Everybody loves messaging. It’s personal, it’s convenient, it’s a great way to keep in touch with the people we care about without having to — cringe— pick up the phone.

Advertising? Not so much. So how will consumers feel when marketers invade their sacred inboxes and start imploring them to “join the conversation”? We may be about to find out.

AdLingo was its name-o 🐶

A Google-incubated startup called AdLingo has launched a platform that allows advertisers to embed a conversational assistant within display ads.

AdLingo has been in development for two years within Google’s Area 120 incubator and, as VentureBeat reports, “essentially builds a Facebook Messenger-like experience within traditional web and mobile ad units.”

Clicking a Conversational Display Ad triggers a chatbot flow, which brands can build using a variety of tools, including Microsoft Bot Framework, LiveEngage, Blip, and Google’s own Dialogflow.

AdLingo is partnering with LivePerson to help brands manage conversations using a combination of humans and AI, and with digital marketing agency Valassis, whose VP of Strategy claims AdLingo’s conversational ads are 10 times more efficient than Facebook news feed ads:

"The conversation happens right there on the page."

Don Draper would be proud 🥃

AdLingo’s cofounder, Vic Fatnani, says the company is focused on solving a very specific problem for brands and software makers — discovery.

As more brands get on board with chatbots and business messaging platforms like Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp Business and Google My Business, they’ll be looking for ways to bring their conversational experiences to the masses.

For Fatnani, the solution is old fashioned (digital) advertising:

"People were building these amazing AI experiences, but no one was using them... We thought: ‘[What] if we combine the new school and the old school together?' "

Show me the money 🤑

If AdLingo’s bringing conversation to the people through advertising, WhatsApp’s challenge is how to bring advertising to the conversation without alienating its 1.5 billion people.

This week Himanshu Gupta, a former marketer at Chinese messaging juggernaut WeChat, published an in-depth piece in Factor Daily about WhatsApp’s advertising strategy and what it means for its parent company, Facebook.

Gupta outlines three ways Facebook intends to monetize the app it purchased for $19 billion in 2014, and whose founders swore would never contain ads.

The first is via WhatsApp Status, the Snapchat/Instagram Stories-like feature it launched last year. Because Status is a public feed as opposed to a private conversation, Gupta suggests running ads there won’t feel like an intrusion.

Indeed, the Status/Stories feature is growing in popularity across all Facebook apps (including Instagram) and may eventually eclipse the news feed in terms of engagement. The question is whether it will prove as attractive to advertisers, and as lucrative to Facebook.

WhatsApp’s second revenue stream is tied to its Business API, which I’ve written about extensively since it launched with limited availability in August.

Unlike Facebook Messenger, where a user needs to initiate the conversation, WhatsApp is allowing businesses to proactively send transactional messages to customers, such as receipts, boarding passes and shipping notifications.

As Gupta reports, WhatsApp is charging businesses a premium for these messages compared to SMS (as much as 7x), though delivery rates are also much higher.

For now, WhatsApp is maintaining a tight grip on what kinds of messages can be sent and which businesses can send them, though Gupta wonders whether the platform can ensure users’ inboxes remain spam-free once the floodgates open next year.

That brings us to the third WhatsApp advertising opp Facebook revealed in August. The company has started selling ads on Facebook and Instagram that prompt customers to message a business on WhatsApp.

Gupta likes how this approach relies on customers to initiate the conversation, but wonders if Facebook will end up cannibalizing its future ad revenue once businesses have a direct channel to the customer.

Proceed with caution ⚠️

No matter which tactics gain traction for WhatsApp in the short term, none will be successful if users’ inboxes become minefields of marketing spam.

The good news is that advertisers seem to get this. Marketing Land interviewed a handful of digital marketing professionals about their plans for WhatsApp.

Though they clearly appreciate the channel’s extraordinary reach, many, including the CMO of a company that specializes in digital ad retargeting, sounded a note of caution for brands:

"They will need to make sure they don’t contaminate the experience with ads that make users feel like someone uninvited has invaded their private conversations."

Everybody loves messaging. Let’s make sure to keep it that way.

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.

Black Friday/Cyber Monday/binge-shopping week has come and gone and, according to LivePerson, customers messaged with brands 97% more than they did last year.

Yet amid the growing buzz around conversational commerce, the season's most-celebrated chat experience so far was published by a 167-year-old newspaper.

And the only thing it's selling is family harmony.

Say uncle 👴

In the run-up to American Thanksgiving, The New York Times ran an opinion piece by a former psychiatrist under the headline, “How to Have a Conversation with Your Angry Uncle Over the Holidays.”

The piece is essentially a web-based chatbot that asks a series of multiple choice questions designed to teach you how to have constructive conversations with opinionated relatives you disagree with politically:

In addition to being a great conversation starter (literally), the bot is a prime example of how conversational interfaces can be used to educate, inform and persuade.

While a traditional op-ed may have come off as preachy — or worse, passed by unnoticed — the Angry Uncle bot went viral. And maybe even opened some minds in the process.

Charlie’s angel investors 💸

Another bot making headlines — and dispensing free advice — this week is Charlie, an AI-enabled personal finance chatbot that just raised a $9 million Series A.

As Crowfund Insider reports, Charlie is designed to help people “save more, cut bills, take control of debt, and avoid fees.” It currently boasts around 250,000 users who interact with the bot over SMS and Facebook Messenger.

What makes Charlie different from most fintech startups is its demographics, which skew female, millennial and middle class. Charlie users are 80% women, with an average age of 27. Their most-frequented retailer? McDonald’s.

Charlie’s co-founder and CEO, Ilian Georgiev, says the company’s mission is to bring “empathy and simplicity” to the world of finance. Besides, as one investor points out:

"Affluent men already have enough access to financial services."

Is Google gaining ground in the business messaging wars?

A couple months ago I noted that Google had quietly launched a messaging service within its almighty search engine that threatened to derail Apple’s own business chat ambitions.

Well, it seems the cat is out of the bag.

Google my business chat 🔍

AdWeek reports that Google has overhauled its Google My Business app, enabling small businesses to message customers directly from the platform.

Back in July, Google quietly gave businesses the ability to add chat to their Google business profiles. This allowed customers searching on mobile to start a conversation with them, much like how they would initiate a phone call:

Previously, businesses had to use their own devices’ messaging platforms to respond to customer inquiries. Google is rolling out the business app worldwide, while also adding the “message” button to business profiles in Google Maps on both Android and iOs.

As Google suggests in its announcement, Maps is a pretty intuitive place for customers to discover and connect with local businesses:

"With these messages in Maps, you’ll never have to worry about accidentally sending 'I love you, Mom' to that shoe store you’ve been sending messages to."

RC-yes!

Meanwhile, Google’s other business messaging play appears to be gaining momentum.

The Verge reports that Verizon will launch support for RCS messaging in “early 2019,” according to its SVP of consumer products.

RCS, of course, is the heir apparent to SMS, bringing group chats, read receipts, typing indicators, branded business profiles and other modern messaging features to old fashioned texting.

Google intends to make RCS the backbone of its native Chat app (Android's answer to Apple’s Messages), but needs device manufacturers and global telcos to support the new standard.

Verizon was one of the last major holdouts in the U.S., so this is a good sign for long-suffering RCS enthusiasts.

A recent report predicts that more than 1 billion people across 168 global carriers will use RCS every month by the end of 2019, and that brands will spend more than $18 billion messaging consumers over the channel by 2023.

As Android Police opines in a story about the Verizon news it seems business messaging may have been the kick in the pants Google and its partners needed to finally make RCS a thing:

"I think we can all be thankful that something has spurred the carrier to improve the current state of messaging." 

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.

New in Smooch this month: Lots of new stuff for Web Messenger. You can now filter and transform messages before they are displayed in the conversation; we’ve added a new configuration option to automatically open Conversation Extensions; and we’ve got the gossip on what’s to come for 2019. We’ve also made it way easier for you to connect your Smooch app to your WhatsApp API client via the dashboard, and have made a few other tweaks to our APIs.

What’s new 🎉

A bunch of Web Messenger updates

Many improvements have been made to our Web SDK this month. Here are the key ones.

Filtering and transforming messages

It is now possible to run code in the browser to conditionally hide or modify messages before they are sent to the business, or before they are displayed to the user in the conversation using the new beforeSend and beforeDisplay delegates. For example, using the beforeSend delegate, user messages can be transformed to pass additional metadata to the business. A common use case would be to add the URL of the page the user is visiting while messaging with a business. Armed with this information, the human agent or bot engaged in the conversation now has even more context to help their customer. One use case for the beforeDisplay delegate can be to hide messages from the user's view, so that Smooch can be used to communicate system or status messages to the browser without polluting the user's conversation history.

