New in Smooch this month: what we’ve learned from dogfooding Smooch, support for WhatsApp’s Reply feature to a particular message; the ability to buy a support plan from the Smooch Dashboard; small updates to our APIs & web SDK. Oh and hey — we’ve won that Martech award!

What’s new 🎉

What we learned from dogfooding Smooch

Last March we challenged ourselves to create a cool conversational experience for exhibitors and attendees at Enterprise Connect, one of the biggest tech conferences for enterprise communications.

The premise was simple: We wanted to showcase the power of messaging to as many people as possible. Attendees would chat with a bot and get free stuff at our booth. Exhibitors would chat with the same bot before being handed off to a human agent. Agents coordinated deliveries with runners on the floor, zipping between booths, dropping off candy, drinks, and swag.

We’ve built the experience using Web Messenger and incorporated cool features like letting exhibitors pick the item they wanted from a carousel and capturing their contact information via a Conversation Extension. We sent delivery updates by enabling them to link their WhatsApp or mobile number to their profile as part of their check-out flow. We also experimented with an early customization framework to give our Web Messenger a makeover. We normally build the APIs you use everyday, so it was actually great to eat our own dog food and feel a bit of your pain. We’ve written a blog post about it where we talk about how we’ve built that stuff while reflecting on what it’s like to be in your shoes. Check it out here.

Support for quoted messages on WhatsApp

This month we’ve added support for Quoted Messages, WhatsApp’s Reply feature which allows users to respond to a particular message or ‘quote’ it in their reply. From now on, whenever a user replies to a particular message on WhatsApp, the payload of the quoted message will be included in webhooks and API responses.

Buy a Smooch support plan right from your Dashboard

We’ve made it easier for you to purchase our Advanced support plan in self-serve mode. Simply navigate to the Billing page in your Dashboard and pick your plan. On top of providing chat and email support, our expert team will provide architectural and operational guidance based on best practices and provide training support. Learn more about Smooch support plans here.

Other API & SDK Updates ⚙

• Source/Destination schema: We are now providing additional information for messages coming from appUsers on 3rd party channels. The originalMessageId field indicates the message identifier assigned by the originating channel and the originalMessageTimestamp field will provide the original timestamp. Find out more here.
• Web Messenger: v4.17.5 improved performance when displaying long conversations. v4.17.6 fixed the date in the message status indicator when the appMaker reads a message. v4.17.7 added margin to reply actions to unstick them from the scrollbar. v4.17.8 added a CSS class to a connection error banner for easier customization.

Check out our changelog for the complete list of updates.

Messaging News & Insights 🤓

Smooch in the news

Last month we told you Smooch was nominated for Best Chat/Conversational Bot Tool at the 2019 Martech Awards alongside Drift and Wizu — and this month we can tell you that we won! This is a big deal for us, and we’d like to thank everybody who took time to cast a vote.

This month, Smooch is a nominee in the Incite Customer Service Awards for Solution Provider of the Year! You can vote for us here. 🙏

Telecom Reseller Podcast interviewed our Cofounder and CEO, Warren Levitan, for their episode Get to Know Smooch, where they hit on topics like the state of contact centers, connecting business software to messaging channels, and keeping the customer at the center of an omnichannel solution.

Warren was also interviewed by Martech Series about conversational marketing, building a winning employee culture, and which books he's currently reading. The interview provides detailed and straightforward explanations about what Smooch does and what it can do — a must-read for anyone curious about implementing a business messaging solution.

Events

On June 3, Warren will be moderating an all-star panel at the Customer Service Summit in San Diego. If you haven’t signed up yet, get $300 off with discount code “Smooch300” — hope to see you there!

In a landmark blog post last month, Mark Zuckerberg outlined a new, “privacy-focused” vision for Facebook. The announcement signaled a fundamental shift in strategy for the embattled 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 rightly observes in his post that while social media 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 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 look up to).

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 owncryptocurrency suggest it may be on its way.

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 that 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 governing 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 too far beyond its own walled garden. Android users can currently 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 has emphasised that Facebook’s new messaging-first strategy will be based on the way they’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 the WhatsApp Business API became available to select brands last year, one of the caveats 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 wanted to engage customers on this channel and b) that Facebook was serious about bringing end-to-end encryption to business messaging.

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

This article originally appeared in Marketing Tech News on April 10 2019. You can read the original here.

This week at Smooch, a team of engineers turned a simple office gong into an emblem of democracy and communitarianism. What was once a way for the sales team to signal their successes to the office is now accessible to everyone thanks to a Slack integration. It’s part ancient Eastern tradition, part robot, part team effort. How’s that for future of work?

