smooch on Viber. Easily send a set of horizontally scrollable items that combines text, image and message actions via our Post Message API. Check out our Viber guide to learn more about how Smooch supports carousels on Viber.

Get the conversation going with pre-filled message copy

Help users start conversations with businesses by providing them with pre-filled copy when they open the chat window. Easily configure what copy should display and when to show it depending on your use case. For example, you could configure different pre-filled messages depending on where users are coming from and what they did in the app. This new feature is currently available in our iOS SDK 6.10.0 and Android SDK 5.13.0 and will be coming this summer in our Web SDK.

Customer Spotlight 🌟 ProNavigator

Can chatbots make the insurance industry more human? That’s the bet that ProNavigator is making, a Canadian startup that’s building an AI-powered “conversation engine” to make the experience of buying insurance faster and more convenient.

For most of us, shopping for home or car insurance is a tedious process, filled with never-ending forms, repetitive phone calls and a nagging sense that things could be a lot simpler.

Thanks to ProNavigator, whose bots are deployed on its customers’ websites and chat apps via Smooch, forward-looking insurance companies and brokers are generating more leads and engaging more customers. Read on to learn how ProNavigator is bringing the insurance industry into the 21st century.

This is our first post in a blog series looking at how innovative brands and bot makers are using Smooch to make the dream of conversational commerce into a reality.

Other API & SDK updates ⚙

• Upload Attachment API: Using the Upload Attachment API, you can now instruct Smooch to automatically delete attachments when the message containing them is deleted.
• Energy consumption on mobile SDKs: We’ve optimized our server-side websocket connection handling to improve energy consumption for our iOS and Android SDKs.
• Web Messenger updates: v4.12.5 included a fix for syncing messages across multiple browser sessions and a fix for iframes that would not load correctly in some browsers. We resolved a connection problem when downgrading to alternative transport when websockets are unavailable in v4.12.7. We fixed a Faye reconnection delay when a browser goes back online in v4.12.8. Finally, we’ve fixed a bug that prevented auto scrolling from working properly in v4.12.9.

Over the last two years, we've seen a variety of popular messaging apps open their doors to businesses that want to engage customers on these channels. Despite being used by over 1.5 billion people every month, WhatsApp was notably absent from the list of messaging platforms launching APIs for business software.

With such a large and dedicated user base, businesses have been clamouring to get onto this platform. Instead of jumping right in and meeting this demand, WhatsApp sat on the sidelines of the business-to-consumer messaging market and focused on learning about what businesses need in order to successfully engage their customers over messaging.

From where we're sitting, this time spent learning about the market has really paid off.

We're excited to announce that WhatsApp has officially launched an early-access API for businesses to message customers over the chat app. Smooch has been working with the team at WhatsApp for the past several months to connect leading enterprise customer experience platforms like Zendesk, Lithium, Sparkcentral and Clarabridge to the platform so that approved businesses can leverage this popular messaging channel.

With this early-access API, WhatsApp is enabling approved businesses to operate under a verified business identity on the platform and solve the biggest issues impeding messaging adoption today: discoverability and privacy.

Driving discoverability through notifications

A frequent criticism of business messaging is that it can be difficult for consumers to discover they can interact with their favorite brands on their favorite chat apps. The OTT channels have tried a variety of techniques such as QR codes, "bot" stores, and click-to-message ads to varying degrees of success.

WhatsApp is taking a dramatically different path here. Instead of trying to pull customers into messaging experiences, it's allowing businesses to send useful notifications to consenting customers.

Each of these notification types must be individually approved by WhatsApp's trust and safety team. Valuable notifications such as boarding passes, shipping updates and order confirmations will make the cut; promotional messages are forbidden at this time.

Unlike SMS, where received notifications are often of poor quality and come from unrecognized phone numbers, notifications on WhatsApp are delivered from a brand's verified business identity. Users will see the brand's logo, website and description in the contact details pane.

Once a brand is invited into a WhatsApp inbox, users are likely to respond to notifications and engage with the business alongside other interactions with trusted people on their contact list.

Privacy first, but at a cost

This trust is key to what makes WhatsApp so amazing and also so different from every other business messaging channel. Unlike most other messaging platforms, WhatsApp is entirely end-to-end encrypted. That means the WhatsApp team can't read or process any of the information you exchange over the platform. This is tremendously important for many use cases, particularly for conversations on sensitive topics like finance and healthcare.

Maintaining end-to-end encryption with businesses on the platform presents new challenges for brands and software makers. WhatsApp requires the use of a headless version of its mobile app, known as the WhatsApp API client, for terminating the encryption between the customer's mobile phone and the business.

These API clients are distributed as docker containers and require the instantiation of a database, block storage and other supporting resources. The clients themselves and the API they present to business software is regularly updated. Businesses need to instantiate at least one API client for each WhatsApp number they enable on the platform, then keep that client running 24/7.

Cutting through the complexity

We've been working with the team at Facebook to make connecting your software to WhatsApp as quick and easy as possible. All Smooch-connected customer experience platforms will be ready to support businesses on the channel as soon as those brands are approved by WhatsApp.

Smooch can also support WhatsApp-approved brands directly. Whether you're running your own proprietary CX software that you want to integrate with Smooch, or whether you want to manage your WhatsApp integration on your own and direct messages to the third-party CX platform of your choice, Smooch can help.

Best of all, once you integrate with the Smooch API, not only is your business software ready for WhatsApp, it's also ready to interact with users across more than a dozen other popular messaging channels.

We're really excited to be a part of this early access program and work with a variety of innovative software platforms and brands that are taking advantage of WhatsApp to connect to customers around the world. We can't wait to learn about how you'll use this channel in your business.

New in Smooch this month: WhatsApp Business API is finally here! We’re super excited to be an official WhatsApp Business Solution Provider and we can’t wait to help you connect your software to the world’s #1 messaging channel. We’ve also shipped a detailed capability guide for Facebook Messenger and made a few updates to our SDKs and APIs.