Better still, with these new delegate methods, you can implement your own creepy “monkey loves you” stored consciousness doll from that episode of Black Mirror. 😜

Check out our new guide to learn more and read the v4.15.0 release notes here, which also include some bug fixes. On the same topic, v4.16.0 includes a new beforePostbackSend delegate that allows you to add metadata before a postback is sent.

Automatically open Conversation Extensions

A year ago, we launched Conversation Extensions to help you create custom interactive experiences that sit on top of the chat window on any messaging channel. 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. This feature allows multi-step tasks to be carried out seamlessly through an intuitive workflow, enhancing the experience for the user.

This month, we’ve added a new configuration option that lets you automatically open Conversation Extensions in Web Messenger. For example, at the end of a conversation with a user, a business could send a CSAT survey and have it automatically open to increase their response rate. Simply set the openOnReceive property on Webview Actions and Web Messenger will open the extension when the message is received. Read the release notes to learn more and check out our mini-guide to building a custom CSAT survey with Conversation Extensions.

2019 Web Messenger 5.0 Sneak Peek 👀

Great things are brewing at Smooch in regards to Web Messenger. Our Product, Design and Engineering teams are actively working on the next major release and many of you have been involved in the conversation to help us make this update a killer one. We can’t spill the beans just yet, but here are some big themes that we are exploring: better ways to capture data from users (think capturing name or email before the conversation starts); making chat more prominent on the page by proactively engaging users; more configuration options to customize the UI; and a refreshed look in line with the top messengers on the market. Stay tuned for more in 2019!

Other API & SDK updates ⚙

• AppUser Events: Further to the App User deletion feature we released earlier this year, we added an appUser:delete webhook that enables you to know when an appUser is deleted through the Delete App User API.
• WhatsApp user names: Messages from WhatsApp now populate a user’s givenName and surname from their WhatsApp profile when available. We also put the raw profile info into the WhatsApp client’s raw field.
• Dashboard update: We’ve made it easier for you to connect your WhatsApp API client (hosted by Smooch or yourself) to your Smooch app directly from the dashboard without having to make any calls to our API.

The holiday season has arrived in a flurry of flash sales, best-of-the-year lists and questionable Christmas-themed comeback albums (I’m looking at you, Eric Clapton).

On the darker side of the communications landscape, consumers also tend to report a surge in telephone scams during these festive weeks, according to The New York Times. The targets tend to be older people who are more easily confused and more likely to rely on the phone to keep in touch.

Despite the rise of messaging and the so-called death of the landline, phone-based frauds are increasing. A recent study found the number of fraudulent calls in 2018 had risen to 30 percent of all calls, up from 4 percent last year.

What’s more, nearly 70 percent of frauds reported to the FTC were perpetrated over the phone, compared to just 9 percent involving email, the Times reports.

The result?

"Fewer people are answering their phones."

A conversational newsletter by
Smooch.io

The holiday season has arrived in a flurry of flash sales, best-of-the-year lists and questionable Christmas-themed comeback albums (I’m looking at you, Eric Clapton).

On the darker side of the communications landscape, consumers also tend to report a surge in telephone scams during these festive weeks, according to The New York Times. The targets tend to be older people who are more easily confused and more likely to rely on the phone to keep in touch.

Despite the rise of messaging and the so-called death of the landline, phone-based frauds are increasing. A recent study found the number of fraudulent calls in 2018 had risen to 30 percent of all calls, up from 4 percent last year.

What’s more, nearly 70 percent of frauds reported to the FTC were perpetrated over the phone, compared to just 9 percent involving email, the Times reports.

The result?

"Fewer people are answering their phones."

No phone, who dis? 🤨

The death of the home telephone has been anticipated for years, of course. Now it looks like the office desk phone may have reached the end of the line.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the demise of those clunky, complicated desk phones with the “curly cord” that nobody seems to know how to use.

According to the Journal, even traditional firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers have been phasing out their desk phones, encouraging employees to rely on their company-issued cell phones instead.

But in offices where desk phones are still mandated, they’ve become a nuisance, as one employee laments:
"I was told to make an appointment with IT to get a training on it, but I just don’t have time for that."

Messaging apps, meanwhile, have become part of the office furniture. Computerworld reports that WhatsApp is the most widely-used mobile messaging app in U.K. workplaces, more prevalent than the mobile versions of actual workplace chat platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Given concerns about data privacy and the “wild west” nature of consumer chat apps — a recent study found that 20% of workers across the U.K. have been bullied by colleagues via messaging — companies are grappling with whether to ban them from the office outright, or embrace the channels people are already using to organize after-work drinks.

Voice of a generation 🙊

While picking up the phone may feel like a relic, communicating via voice will never get old.

As we’ve discussed before, sending short voice memos back and forth over chat is the messaging norm in China. More than 6 billion voice messages were sent over WeChat alone last year, according to the Chinese messaging giant.

The Guardian reports that voice messaging is now “having a moment” in the west as well. But as the piece points out, proper voice messaging etiquette has yet to be established.

Is it weird to "speak" them in public? How do you know if a message you receive is urgent enough to play aloud in the subway? As one critic contends:

" It’s very easy for the person sending... just done in a way that makes it much less convenient for the person receiving the message."

Call your mother 🤗

As convenient as visual and text-based conversational interfaces are, sometimes there’s no substitute for the human voice.

In a recent episode of the podcast Invisibilia, comedian Cord Jefferson shares a story about his mother, and how he still cherishes a mundane voice message — the old “leave a message at the beep” kind — she left him shortly before her death.

Jefferson explains that his sentimentality is supported by science. In a well-known study a group of girls was asked to take a stressful test and then contact their mothers for moral support. One group called their moms on the phone, while the other checked in via text message.

When they examined blood samples drawn before and after, researchers discovered that the girls who spoke to their moms on the phone had far lower levels of stress hormones and higher levels of oxytocin, a calming hormone. The girls who had simply messaged their moms demonstrated no hormonal change at all. As Jefferson puts it:

"It wasn’t the soothing words they wanted, it was the soothing voice."

In an omnichannel world, every conversation has its channel. That's as true in life as it is in business.

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.

To kick off 2019, we asked 34 senior product and CX professionals about the current state of conversational business and technology.

Our second annual State of Messaging report is packed with original infographics and exclusive insights from execs at software companies including Drift, Intercom, Google, HubSpot and Genesys, and brands like Uber, Jetblack, SnapTravel and LVMH.

You’ll learn about emerging business messaging channels like WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat and RCS and get the latest stats on chatbots, voice assistants and conversational commerce.

Check it out now:

The team behind the report:

• Faustine Gheno, Designer
• Scott Morin, Developer
• Dan Levy, Author

Huge thanks to all the experts quoted in the report and to Kevin Gauthier, Alexandra McKay, Warren Levitan, Mike Gozzo, Pascal Pettinicchio, Jesse Martin, Josh Stanbury and the rest of the Smooch team for their contributions, outreach and feedback.

The New York Times broke the news last week that Facebook plans to unify the pipes of its three massively-popular messaging apps.

As the Times and other news outlets were quick to point out, the technical merger raises a myriad of questions about privacy, security, and government regulation. It also suggests that when it comes to staving off its messaging rivals, Facebook sees strength in numbers.

WhatsApp me on Instagram 📲

Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram boast 2.6 billion users between them. They will continue to exist as separate apps, but Facebook’s integration plan will make it possible for users to communicate with each other across all three channels.

It’s not yet clear what this means from a data privacy perspective. Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly “ordered” that all three apps incorporate end-to-end encryption, which only WhatsApp can claim at the moment.

Moreover, WhatsApp lets users sign up with only a phone number, while Facebook (and, by extension, Messenger) requires users to use a single “real-world” identity. Many Instagram users, meanwhile, have multiple accounts for different purposes.

Legislators were quick to raise alarm bells, with EU regulators seeking “early assurances” that the merger will be GDPR-compliant and U.S. Senator Ed Markey, a longtime Facebook critic, waxing poetic:

"We cannot allow platform integration to become privacy disintegration."

All in the family 👩‍👦‍👦

Axios notes that “Facebook’s integration plan is all about improving interoperability among its own 'family of apps.'"

Zuckerberg has called Apple Facebook’s biggest competitor in the messaging space, and bundling his messaging platforms together into one giant user base is a way to challenge iMessage’s ubiquity among iPhone users.

Apple, meanwhile, has been under increased pressure to bring iMessage to Android phones — and is reportedly “in discussions” to support RCS, the next generation text messaging standard backed by Google.

Of course, Google and Apple have their own beef over the future of business messaging, which you can read all about in my latest article for The Next Web.

But if any common enemy could unite these Big Tech rivals, it’s Facebook. That may be what’s prompted Zuckerberg to create a massive messaging ecosystem all his own.