Our Hack Days are an opportunity for Smoochies from across the office-scape to break ranks and take on a variety of projects. Some created a dating CRM that didn’t end up working (cough, cough), while others developed more noble projects like improved employee onboarding tutorials. While those were great and might possibly be explored in future blog posts, I want to take this chance to call attention to the loud noise sounding through the room. Because it doesn’t announce itself.

Gong Days are Over

Initially, software developer FX proposed an announcement speaker as a hackathon project. People could type announcements into Slack and a speaker would say them. Nay, quoth Mike. Not ambitious enough. The gong needs to be involved. After all, if we can use Slack to feed announcements through a speaker, why can’t we use it to hit the gong? How hard can it be?

It is, after all, “obnoxious to have one team hit the gong,” according to one Smoochie speaking under the condition of anonymity. “Other teams accomplish things too.”

Gong with the wind

Here’s how the finished product works: Users type the command `/gongshow [text]` into Slack. It sends a request to a Raspberry Pi, which lives next to our Martech Award on a shelf beside the gong. The Raspberry Pi pings a controller, which releases a mallet. An arm reaches down to retrieve the mallet — fully automated. Neither human nor divine intervention is needed to reset it to its resting position. Tada! Democracy!

Under Gong-struction

How they accomplished it was surprisingly easy. Just kidding — I can’t even begin to wrap my head around this.

In the Slack workspace, you can add apps. Software developers Marc-Antoine and Mario integrated Slack with AWS, creating an app that registers commands. This is integrated with the contraption attached to the gong. When triggered, the mallet drops, sounding the gong before the announcement begins. The announcement — translated automatically into French for Loi 101 compliance — swaps text for speech and plays over a speaker.

The parts attached to the gong were made in developer Ubald’s 3D printer. Yes, he has his own 3D printer at home. Yes, he’s using it to build a hexapod robot. After the first day of Hack Days was over, he modelled the parts he needed on his computer and set the printer to work. They were ready when he woke up the next morning. Thankfully everything fit. Ubald said:

“I was very lucky because usually I print the first draft and there’s something I need to like, glue. We were lucky, everything fit nicely together”

The old me? Dead and gong

There were some hang-ups along the way. A Micro SD card needed to be swapped out before anything worked. Unplugging and replugging the wifi dongle cleared the airwaves. An`Illegal Instruction` error was rectified by swapping out Google Translate for Amazon Translate. An early iteration of the project with a small motor broke — they needed a way to easily lift the mallet while letting gravity do the swinging work. Pascal introduced a sturdier motor. Success!

The engineered gong is full of easter eggs, most of which the office is yet to discover. There’s a line of code exalting Ubald. Birthdays are announced with cushy French descriptors like “Bonne fête [NAME] avec du gâteau McCain et une médaille de vrai champion,” or “Bonne fête [NAME] avec un joyeux festin et un cirque acrobatique époustouflant.” Époustouflant indeed.

Indeed, the engineered gong is not immortal. If anybody decided to manually release the mallet, it might break. This is to say: Please do not manipulate the gong with your hands.

Here Today, Gong Tomorrow

Our Hack Days are a chance for Smoochies to break from our routines and get to know each other. We have the chance to reflect on our values as a company, blend silos, and enjoy ourselves. Creating the gong brought together talented employees from different departments while creating a tool that everybody is welcomed — if not encouraged — to use.

A lot of great things were accomplished during the Hack Days. One team worked diligently on refining our developer documentation, another turned our newsletter into a conversational experience available on Messenger — which should be coming soon! People had a chance to flex their creative muscles, learn, and have fun. And now, most importantly, we are all able to hit the gong for any reason at all.

Facebook’s planned backend integration of WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram has animated the tech world, with many drawing comparisons to China’s do-everything-messaging app WeChat.

Facebook’s pivot from public news feed to private messaging comes at a time when messaging apps have superseded social networking apps in popularity, while Conversational Commerce gains traction in retail, healthcare, and finance. But nowhere is this more true than in the travel industry.

In travel, messaging has surfaced in the CX strategies of big and small players alike, whether that’s hotel chains with a global presence like Four Seasons, or with indie startups like Snaptravel.

It’s happening with airlines, hotels, and online travel agents (OTAs), popping up during the customer journey where it wasn’t previously possible, and creating new opportunities for personalised connections between travel brands and their customers.

Pre-getaway

Today’s savvy traveller could plan a whole trip inside messaging channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger if they wanted to. Kayak’s Messenger integration compares flights and hotel deals, and answers questions like “Where can I go for $500?” (The answer? Fargo, North Dakota. Any time of year.)