What’s new 🎉

Get ready for WhatsApp

Big news in the messaging world! WhatsApp has officially launched an early-access API for businesses to message customers over the chat app. For the past several months, we've been working closely with the team at WhatsApp to make connecting your software to their platform as quick and easy as possible. We’re super proud to be powering the vast majority of customer engagement platforms that are part of the early access program, including Zendesk, Lithium, Sparkcentral and Clarabridge, in addition to leading brands like Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts.

As an official WhatsApp Business Solution Provider, we’re happy to report that all Smooch-connected customer experience platforms will be ready to support businesses on the channel as soon as those brands are approved by WhatsApp. We can also support WhatsApp-approved brands directly.

Read our announcement to learn more about the ins and outs of the WhatsApp Business API and how features like end-to-end encryption and paid notifications have impacted how WhatsApp has architectured its enterprise solution. Trust us, it’s not that simple 😏

Check out our new WhatsApp channel guide and let us know you’re interested in WhatsApp by registering your interest.

Facebook Messenger capabilities guide

In May we shared our plans to add a new section in our docs that details the capabilities of every messaging channel. Our new Facebook Messenger guide is now ready. Easily visualize all the different content types, actions, structured messages and indicators that are supported by the channel, as well as the support level (full support, partial support or not supported). Check it out!

Other API & SDK updates ⚙

• LINE update: We’ve updated our integration to support short-lived access tokens. Read our LINE guide to learn more.
• Source schema update: App user messages now have an integrationId in the message source indicating which integration the message was sent from. Learn more here.
• Web Messenger update: v4.12.10 fixed an issue where an uploaded file would display a cryptic filename; added “Tap to view image” functionality for images over 2MB; added ability to retry loading images that failed to download; fixed dark border sometimes appearing around a custom Messenger button; and fixed carousel behavior on Internet Explorer 11.

A few weeks ago, WhatsApp took the wraps off the WhatsApp Business API - a tool for allowing large businesses to use the chat app to interact with their customers. It didn't take long for Smooch to get a ton of interest from brands and software makers eager to take advantage of the newly-opened platform.

Despite the excitement, production usage of the WhatsApp Business API is only available to a select few brands and software applications (you can register your interest here). So how can you get your business and your software ready for WhatsApp the moment you receive approval?

Introducing the Smooch Sandbox for WhatsApp

The Smooch Sandbox for WhatsApp lets you experience the capabilities of the platform while you patiently wait for approval from the WhatsApp team. The sandbox allows you to start building and prototyping with WhatsApp immediately.

With the Smooch Sandbox for WhatsApp, you can take advantage of most of the functionality of the WhatsApp platform and build, develop and test your applications. However, the sandbox has one key limitation that prevents you from using it in production - each instance of the sandbox can only speak to a single WhatsApp user.

Activating the Sandbox

Follow the steps below to get access to the sandbox.

Step 1: Choose your app

Sign into your Smooch account (or sign up for a free account) and select the app you want to connect to WhatsApp:

Step 2: Connect WhatsApp to your app

From your app page, head to the integrations directory:

Pick WhatsApp from the list of integrations:

Click "Connect" to get to the sandbox:

Step 3: Activate the sandbox

Click "Activate Sandbox" to receive instructions on how to connect your WhatsApp client account to the Sandbox:

You can do it by scanning the QR code or by texting the secret code to the number indicated:

Step 4: You're ready to message!

Once the connection is successful, the page will update and you're ready to start sending and receiving messages between your personal WhatsApp account (on your phone) and Smooch.

Back on your app page, you should now see your WhatsApp integration:

Where can you go from here?

Now that you've activated the Smooch Sandbox for WhatsApp, you're ready to start sending and receiving messages with it.

Use our API (here's a handy walkthrough) to send and receive messages in your software.

Or give it a quick spin by connecting to one of our built-in business system integrations and get started without writing any code.

Whichever route you choose, we're excited to help you experience WhatsApp and get a taste of how it will be transforming business-to-consumer interactions in the coming months.

So you think you’re omnichannel?

With Apple Business Chat in beta, WhatsApp for enterprise on the horizon and Google Chat/RCS tugging at everyone’s trouser legs, businesses are looking toward their customer engagement platforms to connect them to all the world’s messaging channels.

For software makers, more “must-have” channels means more technical overhead and complexity. But what if connecting to these channels is the easy part?

Multichannel vs. omnichannel

In his latest column for Enterprise Connect’s No Jitter, Smooch CEO Warren Levitan breaks down the difference between “multichannel” and “omnichannel,” arguing that only truly omnichannel software will win in the age of business messaging:

Multichannel means being wherever your customers are, whether that's the social chat apps, the web, or wherever else people hang out. That's quickly becoming table stakes. Omnichannel means providing a consistent communications journey for your customers, one where the conversation history and context travels with them from channel to channel.

Breaking down conversation silos 🚜

If businesses are empowered to chat with customers everywhere but aren’t able to connect the dots between conversations on different channels, they actually risk providing a negative customer experience:

Such multichannel solutions lead to conversation silos within the enterprise, frustrating the consumer and limiting a business' ability to have a holistic view of the consumer.

Read Warren’s piece to find out how you can help businesses solve The Omnichannel Dilemma.

Nothing personal

In a webinar with Sparkcentral this week, Forrester analyst Ian Jacobs makes a key distinction between two terms that often get confused in customer experience circles: “personal” and “personalized.”

“Personal” means friendly, natural or human. Even in a business context messaging feels inherently personal because it's how we communicate with friends and family — typos, emojis and all.

“Personalization” is what nearly every business is promising these days, though it’s usually more of an aspiration than a reality.

Messaging can play an important role here too since every conversation surfaces a treasure trove of context (in the form of both chat history and metadata) that can be used to inform subsequent interactions.

Stepping into the customer’s shoes 👟

Speaking to CMO.com, Zappos’ head of customer research, Alex Genov, explains how the online shoe retailer approaches personalization:

What a lot of retailers are talking about is best guess recommendations, and using a lot of algorithms and AI,” Genov says. “But if you really think about it from a person perspective, a lot of those recommendations don’t make a lot of sense.

Instead, Zappos tries to unpack the customer's intent. So if they’re ordering shoes for a first date, instead of recommending a second pair of similar shoes, they might offer some snazzy accessories to suit the occasion.