As Smooch CTO Mike Gozzo told AdWeek:

"It’s a big threat to Facebook and other messaging apps. This combination gives them a very viable shot to compete."

New year, new messaging apps

Have you heard of TikTok? I must admit I hadn’t until a millennial colleague put me in my place.

Turns out the Vine-like video-sharing app has 500 million active users around the world, and recently unveiled a messaging-oriented spinoff.

Tech in Asia reports that the new app is called Duashon and looks a whole lot like Snapchat. It’s currently focused on China, where TikTok is based, prompting the usual speculation about whether it can lure young users from WeChat, the Tencent-owned app that dominates the Chinese messaging market.

Squad goals 🙌

TikTok, though, is so 2018. The newest messaging app on the block is called Squad, and it’s being billed as “the next teen sensation.”

Squad allows users to video chat with up to six people while sharing screens, so they can scroll Instagram, swipe through Tinder, or do whatever one might do on their mobile phone — together.

TechCrunch’s Josh Constine predicts that Squad may become a digital “third place” where teen girls can hang out outside school or each other’s homes, just as the viral online game Fortnite has become for adolescent boys.

Squad CEO Esther Crawford says Facebook and Snap employees have signed up in droves, presumably to spy on and copy the startup’s features. So it may not be long before this type of distracted hangout is as routine a part of the modern messaging experience as typing indicators.

Constine suggests that may not be a bad thing:

"A few people, alone in their houses, video chatting without looking at each other, still feel a sense of togetherness."

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.

New in Smooch this month: Our State of Messaging 2019 report is out; we’ve launched a new status page that will allow you to more easily track Smooch’s current status and past incidents; an update to our Android SDK; changes around how integrations are surfaced in the API; a small tweak to our WhatsApp integration; and a roundup of recent news articles featuring Smooch and our customers.

What’s new 🎉

State of Messaging 2019

In case you missed it (how could you?!) our State of Messaging 2019 report is out. We talked to 34 CX experts from companies like Google, Drift, Intercom, Uber, Jetblack and LVMH about messaging, conversational commerce, voice assistants, and so much more. The report is filled with stats, facts, quotes, infographics, and original insights from our team. You don’t want to miss it. Check it out here.

The expert insight doesn't stop in our yearly reports. We're always covering emerging conversations about the messaging sphere in our biweekly newsletter. Sign up for The Message here.

A New Status Page

We’ve just launched our brand new status page so you can easily keep track of Smooch’s current status, historical updates and past incidents. We’ve switched over to statuspage.io which enables us to give you more ways to get updates on Smooch's health (opt to subscribe by email, SMS, webhook or feeds). Real-time updates are now easier to get and will help you meet your own commitments to your customers and your own SLAs.

If you’re already using statuspage.io for your own status page, you can even add Smooch as a component directly in your page to give real-time updates to your users (check out this handy how-to guide).

We’ll be running both versions of our status page in parallel (old one vs new one from February 5 to March 5, 2019. If you’ve built any custom processes to consume the RSS or Atom feeds of our existing status page, please make sure to adapt to the new status page before March 5, 2019.

Other API & SDK Updates ⚙

• Android SDK: v5.16.0 includes several updates. Amongst those, a Google Maps API Key is now required to render location messages with a maps preview otherwise they are rendered as text messages. This change is due to Google’s requirement to provide an API key to use the Static Maps API. To set your API key, use Settings#setMapsApiKey(String) before calling Smooch.init(Application, Settings, SmoochCallback). Read our Android SDK release notes for the full list of updates.
• WhatsApp: WhatsApp Business Profile information can now be retrieved via the Smooch API.
• Integration API: We’ve made a series of changes around how integrations are surfaced in the API, exposing integrationId in more webhook events and API responses. See the full list of changes in our changelog.

Messaging News & Insights 🤓

Marketing Tech Awards 2019 - Vote for Smooch!

Hosted by ClickZ and Search Engine Watch, the Marketing Technology Awards celebrate innovation at the forefront of the industry. Smooch is represented under the Best Chat/Conversational Bot Tool. You can vote for us here!

Smooch in the News

We’ve been offering insights on major platform developments and convening with experts about bolstering CX strategies. Messaging is having a moment, and Smooch is honored to be at the forefront of these conversations.

Silver-tongued Argenta Launches Conversational Banking | BankingTech

Powered by Smooch and customer service platform Sparkcentral, read about how the Argenta banking app’s new feature allows customers to engage in a continuous conversation “much like they would using WhatsApp with their friends.”

Facebook Confirms Plans to Integrate Messaging Services on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp | AdWeek

Facebook is planning to reroute the back end of its biggest messaging platforms, but what does that mean for data privacy, user engagement, and competition? Smooch Co-Founder and CTO Mike Gozzo says Apple and Google’s efforts to onboard businesses to their messaging platforms pose “a big threat to Facebook and other messaging apps. This combination gives them a very viable shot to compete.”

Google’s Two-Pronged Plan to Dominate Consumer-to-Business Messaging | TheNextWeb

Smooch’s Editorial Director Dan Levy profiles Google’s bygone messaging platforms and the introduction of messaging to business profiles. How does Google My Business enable small businesses to better reach customers, and what about Apple Business Chat?

To Improve Customer Service, Stop Forcing Customers To Repeat Themselves | Forbes

How is Smooch changing the messaging space? This profile by Forbes shows how Smooch allows customers to maintain one unified conversation across many channels — a welcome respite from platforms where customers need to introduce themselves again and again. CEO Warren Levitan says, “It's frustrating for the customer; it's inefficient for the business; it's a waste of time for everybody.”

Why Microsoft Could Deflate Slack’s IPO, WhatsApp Top Messaging App, and More | CMS Wire

With insights gleaned from our State of Messaging 2019 report, CMS Wire emphasizes the fragmented nature of the messaging space. WhatsApp claims the largest user base, followed closely by Messenger. Not bad for Facebook, eh? Also highlighted are the “windfall of new opportunities for brands to engage and convert customers.” Changes are afoot.

After months of rumors, Slack has made it official.

The team collaboration unicorn filed papers last week to go public — setting the stage for one of the biggest IPOs of 2019, and raising the stakes in the battle to dominate messaging in the workplace.

Cut me some Slack

Okay, so this wouldn’t technically be an IPO but a direct listing, meaning only current shareholders (rather than the company itself) can sell shares.

The company was valued at $7.1 billion in August and boasts more than 8 million active users and 3 million paid users. So it can afford to do things on its own terms, as an inside source suggested to Bloomberg:

"The company is choosing the unusual method for going public because it doesn’t need the cash or publicity of an IPO."

Trail of tears 😭

Slack was founded in 2009 but over the last five years “it managed to eclipse almost every major competitor in the space,” reports Quartz.

That list includes HipChat and Stride, which it acquired from Atlassian last summer, and also-rans like Skype, Google Hangouts Chat and Facebook’s Workplace, which haven’t gained much traction within the enterprise.

Then there’s Microsoft Teams. It comes bundled with Office 365, making it attractive to companies that already rely on Excel, Word and Powerpoint.

Microsoft tried and failed to acquire Slack for $8 billion in 2017 and in the last few months it's introduced a host of features to make Teams more competitive, prompting CMSWire to wonder if Microsoft may play the role of spoiler:

"It is possible that it could really rain on Slack’s IPO parade."

Bursting the bubble 💬

Workplace messaging apps don’t exist in a (speech) bubble.

Whether a company chooses Slack, Teams, or another tool, most employees will still have a handful of other apps on their phones to chat with their partners, friends, families and, yes — each other.

Computerworld reports that WhatsApp is the most widely-used mobile messaging app within U.K. offices, more prevalent than the mobile versions of either Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Given concerns about data privacy and the “wild west” nature of consumer chat apps — a recent study found that 20% of workers across the U.K. have been bullied by colleagues via messaging — companies are grappling with whether to ban their use outright, or embrace the channels people are already using to organize after-work drinks.

Slack may soon dominate workplace messaging, but that doesn’t mean it will dominate messaging in the workplace.

The Emoji Report

The Unicode Consortium — the High Church of emojis worldwide — has announced its Class of 2019.

59 new emojis will become available later this year (270 if you factor in variants for gender and skin tone). Along with more pedestrian additions like a waffle, an otter and an ice cube, are a slew of symbols meant to make the official emoji roster more diverse.

These include a falafel pita, a Hindu temple, a mechanical arm and a drop of blood — intended to represent a woman’s period — which was fought for by a UK girls’ rights organization, according to the BBC:

"The most popular choice was a pair of pants marked by blood but when that was rejected by the Unicode Consortium, the charity pushed for a blood drop instead."

Emojis matter 🤓

Fuelled by the meteoric rise of messaging, emojis have changed the way we communicate, with implications as far-reaching as law, science and education.