WestJet’s famously compassionate chatbot Juliet can book flights and send updates in a persistent conversational thread. While the company’s bot doesn’t offer the comparative benefit of OTAs, WestJet can maintain a relationship with its most loyal customers on their favourite channel.

Hotels with web chat on their sites can answer questions, provide support, and move the conversation into messaging apps, enabling them to stay on top of their leads. Receiving a notification on their preferred channel allows customers to get an answer while they go about their day rather than waiting around on a web page.

On the hotel’s end, transferring the conversation from their website to the customer’s preferred channel allows them to extend the relationship and nurture the lead until they’re ready to convert.

In-stay? Text the desk

Guest messaging has taken off in hotels, pioneered by global chains like Four Seasons, which maintains conversations with guests across its 110 properties, and by providers like BookBoost or Okkami. Four Seasons guests can use pretty much any channel — from WhatsApp and WeChat to mobile chat and in-room iPads — to message the front desk with the same convenience as messaging a friend.

Guests can ask for a number of other services, like ordering cars or asking for recommendations of things to do. Unlike messaging a friend, the front desk doesn’t expect anything in return when they send food up to your room or judge you when you ask for photos of Jeff Goldblum on the nightstand.

Meanwhile, smaller hotels are turning to innovative startups like Bookboost to provide their guests with messaging-based digital concierge experiences.

Bookboost’s Lucas Höfer underscored the important role guest messaging plays in strengthening the relationship between the guest and the hotel. “Loyalty can mean coming back to your place or visiting the same hotel in a different city,” he said.

Messaging inspires loyalty that leads to increased time on the property, and guests that are grounded by solid relationships to their hotels will stick around to try the on-site restaurants, bars, and entertainment.

Höfer says that hotels think of their guest relationships as the most valuable asset they have. “They can’t afford the smallest inconvenience here,” he says.

Nick Daniels, co-founder of Alliants, which creates luxury guest-messaging and digital concierge services for travel brands, understands that messaging is key for brands who want to personalise customer communications at scale without sacrificing experience. “Messaging is truly the only way you can handle that volume,” he says.

“Luxury customers are paying for that recognition. Messaging is a simple method of creating a more inclusive, less formal communication structure where you can capture that information more easily.”

What comes after?

Ido Arad, co-founder of Servicefriend, which creates customer service hybrid AI solutions for selected industries, explained that while it appears that travel industry brands are slow to adopt omnichannel messaging strategies, they do recognise the benefit — especially when it concerns extending the lifetime of a customer journey.

“OTAs do see the value in messaging,” he said. “Messaging kicks in after the booking is completed, so in a way they bridge the offline and the online and continue being with the traveler. While the OTA app / website is a commodity today, messaging allows them to provide one to one personal relations that go beyond the traditional offers and creates brand locality.”

The message? Customers expect brands to be available to chat. Even more, they expect personalised, modern messaging experiences. This isn’t to signal the death knell of websites and apps — those are great starting points for messaging. Meanwhile, chat apps are surging in popularity and fast-moving startups and legacy brands alike are already adopting messaging to manage personalised conversations at scale.

A version of this article originally appeared in Travel Daily. You can read the original here.

Last month I told you about the small “t” telegram that arrived on a Michigan man’s doorstep a half-century late. Well, it seems rumors of another legacy messaging channel’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. In an op-ed for The Washington Post, history professor Jonathan Coopersmith argues people are sending more faxes than ever. This is particularly true in countries like Germany and Japan and industries like healthcare, where faxes are often seen as cheaper, more secure and more convenient than newfangled channels like email. Coopersmith doesn’t mention Slack or WhatsApp (or chat in general), but he does see the (digital) writing on the wall:

Eventually, the older generation of people more comfortable with faxing than emailing will fade away. Until then, fax machines will whirl away.

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.

The rapid rise of the customer data platform suggests brands understand more than ever that customer experience is the new battleground for business. According to Walker, a CX consulting firm, 2020 will be the year customer experience surpasses price and even product as the key competitive differentiator.

If businesses are going to deliver a truly exceptional experience to customers, the first thing they need to do is understand who they’re talking to. In The Experience Economy — as Ben Thompson dubs our CX-driven era — achieving the elusive “360 degree view of the customer” has become the holy grail for brands.

In this pursuit to ‘know your customer,’ there are numerous data points brands are becoming used to working from — demographics, location, past behaviors, and transactions. It could be argued however, that there are none as useful, as seemingly obvious, and as untapped as what a customer is actually saying.