Genov’s focus, according to the article, is figuring out how to replicate the quality of Zappos’ phone support on its digital channels, “particularly through mobile devices.” 🤔

The emoji philosopher

Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. A decorated soldier who wrote his own dictionary, he proclaimed to have solved humankind’s biggest philosophical quandaries by age 29.

He also may have invented one of the touchstones of modern life and messaging: the emoji.

Pompous and stately 🧐

According to Quartz, Wittgenstein emphasized the impact of pictorial over linguistic communication. In 1938, he wrote that he could convey “an innumerable number of expressions by four strokes:”

“Such words as ‘pompous’ and ‘stately’ could be expressed by faces,” said Wittgenstein. “Doing this, our descriptions would be much more flexible and various than they are as expressed by adjectives.”

Wittgenstein imagined people sketching their own drawings rather than using standardized icons like we find on our emoji keyboards today, the article notes.

But with emojis infusing our conversations with friends, family, colleagues and customers alike, I think it’s fair to say the philosopher was on to something.

WeChat goes West

If you want to do business in China, you better have a WeChat strategy. Equal parts chat app, digital wallet and web browser (not to mention national ID system), WeChat’s ubiquity in China has been well-documented.

But now WeChat is looking to extend its influence beyond the borders of mainland China.

WeChat, will travel 🗺

The Tencent-owned messaging app boasts around 1 billion users, second only to Facebook’s WhatsApp. But unlike WhatsApp’s global user base, WeChat’s is almost exclusively Chinese.

This week the company announced that instead of trying to make inroads into the Chinese diaspora, it would focus on a lower-hanging fruit: Chinese tourists in popular international destinations.

Chinese travellers spent roughly $115 billion outside China last year, according to the South China Morning Post. And WeChat isn’t the only company that wants their business.

China-ready 🇨🇳

Cities around the world are rolling out the red carpet.

In Canada last year, the cities of Montreal and Toronto forged partnerships with an investment group called OTT Financial to help bring WeChat Pay and its rival Chinese payment service, Alipay, to local businesses.

Now The Boston Globe reports that local businesses, from hotels to supermarkets to luxury retailers, are making it easier for Chinese tourists to pay with their homegrown apps.

The Boston tourist bureau hosted a “China-ready” conference in December and hopes to attract more Chinese tourists to the city, which already welcomes more than a quarter million Chinese visitors per year:

“We turn each of those Chinese visitors into salespeople for Boston when they’re back home on their phones and WeChat and social apps, talking about their experience. You are basically activating 262,000 salespeople.”

AI-powered chatbot outperforms human doctors

A London-based startup is claiming its chatbot is smarter than most med-school graduates.

The AI-powered chatbot achieved a score of 81% on a version of the final exam used to accredit doctors in the U.K., according to Babylon, the company behind it. The average grade for human doctors is 72%.

While some doctors are skeptical of Babylon’s results, the company is part of a larger movement to revolutionize healthcare through conversational technology.

A conversation a day… 🍏

In 1966, MIT launched one of the first chatbots ever. ELIZA was designed to simulate a psychotherapist and its creators hoped it could help doctors treat patients.

Since then, dozens of medically-inclined bots have been developed to do everything from remind us to take our pills, fight Crohn’s disease and help with breastfeeding.

In addition to the chatbot, Babylon’s app provides video consultations on demand with a network of 250 doctors who work for Babylon full time.

Babylon can also refer customers to visit its doctors at one of six clinics in London, but only 15% of patients see a doctor in person, according to a Forbes profile of Babylon’s colorful founder, Ali Parsa:

“In the same way Uber is building self-driving cars to replace drivers, he wants fewer people seeing doctors on video and more getting their problems resolved by Babylon’s clever chatbot.”

Bot me workin’ day and night ⏱

Many businesses turns to chatbots to save costs, but Britain’s National Health Service pays Babylon about $80 per patient per year, the same it pays a general practitioner.

However, roughly a third of video consultations happen outside of normal working hours. Babylon says many patients would visit a hospital emergency room instead, which costs the government $130 per visit.

Meanwhile, in North America, a startup called ProNavigator is helping insurance companies and brokers deploy chatbots to solve a similar business problem. Roughly 30% of inquiries and quote requests come in during evenings and weekends, when most offices are closed.

Embedding a chatbot on their websites and Facebook Messenger has helped some brokers and insurers generate 30% more leads, according to CEO Joseph D’Souza:

“Nobody wants to fill out a web form just to wait for someone to get back to them.”

Can a chatbot turn your salesforce and customer support team into a 24/7 operation? Check out my feature on ProNavigator and how it’s disrupting the insurance industry through chat.

After 20 years, Yahoo Messenger will shut down

When Oath, the holding company that owns what’s left of the digital pioneer, announced it would discontinue Yahoo Messenger, the internet erupted in a fit of nostalgia.

Alongside ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger — which Oath shuttered last year — Yahoo Messenger was one of the original chat apps of the late ‘90s and early ’00s. It helped spark countless teenage flirtations and popularized many messaging hallmarks, like emojis and stickers.

It’s also a relic of chat’s early days, which are officially coming to an end.

A tough nut to crack 🐿

Yahoo Messenger has been in decline for a while, lapped by mobile-first messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, along with workplace chat platforms like Slack.

Oath is funneling users toward Yahoo Squirrel, a group messaging app it previewed last month. This suggests it may be targeting the Slacks of the world more than the WhatsApps and WeChats.

It also shows Oath understands users today are squirrely about privacy. The key to Squirrel is that access is invite-only and doesn’t require users to share their contacts, as TechCrunch reports:

“That is a critical detail, given both Yahoo’s reputation in the wake of its massive data breach a couple of years ago; and the fact that some may now be turning off to just how much data messaging-dominant platforms like Facebook might have about you, starting with your contacts.”

The telcos strikes back? ☎️

Oath is owned by Verizon and “it’s the telcos of the world whose revenues have been cannibalized in part by over-the-top messaging services,” TechCrunch notes.