For Wired, linguist Gretchen McCulloch writes that kids are learning to text emojis before they can even read, and that this form of “digital babbling” may be a way of teaching them the art of conversation.

Here’s an adorable example from a 5-year-old with a penchant for “any animal that pinches:"

🦂🐊🐍🐛🐝🦇🐜🕷🦈🦎🐟🐬🦀🦑🦖🦕🐋🐢🐌🐞🐚🦋🦗🕸🦂🕷🐛🐝🐞🦀🦗🐜

Apple Insider reports that emoji use is causing confusion within the U.S. justice system, with courts unsure how to interpret them in evidence, and how to account for the fact that they can appear substantially different across channels and platforms:

"While Android users may see the 'grinning face with smiling eyes emoji' and understand it as being 'blissfully happy,'... iOS users instead interpreted the symbol as 'ready to fight,' and could take it as an intention to be violent."

Then there’s the time when Apple’s squid emoji had a butt on its forehead for like two years, until a marine biologist pointed it out.

Like I said, emojis matter.

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.

I had no clue how to start this, so I went asking Wikipedia for help on Omnichannel. Here’s what I got:

Omnichannel is a cross-channel content strategy that organizations use to improve their user experience. Rather than working in parallel, communication channels and their supporting resources are designed and orchestrated to cooperate.

In layman’s terms, omnichannel is about being able to reach someone on their own terms.

If you’re here at Smooch, you know a thing or two about omnichannel messaging. It’s about maintaining a single conversation with users across any digital channel — be it a website widget, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat… you get the message.

Notice though that Wikipedia mentions “communication channels” and not simply messaging. There’s a broader view here than the asynchronous experience of messaging. That view includes video and voice.

If I had to make a quick comparison of the two channel types (voice/video and messaging), I’d get to this table:

A few things to remember:

• Different people prefer different modes of communication
• The same person may prefer a different mode of communication for different types of
  interactions, such as support versus purchasing, for example
• We want to be where the customer feels more comfortable
• This isn’t an either/or decision. You can (and should) do both

At the bottom right part of that table? I wrote WebRTC.

WebRTC is an HTML5 technology that is available in all modern browsers. It enables web pages to incorporate voice and video communications (and much more). You can learn more about WebRTC here.

In our context, when someone is chatting with you on your website through a chat widget, you can “escalate” that chat into a voice or a video call — and things will be smooth. This is true for people sitting in front of their PC or on the go with their mobile device.

There are several added benefits to such an approach:

• When text isn’t enough, we can easily move to voice or video, without sharing phone numbers, or getting stuck in a contact center’s call queue. Less friction = happy customers
• Since this “lives” on websites and the internet and not on a separate telephony network, it makes it easier to store these conversations under a unified customer profile.
• WebRTC also allows things like screen sharing, which makes it easy to troubleshoot or see things that are otherwise hard to share in a chat
• If the customer is using some other channel to communicate with you, be it SMS or WhatsApp, you can still send them a web link to join that voice or video call with you

For you Smooch customers out there, rest assured that while Smooch is focused on “messaging” today, they recognize how real-time and synchronous channels like WebRTC are part of a complete omnichannel strategy (just like how they currently integrate with email)

Look out for when Smooch starts unifying voice and video transcripts into their existing conversation timeline so that businesses can have a unified, structured repository of all of their conversational data… let your AI feast on that!

In the meantime, check out this free report - WebRTC for Business People - it will get you up to speed with what other businesses are doing with WebRTC.

At the end of last year, Google announced it was officially pulling the plug on Allo, its latest in a long list of failed messaging apps. That list includes Google Wave, Google Plus, Google Buzz and, most recently, Google Hangouts (which has evolved into the enterprise-focused Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet).

But while its consumer messaging strategy remains confusing, Google is making an aggressive two-pronged attack into the world of business messaging. As a result, it appears to be on a collision course with one of its big tech rivals.

Google My Business messaging

Back in July, Google quietly gave businesses the ability to add chat to their Google business profiles. This allowed customers searching on mobile to start a conversation with them, much like how they would initiate a phone call:

Initially, businesses had to use their own devices’ messaging platforms to respond to customer inquiries. But in November, Google overhauled its Google My Business app, enabling small businesses to message customers directly from the platform.

Google is rolling out the business app worldwide, while also adding the “message” button to business profiles in Google Maps on both Android and iOs. As Google suggests in its announcement, Maps is a pretty intuitive place for customers to discover and connect with local businesses.

Taking a bite out of Apple

Banking its business messaging strategy on search — its undisputed strength — is a smart move on Google’s part. It also threatens Apple’s much-anticipated foray into the business messaging space. Apple began rolling out its Business Chat platform outside the US in October, enabling global brands and customers to interact via iMessage. Brands active on the platform, which is still in beta, include Four Seasons hotels, West Elm, and Burberry.

Apple’s business messaging advantage is discoverability. iPhone and iPad users searching via Safari, Spotlight, or Apple Maps will be able to click a “message” button on a business’ profile to open iMessage and initiate a conversation:

Look and sound familiar?

To make things even more interesting, Google recently agreed to pay Apple $9 billion to to remain the default search engine in the iPhone’s Safari browser, according to one Goldman Sachs analyst. What happens when an Apple user discovers a business via Google and starts chatting? The conversation will open up in the iPhone’s Messages app but their messages will send via SMS instead of iMessage (iPhone people: that means green speech bubbles instead of blue), eliminating Apple’s ability to control the experience.

In theory, Apple Business Chat still has a stronghold on Apple Maps. However, Google Maps is consistently among the top apps in the iTunes store — potentially robbing Business Chat of yet another key avenue of discovery.

RC-yes!

The Google My Business update is only one of Google’s business messaging plays that appears to be gaining momentum. The company’s failure to build its own standalone messaging app to rival the likes of iMessage, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger has led it to rally around the global effort to replace SMS with RCS as the universal text messaging standard. RCS, which stands for rich communication services, brings group chats, read receipts, typing indicators, branded business profiles, and other modern messaging features to old-fashioned texting.

Many businesses still rely on SMS to send transactional messages like boarding passes, receipts, and shipping notifications to consumers. Global telcos, who have lost the lion’s share of consumer messaging traffic to the chat apps, are desperate to hold on to this share of the market, which is expected to be worth $70 billion by 2020, according to Zion Market Research. And it’s precisely this market that Facebook seems to be eyeing with its WhatsApp Business API, which launched in early access in August and is expected to become generally available next year.

Google intends to make RCS the backbone of its native Chat app (Android’s answer to Apple’s Messages) but needs device manufacturers and global telcos to support the new standard. The Verge recently reported that Verizon will launch support for RCS messaging in “early 2019,” according to its SVP of consumer products.

Verizon was one of the last major telco holdouts in the US, so this is a good sign for long-suffering RCS enthusiasts. A recent report predicts that more than 1 billion people across 168 global carriers will use RCS every month by the end of 2019, and that brands will spend more than $18 billion messaging consumers over the channel by 2023.

Suddenly, RCS doesn’t seem like such a longshot. Google, meanwhile, may have finally found its messaging mojo.

This article originally appeared on The Next Web. You can read it here.

As part of Smooch’s recent State of Messaging report, we sat down with a gaggle of (32 to be exact) product, marketing and CX leaders from the world’s most innovative companies that are at the forefront of the conversational revolution.

We spoke with experts from across the board; channel gatekeepers, software vendors, brand stewards and startup innovators, including those who are working directly at the CX coal face at the world’s largest organizations such as Google, Uber, and LVMH. We asked them about the state of conversational business in 2019.

Here’s a snapshot of what we found:

Brand Chat

Despite ample evidence that consumers are ready to chat with brands, businesses have largely lacked the tools to message with customers in a personal, secure and scalable way. Until now. A recurring theme with those who know is that conversational engagement with businesses via messaging apps is set to play a far bigger and wider-ranging role in 2019, driven by demand from consumers.

Hussein Fazal, Co-Founder and CEO, SnapTravel, sees this as the year where consumer impulses shift and “… customers will start searching for brands over messaging first, before looking up their website for customer support.”

As consumers become increasingly familiar with messaging brands they’re looking to engage and do business with, the expectation will grow that this type of accessibility with businesses will exist across the board. This means the ability to connect via any of the major messaging platforms customers are using already, with experience and interfaces designed to make that simple and useful.

According to Jenny Fleiss, Co-Founder and CEO at Jetblack, a members-only personal shopping and concierge startup, which has messaging as the core component of its business, “Consumers are constantly looking for ways to add efficiency in their lives and in 2019, we will continue to see the evolution of conversational commerce as a key tool that will enable this. We have to always challenge ourselves to create a conversational commerce experience that is not just tech for tech’s sake, but meaningfully helps the consumer.”

i ChatBOT

Next-generation customer experience is about brands connecting with customers on their terms. Customers want immediacy, and one of the solutions that’s finding its place within businesses large and small, is the use of customer service bots.