The conversational revolution

The recent rise of conversational interfaces and AI have made customer words more abundant and accessible than ever. From live chat to messaging apps to chatbots and voice assistants, these new digital channels allow customers to communicate with brands in the same personal and immediate way they interact with friends and family. And they’re doing it in huge numbers.

Last year, people and businesses around the world exchanged over 10 billion messages each month — on Facebook Messenger alone. Meanwhile, the emergence of conversational marketing tools like Drift and Intercom has brought modern messaging to hundreds of thousands of corporate websites.

An ability to collect, store, aggregate, analyze, and ultimately act upon the actual words customers are saying to them, would surely enable brands to deliver the type of intelligent and seamless experiences their customers pine for.

So what’s holding them back?

The customer data dilemma

According to a recent Forbes Insights/Treasure Data survey, 78 percent of businesses either have, or are developing, a customer data platform. The idea is to ingest a wide variety of customer data from all of a business’ channels and systems, which can then be accessed by any authorized business system.

The goal? To develop better customer insights and offer more personalized experiences. But while these platforms are equipped to deliver all sorts of behavioral, transactional, and demographic data, the missing piece of the customer data puzzle is conversational data.

The problem with leaving conversations out of the mix is that all the information a customer is giving you directly — from their own (digital) mouths — is being disregarded in favor of increasingly broad, data-bourne assumptions. This then leaves brands in a position where they’re forced to offer customers an orange because they appear from the data to be an ‘orange type of person’ when they just told you directly they like apples.

The conversational data pool

Over the course of the past year, nearly all the major messaging providers — including Apple, Facebook/WhatsApp, and Google — have started opening their platforms to businesses. This rise of business messaging is set to produce a treasure trove of conversational data — chat history and context — that businesses can begin to use and gain a more complete and personal view of their customers. It’s the juiciest of low-hanging fruit for CX-focused brands.

The catch?

Customer conversations currently live across a multitude of disconnected channels, each with their own separate APIs and data structures, and each frequently piped into a distinct customer engagement platform, siloed off both from the other channels and from the rest of a business’ customer data.

Now imagine a business was able to access everything a customer has ever said to them. Their emails to customer service, live chats with sales, phone calls with the order help line, SMS messages, interactions with the Facebook bot, social posts with brand mentions, etc. Imagine they could all be organized in a unified conversation timeline, combined with the transactional and behavioral data and formatted in a way that was easily processed by a company’s NLP or AI assets.

The opportunities unlocked with this type of conversational data pool are endless. A few examples could include:

Informed agents

With conversational data at their fingertips customer service agents can get away from effectively dealing with a stranger every time and instantly provide informed and contextualized support to each customer. No frustrated customers having to repeat themselves over and over again. The whole experience becomes… human.

Surface customer insights

Beyond giving agents historical context to better serve individual customers in real time, businesses could also mine their conversational data in aggregate. By analyzing common support questions, product inquiries, trends, and requests, they can surface actionable insights for their marketing, sales, business operations, and product teams.

If behavioral and transactional data give businesses valuable clues about what products and services customers are interested in, conversational data confirms it right from the proverbial horse’s mouth.

Connect conversations across the enterprise

The first thing a conversational data platform needs to do is unify a business’ conversational data across channels, which includes global messaging apps like WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat as well as SMS, email, web messaging (RIP live chat!), and even voice.

Next, it needs to allow a business’ various systems to access the data, from marketing to sales to customer support. A platform that connects all of a business’ systems of record and engagement on one end, and all available user channels on the other, becomes an incredibly powerful conversational data store that can power a variety of transformational experiences for both businesses and customers.

Imagine a user on WhatsApp who asks about a specific product instead of browsing your brand’s website. They might engage with a human using live chat software or a product discovery bot. Once the customer goes on their merry way, without making a purchase, wouldn’t you want your marketing software to be aware of the conversation and generate an email (or WhatsApp message!) offering additional product information or promoting a discount on that very item?

From retargeting campaigns based on customer requests to churn reduction campaigns based on sentiment analysis, conversational data combined with today’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) allows brands to truly listen to what their customers are communicating to them at scale — through words, actions and, of course, emojis — and respond accordingly.

What have your customers told you lately? If delivering a more personal and personalized customer experience is your goal, being able to answer that question is a critical first step.

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

In the wake of last Sunday’s Easter bombings, Sri Lanka blocked residents from accessing the country’s most popular social media and messaging apps, including Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Viber.