Indeed, the threat of OTTs encroaching on the $55 billion-plus A2P messaging market is a key reason many telcos are rallying around Google’s efforts to establish RCS as a new text messaging standard. This model involves charging businesses for sending stuff like receipts, notifications and alerts to customers, currently via SMS.

Yahoo Messenger has been on the brink for years, but those of us who came of age at the dawn of the IM era are pouring one out for the messaging wars’ latest casualty. 😢

Chatbots are dead. Long live chatbots.

Like the web, mobile apps and vinyl records, chatbots have been declared dead countless times only to prove very much alive (in that non-sentient way).

In April, Tech Republic blamed a lack of AI for why “basically no one uses chatbots.” Last week GrowthBot's Justin Lee singled out the “hype cycle” itself for inflating our expectations.

Meanwhile, The Information reports that bot development on Facebook Messenger is on the rise, and the Walmart-incubated Jetblack threatens to make chatbots mainstream.

But what if bots are still falling short because we’ve been keeping them in the dark?

Context will save the bots 🤖

Writing for The Next Web, Smooch CTO Mike Gozzo draws on his own family story to explain the importance of context in designing meaningful chatbot experiences for customers.

What if a bot was informed not only by what’s being said in real time, Mike asks, but what’s happening around it? Because “like body language, sometimes what hasn’t been said is just as crucial.”

If a bot had access to both conversation history and metadata it could tailor its responses accordingly and pass on the info to a human agent, CRM or other software:

“We need to think about every customer touchpoint across every channel as an opportunity to map out their identities to form a picture of who that person is and what they care about. This isn’t to sell them more stuff — it’s about helping them solve whatever problem or do whatever job they came to us to help them with.”

Check out Mike’s full piece in The Next Web.

Facebook Messenger remains the most popular chat app in the world with WhatsApp — which is expected to open its Business API to large enterprises — a close second.

But don’t forget that Facebook owns a third popular social chat app. Instagram is becoming the de facto way for people of a certain age to keep in touch, whether through sharing photos, video, or direct messaging. Naturally, that means businesses want in on the party.

Follow the green dot 💚

Instagram announced a new feature last week: a green dot that indicates when a user is active on the app. As Business Insider points out, the feature is Instagram’s latest effort to highlight the app’s messaging features.

Last month Instagram launched group video calls, allowing users to video chat with up to four users in direct message threads. Business Insider analyst Peter Sarnoff writes that Facebook’s aim is to make Instagram the “go-to-platform through which users communicate,” which will open the door to business messaging:

As users become accustomed to using Instagram as a communication tool, the app will likely begin adding business-to-consumer (B2C) services, a roadmap used for Messenger.

10X? Make that 100X! 💸

When Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, the internet groaned. The app had no revenue, no business model and it wasn’t clear if its hipster users would tolerate ads in their artfully-curated feeds. Now Instagram’s worth $100 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Over the past half-decade Instagram has become a marketing juggernaut for brands, spawning a new generation of social media “influencers” who are paid handsomely to endorse products. The app could account for 16% of Facebook’s revenue this year, according to Bloomberg, and exceed 2 billion users over the next five years.

As you know, Apple and Google are both entering the business messaging fray. A new cohort of brands just Apple Business Chat and T-Mobile started rolling out support for RCS, the next-generation texting standard backed by Google.

Now Facebook has the opportunity to add yet another contender to the mix.

At Smooch, we take security seriously. Thousands of businesses rely on our services to communicate safely and reliably with their customers. When it comes to quality of service, uptime, change management, and the protection of sensitive data, our customers have high expectations and we try to exceed them.

As part of our commitment to security, we’re excited to announce that we have officially achieved SOC 2 Type I compliance!

The journey to SOC 2

After considering other security certifications, we found that SOC 2 made the most sense for our business, our space and our customers. It covers our customers’ security due diligence, with the benefit of not drowning us in too much paperwork and processes.

We worked with one of the leading international auditing firms towards a SOC 2 Type I audit. The goal was to assess that we have all the controls in place to satisfy the selected “principles”, Security and Availability, and their underlying criteria.

It is not easy for a startup like Smooch to pull this off. It was crucial for us to avoid overwhelming the team with loads of new processes and tools, and slowing down product development.

The first step was to go through a gap assessment that was planned in Q4 of 2017. The outcome of this exercise was a long to-do list that covered various aspects of the company’s processes.

Then was time to get a variety of new processes in place and write new internal policies. The whole process can be quite cumbersome with a laundry list of items to track. But we found that it brought a lot of clarity to our internal processes, and was absolutely worth the investment for both our company and our customers.

What does SOC 2 cover?

In a nutshell, processes and systems are broken down into multiple categories, all of which are reviewed in-depth during the audit:

Organization and Management

Here we lay the foundation for areas of internal control, including integrity and ethical values and competence assessment, a well-communicated direction, organizational structure, and HR policies and practices, etc.

Risk management

The goal here is to establish the existence of a cross-functional risk assessment process to assess and manage risks that could affect the organization's ability to provide reliable services to its customers.

Monitoring of controls

Here is where we assess that we have the set of tools, reports, and processes to monitor the results of the various business processes. Regular reviews of the reports, logs and records must be done to ensure all exceptions are resolved.

Logical and physical access controls

Given all our infrastructure is based in the cloud, this part mostly covers whether we have sufficient processes to give internal access to our tools and services. Important aspects are the role-based security architecture and the tracking of all requests and changes. Every asset must have an assigned owner.

System Operations

This category covers all operational aspects of our platform, from intrusion detection systems (IDS), hardening, vulnerability scanning, monitoring of all critical components, alerting and escalation policies.

Change management

Change management is one of the most important and velocity-impacting parts of this process. We walked the auditors through all the steps for deploying a piece of software — or other changes — to production. They made sure we logged and approved all steps, have rollback plans, and assess the security, availability and overall risk of each change.

Availability

Last but not least, we demonstrated that we have a highly available architecture and that we have all the required processes in order to deploy, maintain, secure and, in case of a disaster, recover each one of them.

It's now official!

As of June 30 2018, Smooch has completed its SOC 2 Type I audit for the Security and Availability Trust Services Principles. This is the first step of a long journey towards achieving SOC 2 Type II, expected next year.