“Brands were very wary after the initial launch of the bot platforms, mainly because companies tried to build big standalone bots that ended up failing. Now it’s clear that if you combine bots with human agents you can deliver really amazing experiences—I think every major brand will be taking this approach in 2019,” said Joshua March, Co-Founder and CEO, Conversocial.

Pervasive reach and scalability are bot superpowers but a human touch is where experience for a customer can live or die. Bots can connect directly to customers wherever they are—on a web site, in a mobile app, on Facebook Messenger, over SMS, etc—and they can operate at scale, 24/7. Depending on the industry, bots should be able to handle anywhere from 30-70% of all customer requests, and that’s before AI is introduced into the equation.

The key factor in delivering a great customer experience is to recognize when you need to escalate to a human who can bring nuance and personal attention to a situation.

Phil Gray, EVP Business Development, Interactions, believes that in the near future technology will advance and blur the lines between bot and human even further and that “Innovations in conversational AI combined with true human intelligence will be the key technologies enabling intelligent assistants to perform at unprecedented levels of understanding and efficacy.”

New brand, who this?

While opportunities to connect with customers via the major messaging platforms continue to grow as business-ready platforms are rolled out, astute brands will remain cautious in how they engage, only doing so when it adds value for both customer and brand — in that order.

Eva Taylor, Global Social Marketing, Hootsuite, believes that “Contacting a prospect or an existing customer by private message results in a far more intimate and authentic approach than publishing banner ads or updates on social media. In 2019 brands will need to decipher how to best participate in these conversations without being intrusive.”

When timing and applications are right, a brand engaging with customers through personal messaging has the ability to cut through marketing noise and be appreciated.

As Ali Sadat, VP Product, Medallia puts it, in the year to come, “Interacting with customers in the moments that matter to facilitate and influence experiences as they are happening will be a critical component of every brand’s customer engagement strategy. ”

For more industry insights from over 30 industry voices, check out Smooch’s 2019 State of Messaging Report.

This article originally appeared on AiThority. You can read it here.

Smooch’s 2019 State of Messaging report was released last month, featuring unique insights from 34 marketing, product and customer experience experts about the future of conversational business.

The report looks at how messaging can be the first point of contact in a customer journey and how emerging business messaging channels can be used to engage and convert customers. I pulled my three favourite takeaways from the report that demonstrate how conversational marketing is becoming much more than a buzzword.

Conversational Leads

Click-to-message ads have come to Facebook and WhatsApp, while AdLingo is creating interactive advertising experiences with chatbots built in. Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift says, “I think we’re about to enter the hardest decade for marketers but the best decade for brands,” remarking that it’s becoming more difficult than ever to reach customers — so why not plant yourself where they already are?

Conversations with businesses can be initiated over Apple and Google Maps, thanks to the limited releases of Apple Business Chat and Google My Business. Customers can chat with businesses in the same manner they would with friends on iMessage. Making messaging  available on maps allows brands to generate leads where they’re already primed to be discovered. These are conversations that are waiting to happen.

Brands are emerging with messaging at the core

Hussein Fazal, Co-founder and CEO of SnapTravel, predicts that “in 2019, we expect customers to start searching for brands over messaging first, before looking up their website for customer support.”

SnapTravel, which connects customers to discounted hotel rooms on Messenger, is part of a new generation of startups that were born conversational. Members-only personal shopping startup Jetblack lets customers text “nearly any shopping request”  and have it delivered within 24 hours, while Threads deals designer clothes on most major messaging platforms. No need to download an app.

Jetblack Co-founder Jenny Fleiss says it’s important that conversational commerce isn’t just “tech for tech’s sake, but [an experience] that meaningly helps the consumer.”

Chatbots are getting better at their jobs

Depending on the industry, bots could handle anywhere from 30-70% of customer requests — and that’s before AI becomes part of the equation.

Phil Gray, EVP of Business Development at Interactions emphasizes the combination of “true human intelligence” and conversational AI as key technologies that will enable bots to perform. You can call this the new theory of multiple intelligences.

It’s important to recognize that while bots have scalability and pervasive reach, the combination of human agents and bots can deliver a winning strategy.

Look out for channels that can carry the bot-to-human handoff when necessary. “It’s clear that if you combine bots with human agents you can deliver really amazing experiences,” Conversocial CEO Joshua March says. “I think every major brand will be taking this approach in 2019.”

Industry insiders are optimistic about messaging and its potential to deliver personal, convenient, and consistent customer experiences — and they’re frustrated that the conversational future hasn’t come fast enough.

With customers eager to chat and tools becoming available for businesses to build on messaging, it’s up to brands and software makers to turn these possibilities into dynamic experiences.

Jesse Martin, Trends Analyst

This article originally appeared in New Digital Age. You can read it here.

“Be where your customers are.” In an experience-driven economy, this phrase is quickly becoming a CX cliché. But that doesn’t make it any less true — especially when your  “customers” are vulnerable teens and they’re counting on you for information that can alter the course of their lives.

Be there or be square 🙈

Desperate for reliable and nonjudgmental resources around sexual health, teenagers across North America are turning to messaging.Last month Planned Parenthood introduced Roo, a web-based chatbot that teens can speak to about birth control, puberty, relationships and other sensitive topics they might be hesitant to discuss with parents, peers or other real people. Roo’s AI is still rudimentary, from my experience playing around with the bot, but it’s a good starting point for American teens, given that only 24 states require sex-ed to be taught in schools. As Mashable reports:

Digital tools can help fill in the gaps and provide a space for teens to ask questions without feeling embarrassed.

Meanwhile, in Texas 🌵

While chatbots are great for delivering general information at scale, some situations require a more personal touch.

Jane’s Due Process is a Texas-based nonprofit that helps teenage girls access birth control and abortions in a state where these services are often denied to minors without parental consent.

Diginomica explains how JDP built a text-based helpline, using Smooch to route SMS and Facebook Messages into Slack while masking contact information to protect the anonymity of the “Janes” — as in Jane Doe — using the service.

Previously, volunteers had been using their own personal cell phones to communicate with Janes. This messaging-based setup allowed them to scale their operations without sacrificing the human aspect of the service.

To promote the helpline, JDP runs ads on Instagram — a tactic that will become even more effective if and when Facebook introduces a WhatsApp-like API for Instagram DMs.

Eleanor Grano, JDP’s community outreach and youth engagement coordinator, told Fast Company that the goal is to reach teens on their own turf:

The reality is that most often teens text rather than call. It’s how they communicate with each other, and it was essential they were able to communicate with us in the same way.

Close to home 💜

As the Fast Company piece mentions, Jane’s Due Process’ isn’t the first messaging helpline Smooch has set up.

We also work with an AIDS community organization here in Montreal, whose anonymous Sext Ed helpline provides teens with locally-tailored advice and resources — sort of like Planned Parenthood’s Roo, but with real humans at the other end of the conversation.

If you know of another registered charity or non-profit looking to serve their community through conversation, give us a shout. As my colleague Mike told Diginomica:

We like to support organizations that we believe are making a positive difference in the world.

China Bans Messaging Apps for Homework

Planning to text in your book report? Think again, kid. Citing a list of concerns ranging from eyesight damage to cell phone addiction to income inequality, The Straits Times reports that teachers in China will no longer be allowed to assign and collect homework via chat.  Meet Liu Yanming, a sixth-grade student in Shanghai. Liu had been doing his homework on paper and then using his mother’s cellphone to take a picture of the assignment and upload it to a parent-teacher group on WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese messaging app. His father wasn’t pleased:

He is just 12 years old and I do not want to buy him a cellphone. But it has become inevitable.

Inevitable, indeed.

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.

New in Smooch this month: a new way to configure WhatsApp business profile information via the Smooch Dashboard, multi-line labels for action buttons on iOS, a new setting to echo postback buttons on SDKs, small updates to our Web Messenger and the latest messaging news & insights.

What’s new 🎉

WhatsApp business profile configuration

There are two different ways to configure business profile information for each number connected to WhatsApp. You can use our Update Integration Profile API or you can easily configure it through the WhatsApp Integration page in the Smooch Dashboard. From the Dashboard, you’ll be able to upload your business profile photo, your company description and contact information. Learn more about the two different methods here.

If using the API to configure WhatsApp business profile info is more your thing, we’ve just released a new API that lets you upload a profile photo. Previously, you had to host that image yourself or call our Attachments API before being able to set the photo. Now, you can upload that photo directly.

Multi-line action buttons on iOS

So you want to send messages with buttons that have extra long labels? No problem! We shipped a new version of our iOS SDK that supports multi-line action buttons. v6.12.0 also includes updated styling on message bubbles and action buttons, as well as a new default accent color. Check out the release notes here.