As Mother Jones reports, the platforms were blocked to prevent the spread of viral misinformation from inciting further violence. But some are wondering if the government ban might have done more harm than good.

The privacy paradox ⚔️

The ongoing shift from public to private messaging channels is a double-edged sword. In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, messaging apps — particularly those with end-to-end-encryption like WhatsApp, iMessage and Telegram – offer data-wary users a more private and secure alternative to social media sharing.

At the same time, end-to-end-encryption means criminal activity can be impossible to intercept — just ask Robert Mueller — and deadly disinformation can spread like wildfire, as we saw in India this year. The backlash has become so intense that even New York Times columnist Kara Swisher, a veteran tech reporter, applauded Sri Lanka’s decision:

It pains me as a journalist, and someone who once believed that a worldwide communications medium would herald more tolerance, to admit this — to say that my first instinct was to turn it all off.

The blame game 🐐

Not everyone feels this way.

Wired notes that Sri Lanka has a long history of sectarian violence and that messaging risks “becoming a scapegoat for longstanding tensions between ethnic and religious groups.”

Sri Lankans rely on messaging apps to circumvent state media and to keep in touch with loved ones — especially in times of crisis. We’ve seen this play out in Iran, where the authoritarian regime’s year-old Telegram ban may have stymied emergency flood relief efforts. As one activist told Wired:

For those in danger, and for those who want to help, not being able to connect or confirm that a loved one is safe can be devastating.

For every messaging-affiliated horror story there’s an inspiring counterexample about surgeons using WhatsApp to save lives in rural Malawi, or a chatbot that helps combat anti-vaccination propaganda. (There’s also a bot for binge-watching Game of Thrones, in case you need more drama in your life). Messaging won’t solve all the world’s problems.

But it shouldn’t be blamed for them either.

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: Spin up WhatsApp API Clients by yourself in minutes; we’ve added appUser details back inside webhooks; a sneak peek at what’s coming for Web Messenger this May; a new authentication API for our mobile SDKs & more!

What’s new 🎊

Spin up WhatsApp API Clients programmatically

Can’t get your customers on WhatsApp fast enough? We’ve got awesome news for you. We just released our new Deployment API to help you deploy WhatsApp API Clients by yourself. No need to get help from Smooch’s Customer Success team, you can do this on your own right now! For the moment, this new API is only available for WhatsApp-approved Customer Service Platforms. If that’s your case, this means that once your customers have been approved by WhatsApp, you’ll be able to spin up an API Client in minutes ⚡⏱⚡.

We’re currently also working on updating the Smooch Dashboard so you can create WhatsApp API Clients directly from there instead of creating them programmatically. Coming soon!

Check out our handy guide and our API reference documentation for the new Deployment API to learn more.

AppUser details are now back inside webhooks

When we introduced API versioning a few months back and shipped v1.1, we removed appUser details from webhooks to reduce the size of their payload. While it allowed us to optimize our webhook implementation, we received feedback from some of you that this change makes your integration more complicated. We’ve revised our design and reintroduced appUser details into webhook payloads 😬.

New includeClient and includeFullAppUser settings have been added to webhooks. When turned on, includeFullAppUser adds properties, surname, givenName and signedUpAt to the appUser object. This setting is on by default, even for existing v1.1 webhooks. includeClient adds the client associated with the webhook event and you must opt-in to this setting. Check out an example webhook payload here.

Sneak peek 👀

Collect information from users more easily on Web Messenger

Some exciting stuff will be coming your way mid-May in regards to user data capture on our Web Messenger. We’ve been hard at work to make it super easy for businesses to collect lead and customer information while they are chatting with them on their website. Think built-in pre-chat information capture and in-conversation forms to help collect things like names, phone numbers, emails, addresses & more!

Other API & SDK Updates ⚙

• WhatsApp: We shipped a temporary fix for a WhatsApp bug that would affect delivery events when HSMs are sent to an iOS device. When using v1.1 `message:delivery:*` events, HSM messages that are sent to users on WhatsApp iOS would not receive a failure event if the HSM could not be rendered. This bug is on the WhatsApp side (they incorrectly send a delivery event indicating success and failure), but we added a delay in our delivery events logic to handle this bug, so that you can get the correct delivery status.
• New authentication API for mobile SDKs: We’ve updated our Android SDK 5.18.0 and iOS SDK 6.13.0 to now accept an authentication delegate as an init setting that gets notified when a request fails because of an invalid JWT, allowing you to renew credentials without having to call login.
  

Check out our changelog for the complete list of updates.