Many thanks and kudos to the team for adapting to all these new processes.
Our SOC 2 Type I report is available upon request. Do contact us for more information.

New in Smooch this month: Our new Smooch Sandbox for WhatsApp lets you test the integration today; new channel capabilities guides; we're now SOC 2 Type I compliant; a new data storage guide; updates to our APIs and SDKs & more!

What’s new 🎉

Smooch Sandbox for WhatsApp

As you know, production usage of the WhatsApp Business API is only available to a select few brands and customer service platforms for now. How can you get ready for WhatsApp the moment you receive approval? Try the Smooch Sandbox for WhatsApp and start testing the integration right away! Check out our step-by-step guide to activating the sandbox.

Save your seat for our free webinar! WhatsApp Business: Customer Engagement Game Changer

Join us and our friends at Sparkcentral for an insider’s look at WhatsApp Business for customer care and engagement, Thursday September 27. Learn why omnichannel business messaging is the next frontier of CX, what makes WhatsApp so different from other customer care channels (and how to best leverage it), why leading brands are investing in WhatsApp customer care, and the results they are already seeing! Register for the webinar here.

More channel capabilities guides

New channel capabilities guides are now available for iOS SDK, Android SDK, Twitter DM, Telegram, Viber, WeChat, LINE and Twilio SMS. Easily visualize all the different content types, actions, structured messages and indicators that are supported by each channel, as well as the support level (full support, partial support or not supported).

Smooch is now SOC 2 Type I compliant

It’s now official! As of June 30 2018, Smooch has completed its SOC 2 Type I audit for the Security and Availability Trust Services Principles. Learn more about Smooch’s ongoing commitment to security and privacy from our Head of Technical Operations & Security, Ignace Mouzannar in his latest blog post. Ignace provides insights into our strategy and processes for keeping your data private and secure. Read the blog.

Data storage at Smooch

Wondering what data Smooch stores and how we store it? Our new data storage guide takes you through how we do just that, and gives you all the relevant info on which APIs to use to delete apps, app users, conversations, messages and more.

New algorithm for anonymous user naming

At Smooch, we truly value your feedback which is why we’ve made an update to the logic we use to assign a name to a message when a user is anonymous. Many customers have told us that our randomly generated animal names were not appropriate for them. So long Fabulous Camel 🐫! Learn more about the new logic we use to determine the message author name in the absence of a user’s name here. You can also check out our Introduction to Users guide to read more about our different types of users. Note that we’ll soon release an update to the App settings API to allow you to keep using animal names if you prefer 🐵🐶🦊.

Other API & SDK updates ⚙

• Twitter DM update: We’ve added support for receiving typing events and read receipts.
• Android SDK: We’ve added support for apps targeting Android 9.0 (Pie) or higher. See our release notes for v5.14.0.
• File type validation: As of next month, the Smooch API will start detecting the type of file uploaded to the platform and will refuse files that are outside our whitelist. We've been closely monitoring file types uploaded to Smooch by both users and businesses to ensure we don't refuse legitimate files. Adding file type validation to the platform will help protect you and your users against potential viruses and harmful software.
• Web Messenger: v4.13.0 included a multitude of updates. We’ve added support for multiline user messages. You can now disable the notification prompt shown after a user's first message and we added a new API to allow you to show it at any time. Finally, we have a new API to prefill the user's chat input.

This is the latest in a series looking at how innovative brands and bot makers are using Smooch's omnichannel conversation platform to make the dream of business messaging into a reality.

Being a real estate agent is a bit like being a salesperson, a marketer and a customer support coach in one. While you spend your day with homeowners and buyers, you need to generate a steady flow of leads and convert them as fast as possible. All while being available nearly 24/7.

It’s a challenge one startup is helping Realtors solve with AI. Over the last two years, Iowa-based Structurely has developed a unique platform that aggregates leads from multiple sources and engages them through messaging — with a little help from an AI-powered chatbot and an omnichannel conversation platform called Smooch.

As a result, Realtors are converting more leads, growing their teams faster, and freeing themselves up to focus on the parts of their job that require a human touch.

Structurely built its chatbot using Smooch's web and mobile SDKs, and Facebook Messenger and SMS integrations. "I don't think we'd have a product without Smooch," says CEO Nate Joens.

The need for speed

Real estate is a competitive sport. As Structurely CEO Nate Joens points out, there are about 2 million real estate agents in the US, though only 5 million homes get sold every year.

"There’s a major 80-20 rule in real estate," says Joens, meaning 20% of agents are behind 80% of home sales.

Structurely was built for the 20% of agents who are generating more leads than they can handle. When they founded the company in 2015, Nate and his co-founder cold-called Realtors to ask them what their biggest challenge was.

Their answer, says Nate: "I hate following up with leads and I’m terrible at it." They weren’t just being humble. A 2013 report found that 45% of people who reach out on real estate websites never get a response, and that those who do wait an average of 15 hours.

Meanwhile, high-producing agents get an average of 25 leads per month, according to Nate, though on multi-agent teams that number can reach as high as 600-700 leads per month.

Structurely helps them sift through the noise and follow up with leads as quickly as possible. Since Nate’s team is stacked with experts in machine learning and natural language processing, they use AI to get the job done.

"It’s easy to throw a bunch of humans at the problem," says Nate. “But we didn’t just want to build another call center”

Meet Aisa Holmes

The Structurely platform consists of a lightweight CRM that manages leads and an AI-powered chatbot or "virtual sales assistant" called Aisa Holmes that engages and qualifies them through messaging. When leads land on an agent’s website or Facebook page, Aisa starts a conversation via web chat or Facebook Messenger.

Most leads, however, come in through online real estate aggregators like Zillow and Realtor.com — and more than 60 other lead sources that Structurely integrates with — and which real estate agents pay to fill their funnel. In these cases, Aisa typically follows up via SMS.

The chatbot is able to qualify leads based on a variety of questions, such as their timeframe to buy, their budget, whether they’re looking for financing, and their current address. This information is stored in the system under each lead’s user profile and can be used to nurture unresponsive leads over time.