Echoing postback buttons on SDKs

We’ve added a new optional App setting for SDKs where you can specify whether a message should be added to the conversation history when a postback button is clicked. This lets users see what action button they’ve clicked on in their conversation thread. When enabled, an appUser message is silently added to the conversation, without a corresponding message:appUser webhook being triggered. Learn more about this feature here.

Other API & SDK Updates ⚙

• Web SDK: We released v4.17.2 which now displays a "disconnected" banner when the user is not connected to Smooch. You can now subscribe to two new events, connected and disconnected. We also fixed a bug where multiple calls to start a conversation or create a user could cause the creation of duplicate appUsers or a 409 conflict error. v4.17.3 introduces a change where the conversation scrolls to the bottom when the user clicks on the unread badge. v4.17.4 was released with a new setting to use sessionStorage as browser storage. Learn more about browser storage here.

Stay up to date with all our updates by checking our full changelog.

Messaging News & Insights 🤓

Marketing Tech Awards 2019 update

Thanks to all of you who voted for us last month! We’ve been selected as a finalist for the Marketing Technology Awards hosted by ClickZ and Search Engine Watch under the Best Chat/Conversational Bot Tool category. We’re in good company there, going up against Drift and Wizu. Winners will be announced on March 21 in New York 🤞.

Webinar Recording: Clarabridge x Smooch

Getting Personal: Connecting with Customers Via Messaging
Smooch CEO Warren Levitan and Clarabridge founder Sid Banerjee co-hosted a webinar earlier in February. They talked about the rise of messaging, what it means for the contact center and how Smooch and Clarabridge are partnering to help brands leverage their conversational data to deliver more personalized customer experiences. Don't worry if you missed it — you can check out a recording here.

Smooch in the News

We’ve been working with Jane’s Due Process to help them create a helpline to connect teen girls in Texas to resources and information about their reproductive rights. In Diginomica, Jessica Twentyman took a deep dive into why this service is necessary, and how Smooch helped JDP scale their operation. Mashable and Fast Company looked at how JDP’s service fits into the trend of sex-ed messaging, taking a glance at another Smooch community partner, SextEd, and Planned Parenthood’s chatbot Roo.

How can Businesses Leverage Technology Without Losing Their Personal Touch | Telegraph
Our CEO Warren Levitan was interviewed in the Telegraph about how bots can solve numerous problems if companies don’t over-rely on them. As chatbots become increasingly common in contact centers, Warren reinforces the importance of communicating in a way that feels natural to customers.

The Next Wave of CX Messaging Trends (From Those Who Know) | AiThority
Smooch’s Editorial Director Dan Levy draws on the State of Messaging 2019 report to highlight trends in CX messaging. Between newly available APIs and customers becoming more comfortable chatting with brands, Dan pulls expertise from industry insiders to show how messaging adds value to CX strategies.

Conversational Commerce is no Longer Just a Buzzword | New Digital Age
A collection of insights and quotes on conversational commerce gleaned from our State of Messaging 2019 report, highlighting the momentum of messaging for brands who want to craft personalized and human customer experiences.

Over the past year, 44% of consumers used chatbots to make purchases and 75% messaged businesses to do the same. The future of conversational commerce.

Remember a hundred years ago when nobody owned a smartphone? On the periphery of the industrial revolution, interactive carousels meant fun at a county fair and rich messaging was a letter delivered by a butler. We’ve come a long way, but one thing that hasn’t changed is innovation for convenience’s sake.

Today the world is in constant conversation, thanks to technological innovations like voice assistants and messaging apps. In the last few years messaging apps have superseded traditional social networks in popularity. 2018 was a big year for messaging and entrepreneurial spirits have taken note, both in the startup trenches and in the offices of Facebook, Apple, and Google, because messaging is changing the way people spend money.

When asking your smart speaker to order a pizza feels as natural as messaging your roommate to ask what they want for dinner, wouldn’t you expect more businesses to be open for conversation?

Scaling From Nada to Prada 💅

Coined by Chris Messina in 2016, the term “conversational commerce” has been used to refer to everything from customer service chatbots to buying stuff with the help of voice assistants, to communicating with businesses via messaging apps.

What’s clear is that, over the past year, more businesses have accepted it as a reality. Chatbots, for example, are becoming a common part of the customer experience, with 44 percent of consumers using them to make purchases. That’s not happening in isolation, because according to data collected by Facebook, 75 percent of consumers are messaging businesses to make purchases.

But while many old-stock brands are scrambling to meet the demand and figure out how to message with customers at scale, a new breed of millennial-focused startups have woven the concept into their DNA.

Emphasis on Prada 👀

Imagine the convenience of having a personal shopper. Next, imagine being able to text nearly any shopping request and have it delivered ASAP.

That’s exactly what Jetblack aims to do. Incubated by Walmart and headed by Rent the Runway founder Jenny Fleiss, Jetblack allows customers to text with a personal shopper that’s part AI-chatbot, part real-life courier. The $50-a-month service promises its deliveries will arrive at the customer’s doorstep between 24 to 48 hours.

“We can’t forget that convenience and speed are the key value drivers of conversational commerce,” Fleiss says, in Smooch’s State of Messaging 2019 report.

Convenience is absolutely key for busy, urban, affluent moms who don’t have time to stop by Bergdorf’s (or Walmart, of which there are approximately none in New York City).

The only things Jetblack doesn’t service? Perishables and booze — but leave those to your real assistant.

Conversational Commerce in Action 💪

Threads is a similar shopping service that exists solely over messaging apps, connecting buyers to designer clothing. Clients message a single personal shopper rather than a bot integrated into the platform.

Personalizing the experience is key, and the luxury niche suits conversational commerce well. Threads’ CEO Sophie Hill told TechCrunch, “The idea behind Threads is curation and convenience. It’s a customer-centric business and it’s built on chat because that is where the customers wanted to be and transact.”

SnapTravel, another business engaging its customers uniquely through chat, uses an AI-powered chatbot to connect its customers to reduced-rate hotel rooms. While Threads relies on humans entirely, Jetblack, and SnapTravel’s reliance on bots demonstrates that personalized messaging can be broadly executed.

SnapTravel’s chatbot is a great example of how NLP (natural language processing) and AI can be seamlessly integrated into conversational commerce to offer a personalized experience while betting on the convenience of messaging. In the Smooch report, CEO Hussein Fazal predicts that brands will shift their marketing and customer experience efforts from their own properties to chat apps.

“In 2019 we expect customers to start searching for brands over messaging first, before looking up their website for customer support,” he says.

Dirty Lemon, which operates a cashier-less store in Manhattan uses a chatbot to tender its transactions. It’s a simple process, pop into the drug store, grab a bottle of CBD-infused lemonade (discontinued until further notice 👀), and text Dirty Lemon so they can put the $11 charge on your account. They also deliver.

While Dirty Lemon’s approach is certainly experimental, it works for open-minded customers accustomed to messaging and convenience. As Jetblack’s Fleiss understands it, “As the technology to enable text shopping becomes more widely available, and those experiences become more ubiquitous, it forces a change in how customers interact with incumbent channels such as brick-and-mortar retail and mobile apps.”

Dream big, Message Rich 🤑

Jetblack, SnapTravel, Dirty Lemon and Threads have built their brands on messaging from the ground up.

Small businesses have been able to engage customers on popular consumer messaging channels like Facebook and WhatsApp (since the release of the WhatsApp Business app in January 2018). And most recently, Google My Business, which allows mobile users searching for a business to text them, much like how they would initiate a phone call.

But these apps aren’t quite the solution big brands need. High volumes of messages need to be routed through helpdesk software, and brands looking to provide an omnichannel messaging experience can’t sit in one app. That’s why the major messaging players are now making their APIs available to enterprises.

The WhatsApp Business API rolled out in August 2018 to a small pool of companies likeUber, Wish, and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

No word on whether or not KLM responds with clever GIFs — but they will send you your boarding pass.

Likewise, Apple launched an early access program for Business Chat, which allows brands like West Elm and Burberry to message with the much-desired Apple user segment through iMessage.

Google, for its part, is working with global carriers to champion RCS (Rich Communication Services), the successor to SMS, so that businesses can set up verified business profiles and engage customers through old fashioned text messaging.

2019 will see all these beta programs become widely available.

Fine timing for conversational commerce startups, but for legacy brands, this is a chance to figure out how to manage these changes before the floodgates open.

One legacy brand that seems to be getting the message is Subway, delicatessen of the masses. The sandwich chain allows customers to place and pay for orders ahead of time on Messenger with a chatbot.

Subway’s main product is totally customizable and widely available, making it an ideal candidate to promote this sort of customer engagement.

It’s the same spirit of personalization and convenience that works for personal shopping and travel startups. Meet the customer where they are, let them tell you exactly what they want, then deliver the experience seamlessly. But conversational commerce doesn’t end with messaging apps.