Messaging News & Insights 🤓

Smooch in the News

At the beginning of the month, our Editorial Director Dan Levy wrote a piece for Marketing Tech, posing the question of whether or not Facebook’s pivot to privacy has anything to do with business messaging. We’d love for you to check it out.

Our CEO Warren published a piece in The Next Web about conversational data. With business messaging quickly becoming the new normal, customer conversations can provide key insights that allow brands to develop more personalized customer experiences.

In mid-April, Jesse, our Trends Analyst, penned an article for Travel Daily on how chat is asserting itself across the travel industry, and what that means for customer experience.

Last week the UN and World Bank revealed a surprising stat that went largely unnoticed. At some point in the last decade, the number of cell phones grew larger than the earth’s population.

As Quartz reports, this doesn’t mean everyone owns a phone (and certainly not a smartphone). But it does help explain why, for many around the world, mobile messaging and the internet have become indistinguishable.

No internet who dis 🤔

Here’s another fun fact. According to Pew Research Center, millions of people now use the internet without even realizing it. In developing countries, as many as 14% of adults surveyed said they do not use the internet, yet they reported using over-the-top messaging apps like WhatsApp on their phones.

Dubbed “unconscious internet users,” this group exists in the developed world as well. Only 90% of South Koreans, for example, reported using the internet, even though 97% said they own a smartphone or use social media. In the U.S., one quarter of people who denied using the internet indicated they own a smartphone.

Messaging first ☝️

Pew suggests that while this may seem like a “niche issue,” having an accurate measure of how much of the population is online can be crucial for policy-making and ensuring free access to information.

The phenomenon also helps explain why the world’s leading tech companies — namely Apple, Facebook and Google — have become so obsessed with connecting businesses and consumers over messaging.

Apple has been busy rolling out Business Chat internationally, allowing Australian students to seek financial aid over iMessage, for example.

Google continues to pursue its two-pronged strategy, encouraging phone carriers and device manufacturers to ditch SMS in favor of the richer, more business-friendly RCS, while quietly building its own enterprise messaging platform on top of the all-powerful Google search engine.

Meanwhile, at the annual F8 developer conference last week, Facebook doubled down on its private messaging pivot, announcing a sleek new version of Messenger and hinting at a host of new features for WhatsApp, including payments and product catalogs.

In a blog post about the Messenger redesign, Facebook’s head of consumer messaging put it plainly:

If we were to start to build a social network today, we’d start with messaging first.

It won’t be long until people around the world consider messaging a business as unremarkable as… being online.

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.

On November 10, 2015 fourteen of us gathered in six-thousand square feet of empty office space on the top floor of 5333 Casgrain in Montreal. Six days later we would spin out of the former Radialpoint and collectively found Smooch.

Standing together that day, overlooking Montreal’s famous Mile End neighborhood, we clinked champagne glasses (Okay, they were plastic cups with cheap sparkling wine) and toasted to our vision of a future where every business in the world could treat each customer with the same personal warmth and respect of a close friend. At the time, our vision of customer love seemed so very far away from the frustrating on-hold times and live chat queues, de-humanizing case numbers and online forms, and impersonal no-reply notifications we had all become far too accustomed to.

Three-and-a-half years later we couldn’t be more proud to be at the forefront of the most significant change in how brands and consumers communicate in decades. We have seen the launches of Facebook Messenger for Business, WhatsApp Business API, Apple Business Chat, Google Business Messaging and RCS, each of which Smooch was an early adopter and integrator of. Enterprise demand for these channels and their superior customer experiences have driven our growth handsomely. We have also benefited from the rising tides of conversational commerce and conversational marketing, which contributed to the popularity of our market leading web and mobile SDKs that can integrate with any customer helpdesk, contact center or customer engagement platform.

We generated revenue from our first month in business, and our unique approach to the market allowed us to grow over 15% per month or almost 450% per year since founding. It’s been absolutely wild. We were always told that we'll know what product-market fit feels like, and boy was that true! Today, our headless API and SDK-based platform, combined with our ecosystem of over 100 integrated CX platforms, allows more than 4,000 businesses to build richer relationships with their tens of millions of consumers every month through messaging conversations.

From our 14 founders, we have grown to more than 60 Smoochies who are so proud to support a global customer base that includes the greatest CX brands and software products that exist:  Zendesk, Oracle, Genesys, Freshdesk, Khoros (formerly Lithium), Clarabridge, LiveChat, Four Seasons, Uber, Betterment, Harry’s, LVMH, Delivery Hero, BarkBox and so many more incredible companies. All in less than four years.

Today, we begin the next chapter of this unlikely story: joining the Zendesk team.