Structurely has also built agent-facing apps for iOs, Android and the web. Their UI enables agents to monitor the bot’s conversations across any channel and take over when necessary. The system also leverages NLP to "listen" for key words and phrases that indicate when a conversation is going off the rails, and automatically bring a human agent into the loop.

Agents can mute the bot and jump into the conversation at any time.

With Aisa, Structurely is not just building another bot. The team has added very human elements to Aisa’s conversations such as empathy for divorcees and new parents, deliberate typos, and delays between messages — all to make the conversation feel indistinguishable from talking to a human.

"Buying or selling your home is a wildly emotional and stressful time in your life," says Nate. “So the last thing a buyer or seller wants to talk to is a computer.”

Structurely has taught its bought to respond with empathy.

A quicker path to growth

For high-producing brokers, Aisa Holmes — whose name stands for "Artificial Intelligence inside sales agent" — is an efficient way to scale their businesses without hiring a flesh-and-blood sales assistant, which can be costly.

"I think one of the reasons a human ISA doesn’t work is oversight," says Edric Williams, team lead and broker at RE/MAX Edge in Fayetteville, North Carolina. “With a human ISA you can lose sight of information through translation and the accountability is only as good as the system you’re using.”

Since "hiring" Aisa, Edric’s team’s lead volume has doubled and their conversions have increased 233%

Edric Williams

But this isn’t another case of "robots taking our jobs." By outsourcing lead generation and management to Structurely’s system, Edric has been able to bring three new real estate agents onto his team.

For Juhmad Hollis, a New Orleans-based Realtor, Aisa has proven to be a powerful recruiting tool.

"When I sit down with agents I let them know I have this system in place that will qualify your leads for you," says Juhmad, who has seen a 400% increase in lead volume since using Structurely and went from turning only 5% of leads into appointments to having Aisa book 15% of leads.

Juhmad Hollis

"A lot of leads may not be ready to buy right now but she lets me know that we are here to help," says Juhmad, who tellingly refers to the chatbot in the third person. “When I call a lead, it’s not a cold call, it’s a warm call,” he says.

For Edric, the RE/MAX agent, Structurely also brings peace of mind. He is in the National Guard and was recently deployed. But with Aisa Holmes on the front lines of his business, he knows his team is in good hands.

"I have never been more confident about leaving and coming back to an office that was more successful than when I left," he says.

Labor Day weekend is always bittersweet for me. On the one hand it’s generally my birthday weekend. 🎉

But at the same time I hate feeling like I’m celebrating the end of summer, especially considering that I live north of the 49th parallel!

Birthday aside, unlike a lot of parents I truly love the post Labor Day back to school week. What an opportunity kids have at the start of every school year to start fresh. Clean slate.

I like to take the opportunity to ask my kids what they are most proud of from the previous school year and then to consider what personal goals they would like to set for the coming year.

This year my daughter put the question back to me. Easy question to ask, harder to answer. But this year, I had just learned that the Canadian Innovation Exchange named Smooch to their Top 20 most innovative Canadian technology companies of 2018. I shared the news with my daughter who then asked why we were chosen. And so I reflected.

Our customers 💜

As Marc Andreessen famously said, "you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening." Last year was when we felt it and there is nothing I could be more proud of our team for achieving.

While we’ve had working product in market from day 1 of Smooch (which is a different story), only in the past year did we truly marry the right product with today’s market, and in came the most amazing customers we could have hoped for, building some of the most personal and personalized customer experiences on the market.

Here is a small selection of our new customers from the past year:

• Genesys - When the world’s #1 CX platform picks you to power the messaging in their cloud offer, you sit down with your product and engineering team and say, "You nailed it!"
• Betterment - The leading US robo-advisor platform went all human on us, leveraging Smooch for highly personalized 1:1 conversations with licensed financial advisors.
• YaloChat - This Mexico City-based enterprise chatbot provider is on 🔥! AeroMexico, Walmart, Coppel and other leading consumer brands rely on our good friends at Yalo for fully automated conversations on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, always with the option to hand-off to a live agent via our Front integration.
• Sparkcentral - This high-growth, messaging-centric social support platform powers rockstar brands like Slack, JetBlue and Delta. We in turn couldn’t be prouder to support Joe Gagnon and his team at Spark!
• Bird - Some new customers fly right out of the gates, but we’ve never had a customer fly like Bird! I guess that’s why they were the fastest startup ever to achieve 🦄 status. If you ever have a problem with your Bird, their awesome support team is just a chat away, right from the Bird app.
• Oracle - October 2017 saw Smooch being demoed live on stage at Oracle OpenWorld as part of their Intelligent Bot Platform launch. Special thanks to Suhas Uliyar, VP Bots, AI & Mobile, and his global team for their trust in Smooch.
• Zingle - A longtime leader in the hotel texting space, this year Zingle decided it was time to expand beyond SMS and we couldn’t have been more proud that they chose Smooch for their IP messaging stack.
• Lithium - On the heels of being acquired by Vista Equity Partners, this 17-year-old community and social media management juggernaut is still going strong and we’re humbled to be a part of their secure messaging solution. Congrats to the team on their recent merger with Spredfast!
• Infobip - If a global communications platform leader like Infobip picked you for their own IP messaging solution, you’d blush too!
• LiveChat - This global chat leader is trusted by over 25,000 businesses in 150 countries and we’re honored to be trusted by them to power their chat app support.
• Clarabridge - Their mission is to help businesses win the hearts of customers, and they won ours when they selected us to power messaging within their CX Social product.

All the channels

Going back as far as 2014 my co-founders and I were inspired by the rise of B2C messaging in Asia via WeChat, Line and Kakao Talk.

The Asian market dynamics were a foundational driver of our decision to start Smooch and we believed the trend would expand globally in no time.

Woops, wrong.

We had to wait until 2016 for Facebook Messenger to open up, but in 2017-2018 the messaging heavens opened up with the soft launches of RCS, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp Business API and Google My Business Messaging.

One of our core brand promises has always been that once you are integrated with Smooch you are connected to ALL THE CHANNELS, and I am happy to say we’ve kept our promise!