Alexa, can you predict the future of business messaging? 🙋

Smart speakers are taking the world by storm, with estimates suggesting that by 2022, 55 percent of American homes will have one. People are already using voice assistants to order pizza or groceries, but they’re more commonly using them to seek information about the weather or play music.

Jetblack’s Fleiss contends that visual imagery is critical for most purchases and suggests a workaround is to include a tie-in to “some sort of visual reference, whether it be through images or augmented reality.” Manufacturers have taken this into account. Amazon Echos have models with built-in screens and app integrations, and while the experience might be clunky, customers will ultimately iron out the kinks with their feedback and engagement.

This isn’t to say that smart speakers will replace the Great American shopping mall (although those are dying 😉), but conversational commerce is another avenue paved by their convenience.

Jetblack, SnapTravel, and Subway are able to operate at different scales with the help of AI-driven chatbots, human agents, and enterprise software. Starbucks has used chatbots in messenger for publicity stunts and incorporated them into their app. But who’s to say they won’t follow Subway’s model for ordering?

They say you die two deaths. The first is when you stop breathing. The second is when your customers can’t find you in Messenger.

Jesse Martin is a Trends Analyst at Smooch.

A version of this article originally appeared in ClickZ. You can read it here.

In a landmark blog post last week, Mark Zuckerberg outlined a new, “privacy-focused” vision for Facebook. The announcement signalled a fundamental shift in strategy for the company in the midst of growing public mistrust and plummeting usage of its core social network.It was also a shot across the bow of Facebook’s Big Tech rivals in the ongoing battle over the future of business messaging.

Welcome to the living room 🛋

Zuckerberg observes in his post that while public social channels like Facebook offer users a digital “town square,” the rise of messaging signals that people increasingly prefer to “connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room.”

Lucky for Zucky, Facebook owns the two most popular messaging apps in the world — WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger — which, along with Instagram — collectively boast more than 2.6 billion users.

As the New York Times notes, Zuckerberg seems to be drawing inspiration from the world’s third most popular chat app. That would be WeChat, the Tencent-owned platform that dominates the digital landscape in China thanks to a built-in payment system that allows users to pay bills, play games, order food and do pretty much anything else you can think of without leaving the app.

Instead of selling ads — a business model that inevitably depends on collecting user data — WeChat makes most of its money by taking a cut of these transactions (not that its track record on data privacy is anything to admire).

If Facebook’s plan is to transition from an ad-based business to one built on conversational commerce, it has a long road ahead of it — though reports that the company is developing its own cryptocurrency suggest it could be shifting into gear.

But the short term strategy here may be a lot simpler.

All in the family 👨‍👩‍👧

Facebook’s announcement comes on the heels of widespread reports the company is working to merge the back-ends of WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. This will allow users to message each other across the three apps and presumably make life easier for businesses once WhatsApp’s Business API becomes generally available and Instagram introduces its own enterprise solution.🤞

In his post, Zuckerberg confirms the merger plans and lists “interoperability” as one of its new privacy-minded principles:

People should be able to use any of our apps to reach their friends, and they should be able to communicate across networks easily and securely.

Of course, Facebook’s version of interoperability doesn’t extend much beyond its own walled garden. Android users can already send and receive old fashioned text messages via Facebook Messenger. But this doesn’t work on iOs devices where iMessage is king and Apple is making its own business messaging play with Business Chat.

Most importantly, the SMS protocol is not encrypted, as Zuckerberg acknowledges in his post. Neither is RCS — the new telecom standard backed by Google, which aims to update and replace SMS with a more modern messaging experience.

Tales from the encrypt 💀

Zuckerberg emphasized that Facebook’s new messaging-first strategy will be based on "the way we've developed WhatsApp," with end-to-end encryption at its core.

While critics have pointed out that encryption and privacy are not the same thing, WhatsApp is currently the most secure messaging channel on the planet as far as businesses are concerned.

When WhatsApp's Business API became available to select brands last year, a key caveat was that businesses had to store customer conversations on their own servers so that not even Facebook could access the data.

This was a significant technical hurdle that underscored A) how badly brands want in on this channel and B) that Facebook was serious about bringing end-to-end encryption to business messaging.

The question now is whether Facebook’s mega-messaging ecosystem can really be private, secure and interoperable, and whether brands and users will demand anything less.

The Last Telegram

You’ve probably heard of Telegram, the encrypted messaging app popular with Israeli potheads, feared by the Ayatollah and that reportedly gained three million users in the wake of this week’s Facebook outage (the perils of interoperability?).

But this story isn’t about that telegram. It’s about the kind your grandparents used to send, and which could take weeks to receive. In one Michigan man’s case, it took 50 years.

Robert Fink recently received a congratulatory Western Union telegram sent in 1969 by now-deceased family friends, theAP reports. The message was delivered a day too late and failed to reach him — until a good Samaritan found it buried in a filing cabinet and decided to track down the college professor.

As you’d expect, receiving the long-lost letter has put Fink in a reflective mood:

The theme for me has been that the long arm of the past is reaching out and grabbing me, and I should take it seriously.

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.

This past Thursday, our CEO Warren Levitan popped down to New York for the 2019 Martech Awards.

Guests were treated to an open bar, an ice sculpture, and an entertaining presentation by host Scott Brinker.

Over 500 companies were nominated for awards that evening, and we were up for the Best Chat/Conversational Bot Tool alongside Wizu and Drift, who basically put conversational marketing on the map. Talk about stiff competition. Warren kept us updated while we waited with bated breath.

Slack popped off. Smoochies near and far toasted to the victory, from the D&D crew hanging back in the office, living rooms across Quebec, to our man in San Francisco enjoying a sunset in the park.

What makes this competition different from all other competitions? It’s not small potatoes. The judges and ClickZ readers scored Smooch based on a number of considerations. They looked at the problems we’re solving for customers and what they’re building on our product. They considered how innovative our product is, how it’s differentiated from our competitors and how easy it is to use. They factored in glowing client testimonials, our Support and Solutions Team, and our developer documentation.

Winning was a team effort, through and through. The award now sits proudly in our office for all to see, a reminder that we came together to make something great.

The Martech Awards are hosted by ClickZ and Search Engine Watch, celebrating the real-world application of emerging and innovative marketing technologies. Nominated technologies are assessed on qualities like ease-of-use, innovation, value for money, integration, and customer service. You can check out the other winners here.

Last month the Philippine consulate in Dubai decided to make itself available on WhatsApp.The United Arab Emirates’ 679,819 Filipino expats are big chatters and there had been complaints the consulate didn’t always pick up the phone.Sounds like they’re having second thoughts.

Tagalog, you’re it 😁

The Gulf News reports the consulate received more than 1,000 inquiries in its first week on WhatsApp, in addition to the 100 to 120 daily messages it gets through Facebook.

This proved to be a heavy load for the consulate's small staff, prompting the Consul-General, Paul Raymund Cortes, to divert people to more traditional channels:

While they are happy to answer queries, Cortes said the public may also save time by checking their website and official Facebook page directly so the WhatsApp service can be used for more pressing concerns.

Ready for the flood 🛶

The consulate’s first-week WhatsApp experience is a microcosm of what brands can expect when they connect to the world’s most popular messaging channel.

This week Facebook began rolling out the WhatsApp Business app on iOs. The app, which has been available on Android since last year, allows small businesses — and, presumably, small consulates —  to communicate with WhatsApp users from a free app they download from the Google Play or Apple app store.

Don’t confuse the WhatsApp Business app with the WhatsApp Business API. That’s a more complex integration that enables large businesses to engage customers on the channel using their existing enterprise software.

WhatsApp’s API is still in early access, along with Apple and Google’s competing business chat platforms. But people around the world are already betting the farm on messaging.

Gaining traction 🚜

Kenyan farmers are using WhatsApp to grow healthier kale, according to Business Daily, and they’re “laughing all the way to the bank.”

The small-scale farmers have come to rely on private WhatsApp groups to share best practices and consult with agronomists responsible for approving their crops for export.

As a result, farmers have boosted their earnings by as much as 500%.

Back in the U.S., where WhatsApp is less dominant and many still rely on good old SMS, some jurisdictions are using text messages to help keep citizens out of jail, reports Law360.

Frustrated that 41% of people summoned for low-level crimes skipped court, New York City brought in researchers who found messaging helped lower failure to appear rates by 26%.

The human factor 🤗

People miss their court appearances for all sorts of reasons. Some can’t find childcare or afford to miss work. Others simply forget.

The text messages remind defendants of their dates and warn them of the consequences of skipping, which can include jail time.

But messages offer more than just a reminder. They’re a doorway to a conversation that might not have happened otherwise, and can add “a bit of humanity to the grind of the criminal justice system,” as one public defender put it:

“A lot of thank-yous go on… And this isn’t a business that necessarily generates a lot of thank-yous.”