While this is definitely an unplanned — and if you asked us only a few months ago, a never going-to-happen — outcome for Smooch, it is one that we believe will supercharge our mission to make customer relationships more human and make Smooch more powerful and transformative than we would be on our own.

You may be thinking: doesn’t Smooch’s headless platform strategy conflict with Zendesk’s multi-application CRM suite strategy? Obviously Zendesk, one of Smooch’s oldest customers, is simply trying to take us off the market, right? Hell no.

We have always said we were a terrible acquisition target since our open platform strategy requires a legendary embrace of co-opetition to deliver all the value from Smooch. But Zendesk has convinced us, and their acquisition of Smooch should convince you, of their shared vision to be a truly open platform. Last Fall Zendesk launched Sunshine — an open and flexible CRM platform built to deliver the next generation of customer intimacy by letting brands connect and better understand their customer data. While it will take time for our joint teams to get there, Smooch couldn’t plug-in more beautifully to Sunshine, with Smooch’s conversational data model ultimately allowing brands to connect all their conversations with the rest of their customer data.

When we learned about the depth of Zendesk’s vision for Sunshine and their team’s commitment to building a truly open platform, we were blown away. There are many customer data platforms out there, but no one who shares Smooch’s vision for the power and importance of conversational data like Zendesk. And there is no company or team of people in the world who share our level of passion and commitment to enabling truly amazing customer experiences.

So, whether you’re already a Zendesk customer or not, nothing changes today from the Smooch you know. We have been proud to serve our incredible customers as Smooch, and we look forward to serving them just as we have to date under the Zendesk name — only now backed by a remarkable, committed team of over 3,000 new colleagues across the globe. Rather than expecting any change to our vision, our roadmap, our service or scalability, expect a doubling down!

Thank you to all of our customers and partners who helped us get to where we are. We look forward to continuing to build the future of customer experience together. And to the 145,000 Zendesk customer accounts we don’t yet know, we can’t wait to serve you as well.

To the Smooch team, what can we possibly say? From the founding 14 to today’s crew of 60 rock stars, you have been our inspiration. You define everything that is Smooch. We talk about one of our core values being “enjoying the journey together” and this remains more true than ever. Joining Zendesk may be the end of one journey, but it is also the beginning of another. A journey that holds only greater opportunity to help businesses deepen and enrich their customer relationships through conversation.

So thank you to every Smooch team member who helped get us here, and special thanks also go out to our financial partners.  Real Ventures and JS — it took us a while, but we finally found a first opportunity to partner on, thank you.  iNovia, with very special call outs to Chris Arsenault and Sarah Marion, you define a founders-first culture and every VC firm on the planet can learn from you. Thank you for your guidance and most importantly always having our backs.  John Meeks and Hythem El-Nazer from TA Associates — what a long strange trip it’s been from where we began back in 2008!  When it comes to growth equity, you will always be our first and hopefully (!) last call, and we thank you for being the most steadfast partners anyone could ask for.

Finally, thank you to Mikkel, Adrian, John, Ben, Brett and the rest of Zendesk leadership whose commitment to Smooch has always been so humbling. We can't wait to walk into the Sunshine together!

💜Warren, Mike and Hamnett

Xoxo

At Smooch, it’s common for interns to provide feedback on a senior developer’s pull request. Is that weird? Maybe, but then again, maybe not. Let me explain.

I’ve worked at large and small companies during my career and participated in a variety of code review cultures. On some teams, code review is a battleground where engineers wield seniority like a sword. On other teams code review is a clerical approval gate, where work languishes in a queue for days only to get a timid rubber stamp at the end without any feedback. On some teams, code review doesn’t happen at all — and a year later when you look at your colleague’s code for the first time it feels like the Lewis & Clark expedition.

But there are teams who take a more practical approach to code review —and they’re rewarded for it.

It’s natural to assume that because code review happens before deployment, its main purpose is to detect faults. A thorough code review might surface ideas for better internal design, but it’s ineffective when it comes to catching bugs. In fact, when a developer addresses a Pull Request nitpick in a rush to get something out the door they might end up introducing a bug at the last minute (we've all been there).

Modern software teams tend to ship code at a fast cadence. If you want to deploy new versions of your code weekly or daily, you need to handle fault detection with automated tests. Static code analysis performed by humans will never catch as many bugs as a comprehensive suite of automated tests.

Why review code?

I see three reasons.

These three reasons ought to be regarded as equal branches of the code review government.

Software design has the most obvious appeal. Code review occasionally does catch faults, and it's a great forum where non-functional aspects of software craftsmanship are discussed.