We integrated Apple Business Chat for multiple early access partners. We demoed our RCS integration with Google and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We are an official WhatsApp Business Solution provider and are already powering WhatsApp integrations for Zendesk, SparkCentral, Lithium, Clarabridge, and Four Seasons.

As with the Google Jibe team for RCS, we are working closely with Google as we wait for the launch of their GMB Messaging API.

Beyond channels - features, insights, scalability and security

We’ve always had plenty of product roadmap that we imagined up on our own, but with a slew of new customers came awesome new product input and feedback.

Here is a highlight reel of of what we’ve delivered over the past year:

• Agent.ai integration - send all your messaging in Agent.ai’s AI powered helpdesk
• Complete refactoring of our Web and In-app Messaging SDKs
• iPhone X support
• Conversation Extensions - bringing full web experiences to any chat or messaging app
• Channel transfers - where context follows the user across channels, enabling true omnichannel experiences
• State of Messaging report - everything you needed to know about messaging developments in 2017, including insights from 17 messaging leaders from brands like Slack, Drift, Aspect, Greylock and Uber.
• Smooch for Bots - a tailored solution just for bot makers
• Botanalytics integration - bringing the top conversation analytics solution to all of your Smooch messaging
• Carousel support in our SDKs and for Viber
• GDPR Compliance and EU Hosting
• We produced a flashy rich messaging capability guide for our Web messenger - and it was so popular we are rolling one out for ALL THE CHANNELS! eg check out the Facebook Guide
• A super cool sandbox for testing out WhatsApp in your software!
• We recently announced the first major milestone on our path to SOC 2 Type II Certification
• We launched The Message - our new newsletter by the one and only @danjl. If you haven’t been reading, you’ve been missing out on this much-recommended read. Subscribe now. You won’t regret it.

Team & culture

Last but not least, we’ve continued to grow our team and make Smooch an awesome place to work. Some highlights from last year included our summer beach party, our quarterly hackathons, archery dodgeball (which is surprisingly exhausing) and, of course, karaoke.

Oh, and we added 15 new and talented Smoochies in the past 12 months:

Looking ahead…

So my daughter was pretty impressed with my recap of our prior School Work Year, but not so impressed that she failed to ask: So what are you going to do this year?!?!

My answer: If we could do the same all over again I’d be very proud, but the truth is we have a lot more planned. She got the full download, but is under strict NDA, so you’ll just have to wait. Stay up to date by watching this space and following us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

New in Smooch this month: File type validation to help protect against harmful software; a new guide to help you use metadata to personalize conversations further; ICYMI our WhatsApp webinar recording; customer spotlight on Structurely; small updates to APIs; and oh yeah — we won an award!

What’s new 🎉

Safely send & receive files with file type validation

In order to protect you and your users against potential harmful software, the Smooch API now detects what types of files are uploaded by businesses and users and refuses files that are not on our whitelist. We’ve been closely monitoring file uploads for over a month to ensure legitimate files won’t be refused. If one of your files gets rejected when it shouldn't have, please get in touch with our Support team and we’ll update our whitelist. Learn more about our file validation logic in our new guide where we cover file types accepted, the rules for rejecting files and what happens when a file is rejected.

Personalize conversations based on context with metadata

What if a live agent or bot knew a user was one step away from checkout with a loaded shopping cart? Or that they recently complained about a product experience? Smooch gives you the tools to surface up proprietary behavioral and transactional data during a live customer interaction to help deliver a more personal experience.

Adding metadata to a user’s profile, to an action they took or to the message they sent and making it available in the agent’s UI can help answer questions faster, close more sales and provide an overall better customer experience.

For instance, you could provide information to the agent or bot about what page a user is on while they chat with the business, what’s in their shopping cart, how much they’ve spent over time, if they are part of a VIP or loyalty program, what their last purchase was and the date that it was made, the last time they visited the website or mobile app, what pricing plan they are on, etc. You can surface up this information in real time and as it changes throughout the conversation.

Learn about the custom properties that can be added to user profiles and check out our new Using Metadata guide that shows you how to leverage this information in your software. Note that our Web SDK 4.14.0 has just been updated to be able to attach metadata before the message leaves the SDK to reach the Smooch platform which will ensure updated metadata is available when the business receives the message.

Missed our WhatsApp webinar? Watch the recording!

Last week we teamed up with our friends at Sparkcentral and KBC Bank for an insider’s look at how to use WhatsApp Business for customer care and engagement. Our CEO, Warren Levitan, covered why omnichannel business messaging is the next frontier of CX and what makes WhatsApp a perfect channel for business communications. Sparkcentral shared some great insights and benchmark stats about how to forecast messaging volume and best use cases for messaging. Meanwhile, KBC Bank talked about their experience rolling out WhatsApp to their customers, how they scaled their program, trained their staff and their learnings so far.

If you weren’t able to attend the webinar, here’s the recording.

Customer spotlight 🌟 Structurely

Over the last two years, Iowa-based Structurely has developed a lightweight CRM for real estate agents that aggregates leads from multiple sources like Zillow and Realtor.com and engages them through messaging — with a little help from an AI-powered chatbot and Smooch.

In a world where top real estate teams can receive up to 600-700 leads per month, Structurely’s chatbot sorts through the noise and qualifies buyers and sellers for Realtors. Information on each lead gets stored in the platform which can later be used to nurture unresponsive leads over time. Realtors are able to monitor the bot’s conversations across any channel and take over when necessary thanks to Structurely’s agent-facing apps. Their platform also leverages NLP to listen for key words and phrases that indicate when a conversation is going off the rails, and automatically bring a human agent into the loop.

As a result, Realtors are converting more leads, growing their teams faster, and freeing themselves up to focus on the parts of their job that require a human touch. Check out how Structurely is changing the game for the real estate industry.

Industry news 📰

Smooch named CIX Top 20 company

We are proud to have recently been named Top 20 most innovative Canadian technology companies of 2018 by the Canadian Innovation Exchange. For our CEO Warren Levitan, this was the perfect occasion to reflect on the past year and to highlight the capabilities we have added to our platform, the new channels that we have made available to you and some of our customers who have been doing amazing things with Smooch. His blog post is a handy recap of our major releases and a good way to make sure you’re fully in the loop with what’s new at Smooch.