Instagram Checks Out Conversational Commerce

Hot off the heels of Mark Zuckerberg’s big private messaging pivot, Facebook’s other other messaging app is making moves in the retail space.

Last week Instagram beta-launched a new feature that lets people shop and complete payment — hence the name “Checkout” — without leaving the comfort of the app.

Typically, users need to click a link on a brand’s Instagram profile or story to complete the purchase on a third-party site.

Why am I telling you this?🤔

By now you know Facebook plans to unify the underlying infrastructure of its three popular chat apps — Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram – so users can message each other across the three channels.

Meanwhile, Instagram is widely expected to introduce business messaging through a WhatsApp-like API.

All this supports speculation that Zuckerberg is modelling the future of Facebook on WeChat. The Tencent-owned platform dominates the digital landscape in China thanks to a built-in payment system that allows users to order pretty much anything without leaving the chat window.

With Checkout, Instagram will charge a “small fee” to brands selling through the platform, which include retail giants like Burberry, H&M and Zara. As Digiday notes:

The new beta marks a significant evolution for a brand that began as a photo-sharing app with an ad-supported revenue model.

What seems like a small step for Instagram may prove to be a giant leap for conversational commerce.

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.

A lesson in dogfooding

This month we challenged ourselves to create a cool conversational experience for exhibitors and attendees at Enterprise Connect. The convention was held at the luxurious Gaylord Palms Resort, built on swampland near Orlando.

The premise was simple: We wanted to showcase the power of messaging to as many people as possible. What do most people love? Free stuff. Attendees would chat with a bot to receive free stuff at our (extremely beautiful, incredibly designed) booth. We called it The Chat Boutique.

Exhibitors, chained to their own booths, would be handed off to a real human who would coordinate the deliveries. We had runners (they were models!) on the floor zipping between booths, dropping off candy, drinks, and socks.

And the Real People the exhibitors chatted with? Three Smoochies, staffing a makeshift contact center in Montreal out of a meeting room named after a food emoji.  🍕

One of those Real People was Me.

Building the Chat Boutique

Here’s where things get technical. To showcase a host of different features, our designers built the experience using our embeddable Web Messenger. Users would initiate a conversation with a bot before being handed off to a person (hey!). We would chat them up, shoot the breeze, and send them a carousel when it was time to order.

Once they picked what they wanted, a conversation extension would have them fill out their name and booth number, giving them the option to connect their preferred messaging channel. That means they could carry on the conversation wherever they preferred, with all the context from previous exchanges.

What did we learn from using a product built on Smooch?

Messaging is a great way to have personalized conversations at scale, but we did not anticipate the scale we ended up working with.

It’s not easy being the person using help desk software. Dealing with high volumes of customers is overwhelming. Real CS agents might have an easier time doing this with  training and experience, but we were making it up as we went along. I hate to admit it but we definitely lost some conversations in the shuffle.

But!!! Big but! It’s clear that people are excited to chat They’re so excited they kind of broke our system.

So we need to plan for the unexpected.

Exhibitor orders and information were routed into a Google Sheet, where another person dispatched the runners to the booths. We kept breaking it. What happens when somebody wants to order two bottles of water instead of one? What if they prefer sugar-free Red Bull? If we wrote customizations into the Sheet, it died. Conversely, orders were often accidentally duplicated, tripled, and sometimes quadrupled — ultimately manageable, but with limited products we wouldn’t want one person to end up with five copies of the 2019 State of Messaging report.

Always pack an extra pair of socks.

Corporate swag famously lacks the effortless charm of indie streetwear brands and DIY graphic tees, despite being made in the same factories. This is absolutely not the case for our socks. Smooch socks are an elegant, timeless choice that can easily transition from day to nightwear. It’s no surprise that our socks were the fastest going item. We ran out with more than half of the convention ahead of us, and nothing feels worse than telling somebody who wants free socks “no.”

You never know who’s on the other end of the conversation.

While looking up exhibitors on Twitter, I found that one of our conversations was with a former contestant on the Bachelorette!

Yes, he was on season 7 almost 10 years ago. Yes, he was eliminated with two other men with six weeks to go in the season. Yes, I asked him about it when he popped into my inbox.

He continued to use our service throughout the show. Each time he hit us up for water bottles and socks, the conversation history gave us the context we needed to personalize the conversation. Although we were operating on a small scale for a short time, Smooch’s capability of storing and maintaining conversation history across channels is great for contact center employees. Customers don’t have to repeat themselves, agents can customize their service, and they’ll never forget about your brief stint on the Bachelorette.

Contact center employees get ghosted too.

Dating apps have really changed the way we treat people. Ghosting, when one person abruptly breaks off the relationship with no warning and no contact, has emerged as a defining feature of our app-based dating culture. As it happens, many of our conversations would end abruptly too. After a volley of emojis, GIFs, and banter, we’d hear nothing. Were they okay? Did they get what they ordered? We had absolutely no way of knowing.

It’s best not to take it personally.

Help desk software is weird.

There are a number of features that could have made this a bit easier from the agent side. Typing indicators, read receipts, the ability to send outbound notifications — little reminders that the conversations were alive. New conversations would pop into the group inbox before being routed into our personal inboxes. It was easy to hoard incoming conversations, but difficult to tell when a conversation was truly finished.

While our Web Messenger and linked channels can support modern messaging experiences, agents using help desk software are limited as to what they can see. Live agents deserve better!

Dogfooding is a word people use unironically, and that’s okay.

I’ve heard the word “dogfooding” so many times this past week without knowing what it was. In my onboarding I was introduced to the expression “drinking our own champagne,” which I like more. I absolutely did not connect that to “dogfooding” until I googled it after the meeting.

Last month, our CEO Warren Levitan did a webinar with Clarabridge founder and executive chairman Sid Banerjee to talk about omnichannel customer experiences driving brand loyalty. They covered a range of topics, including the proliferation of business messaging, the meaning of omnichannel, and how to prevent conversation silos within the enterprise.

You can find the full webinar here, but you can read on for some key insights.

What does omnichannel actually mean?

The way we communicate has changed. Warren said:

“Omnichannel is engagement wherever is most convenient for you at any given point in time.”

The problem is that when people throw around the word “omnichannel,” what they actually mean is “multichannel.”

What’s the difference?

A multichannel CX strategy involves creating multiple points of contact for your customer. This means being available over email, phone and social media. Maybe even in the real world! 😉

The problem with this is that the information drawn from these different conversations falls into a silo. Should a customer choose to contact your business through a different channel, they’re forced to repeat themselves and start over.

A truly omnichannel messaging experience carries the context from channel to channel. No need for repetition.

“Omnichannel insight is holistic,” Warren explained. “Omnichannel is about being where your customers are. It’s about reducing customer friction.”

Sid and Warren touched on the 2019 State of Messaging report we published in January. Topics discussed include the dominance of WhatsApp outside of North America, and the oft cited Gartner stat that says by 2020, the average person will have more conversations with chatbots than with their spouse. When well-oiled chatbots automate processes and redirect conversations to the appropriate agents or departments, companies can provide personalized messaging experiences to their customers at scale.

“Forrester Research indicates that 77% of customers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good service.”

Engagement wherever it’s convenient for you at any point in time.

“Messaging is a conversation. Like a relationship, these conversations are persistent, evolve over time and have no defined end,” Warren said. “When the customer has a follow-up request or an entirely new question, they can effortlessly pick-up the conversation from where they left off.”

Messaging allows businesses to have asynchronous conversations with their customers, meaning that a customer can shoot a quick text, put the phone in their pocket, and be notified when they receive a response. Live, session-based chat, where a customers are forced to wait for an agent to respond lest they close the chat and lose the conversation, is disruptive in an economy where peoples' time matters.

Messaging enables us to listen to our customers and create personalized experiences at scale. According to Sid:

“Right now it’s important to recognize that more and more people, typically younger consumers are finding messaging to be a more practical way of interacting with brands. You can get responses in an asynchronous way. It’s a high CX driver.”

Leveraging conversational data

Sid explained that 65% of customers cut ties with brands with which they have bad experiences. Customer journeys are growing more sophisticated. Messaging allows brands to tap into vital information present in conversations that are otherwise routed into data warehouses and forgotten. This conversational data, leveraged across all the channels a customer can access, contains insight about the customer journey from awareness to purchase to support.

“I don’t think in today’s world we can underestimate the value in actually listening to the words our customers tell us. We’re obsessed with their clicks, their transactions, and their profile data. We’re missing the most right and valuable information we have at our fingertips, which is the words they say.”

For more insights from Sid Banerjee and to learn more about how Smooch works with Clarabridge to power customer conversations, you can watch the webinar here.