Other API & SDK updates ⚙

• Node.js API library: We shipped a new update to our Node.js API library with new function signatures for appUsers.create and appUsers.update.
• Anonymous user naming: Last month we changed the logic we use to assign a name to anonymous users and stopped using auto-generated animal names for them. However, if you’d still like to use animal names, we’ve updated our App API with a new useAnimalNames setting.

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.

When WhatsApp unveiled its new enterprise API last week, most tech reporters concluded Facebook was getting serious about monetizing the chat app it purchased for $19 billion in 2014.

They’re probably right about the money, but wrong about where it’s most likely to come from.
No reply for you! ?

TechCrunch’s Josh Constine was first out of the gate with a hot take under the headline “WhatsApp Finally Earns Money by Charging Businesses for Slow Replies.”

Constine explains that WhatsApp will let businesses respond to messages from users for free for up to 24 hours, but charge them to continue the conversation once that window closes.

From there, he jumps to an interesting conclusion:

If users get quick answers via WhatsApp, they’ll prefer it to other channels. Once businesses and their customers get addicted to it, WhatsApp could eventually charge for all replies or any that exceed a volume threshold, or cut down the free window.

You down with A2P? ?

As Constine notes, the API will also allow businesses to “programatically” send notifications like receipts, tickets and shipping confirmations to customers who have opted in.
While charging businesses to reactive conversations may prove to be a significant revenue stream, these automated notifications — known as application-to-person or A2P messages — are the real backbone of WhatsApp’s monetization strategy.

The A2P SMS market is expected to reach $70 billion by 2020 and it’s precisely this pie that Facebook wants a piece of.

As I’ve reported at length, WhatsApp’s interest in A2P messaging is a major reason telcos have allied with Google in its campaign for global adoption of RCS, the next generation text messaging standard.

RCS is intended to bring text messaging into the 21st century and boasts many of the same features (rich message types, branded business profiles) as WhatsApp Business and Apple Business Chat, Google’s other mobile messaging rival.

Global telcos have already lost the lion’s share of consumer messaging traffic to chat apps; they’re not going to relinquish the business messaging space without a fight.

Advertising an ad-free zone ?

WhatsApp is different from other major chat apps for two key reasons. First, it’s encrypted end-to-end. Just this week, Facebook faced a backlash when the Wall Street Journal (paywall) reported it was asking banks to share customers’ financial information.

While the report was likely blown out of proportion, it’s clear that in a post-Cambridge Analytica world, people remain wary of Facebook’s commitment to privacy.

Because WhatsApp is encrypted end-to-end, messages can't be intercepted and read by any third parties, including Facebook. That means businesses can trust it to keep their conversations with users safe and secure.

Second, WhatsApp is continuing to shield its 1.5 billion global users from ads and promotional messages. Unlike Facebook or email, the WhatsApp inbox is a pristine space, reserved for messages from friends and family.

That’s why the prospect of messaging customers on WhatsApp is so appealing to businesses. It’s also why WhatsApp is keeping a tight grip on what types of messages brands can send, and to whom.

But here’s the thing. When it announced the Business API on its blog, WhatsApp also revealed that businesses will be able to add click-to-message buttons to Facebook ads that prompt users to initiate conversations on WhatsApp.

By owning both a major channel of discovery and the leading channel of engagement, Facebook can have its pie and eat it too.

Early access, early days ?

WhatsApp’s Business API is still in early access, but we’re starting to see some interesting use cases from around the world. In Brazil, journalists are using the API to combat the viral — and sometimes deadly — spread of misinformation on the chat app.

Writing for No Jitter, Smooch CEO Warren Levitan explains what large businesses need to figure out before they get the green light from WhatsApp:

As it turns out, the very same attributes that make the channel so valuable for users make it far more complex for businesses to adopt and maintain than any other messaging channel.

Last week Twilio announced it was expanding its communications platform beyond voice and text messaging by snapping up email delivery specialists SendGrid.

The $2 billion all-stock deal, which is expected to close next year, comes in the run-up to Twilio’s annual developer conference and represents the company’s biggest acquisition to date.

It also signals that email — which has been pronounced dead as often as the web itself — is still very much alive.

Aren’t you the messaging people?

You may be surprised to see me tip my hat to a channel apart from messaging — but then again, this is an email newsletter.

People will send and receive 281 billion emails per day in 2018, according to the latest email statistics report, and that includes teenagers.

It’s no surprise that email remains the dominant digital marketing channel, but
marketing emails make up only a portion of those we receive from businesses every day.

Far more ubiquitous are what’s known as “transactional emails” — shipping updates, password resets, boarding passes, receipts and other boring but vital notifications.

These are the emails SendGrid specializes in getting delivered.

The new inbox

Of course, these kinds of notifications aren’t just sent via email anymore. As I’ve noted before, the A2P SMS market is a $70 billion industry. A2P stands for “application to person” because these messages are sent programmatically from a business’ notification system, as opposed to a human agent or chatbot.

With the recently-released WhatsApp Business API, Facebook is looking to take a slice of the A2P messaging pie away from SMS and the telcos who profit off it.

This in turn has led global telcos to join forces with Google in its campaign to make RCS (Rich Communication Services) the new text messaging standard and heir apparent to SMS (which stands for Short Message Service).

The theory is that if they can offer a more modern messaging experience through RCS, businesses and consumers will be less likely to choose third-party messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Apple Business Chat (which is linked to iMessage) for their business messaging needs.

Assuming that ship hasn’t already sailed.

No more noreply

There’s one major difference between business notifications sent via email or SMS and those sent via WhatsApp.

When a business emails or texts a boarding pass, for example, no one is going to respond to that automated and anonymous message. But because notifications sent on WhatsApp will come from a verified business identity they know and trust, users will have a natural tendency to reply.

Indeed, if the user has already interacted with the business over chat, it will appear in the very same conversation thread. Question is, will businesses have the context and tools they need to respond?

In the business messaging world, a notification is no longer just a notification — it's an invitation to an ongoing conversation with customers. They better be ready when customers accept the invite.