The other two reasons are often forgotten or neglected. For this reason, I want to focus on them specifically.

Learning the code

When you read a piece of code for the first time, it takes a little while to get through it. As you traverse the jungle, your mind hacks away the vines and places mental waypoints. These waypoints help you walk those trails with ease the next time around. The code landscape will evolve over time, and your waypoints will eventually grow stale. Performing regular code reviews is a great way to incrementally keep yourself up to date.  

You also contribute new code to the project from time to time. Having an up-to-date understanding of the code allows you to do this more quickly. It reduces the chance of making incongruent design decisions and it helps to inspire worthwhile code refactorings down the road.

Learning how to code

This is by far the most under-appreciated benefit of code review. I’ve worked on teams where all code needed to be reviewed by a senior developer, or where only senior developers were expected to perform code reviews. Hogging the code review responsibility is a great way to stunt the growth of interns and junior developers.
Like any other trade, you can only learn how to create software by doing it.

Inspecting a code change, understanding its implications, and considering alternatives are skills that you can only learn through practice. If you're not reviewing code, you're not learning. Software is a young and evolving field. There are always new techniques and tools colleagues will want to show each other, which has nothing to do with seniority. We are all self-taught, it doesn't matter how long you've been in the business. I profess to be a senior member of my team and I learn new things from interns all the time. Code review is my primary channel for learning new sleight of hand.

Code review worst practices

While it's great to talk about what benefits good code review can bring it's equally important to talk about what can go wrong.

Approval Gates

Suppose you were to select a small set of talented senior developers to serve as your "code review board," where all PRs must be approved by at least one of them. You've just implicitly painted this small team with shared accountability over everyone else's contributions to the codebase. They will be highly incentivized to nitpick. You've created an approval gate. Gross.

Worse still, this small team gets stretched thin tackling a code review workload that ought to be carried by the team as a whole. A "review board" PR process might ensure strong consistency in your code, but it will grind your schedule to a halt.

The blame game

It's important to talk about how a code review process can fall off the rails.

Have you ever shipped a bug? Of course you have. Whose fault was it really? You, the author of the code, or the developer who reviewed your code and approved your PR? It's a trick question. While you were worrying about who's to blame you should have been more concerned about accountability and autonomy. The difference is subtle but crucial.

Suppose we held reviewers accountable for all of the code they approve. The reviewer would be incentivized to request endless changes from the author, perhaps going back and forth over multiple revisions. They'll expect to have their way, even when the author disagrees.

At some point you begin to wonder if it would be simpler for the reviewer to just rewrite the code themselves. Then the epiphany hits you: perhaps the author is the one who should hold the accountability and ownership of the code they ship.

In the end, the code reviewer must serve as a guide, not a gate, and rank shouldn't matter. At Smooch, the author of the code has final say. Passionate disagreements are not uncommon. An author might disagree with a reviewer's PR comment, but they must act in good faith: they must at the very least explain their side before they proceed.

Hopefully by now it's clear why everyone on the dev team (including interns!) should be performing code reviews.

Culture of feedback

Have you ever noticed that software developers tend to be a bit pedantic? That's because compilers are pedantic and we talk to compilers all day every day. What you do all day tends to rub off on you in unexpected ways.

The same is true with code review. We spend hours doing code reviews. If you get accustomed to a nasty battleground PR culture, you'll be crusty and argumentative in real life. However, if you have a code review culture built on mutual respect and strong, clear accountability, where colleagues assume the best of intentions in every PR comment, you'll develop a team culture where feedback is openly given and graciously received.

Amazon’s Alexa and similar voice-activated assistants have been a big hit, but few consumers use them to shop. Here are some reasons why, and some steps that retailers and technologists are taking to overcome the obstacles to conversational commerce.

You’ve seen the stats about voice assistants. Nearly one in five U.S. adults had one in their home last year. Half of all searches will be voice-based by 2020. More than 100 million Alexa-enabled devices have been sold. Sounds impressive. But despite the hype about voice-enabled devices powering the next wave of conversational commerce, the question remains:

Why aren’t people actually using them to buy stuff?

Opening Pandora’s Box

Less than a third of voice-activated speaker owners used them to make purchases last year. As shown in Smooch’s “2019 State of Messaging” report, consumers use their devices to play music, check the weather and get their news, but few are using them to shop.

Some of the largest music streaming services are hoping people will change their tune. In April, Pandora announced it would be launching voice-enabled ads that will let listeners ask for more information, place an order, or skip past the ad via voice commands.

The idea, according to TechCrunch, is to allow advertisers to target people “at times they aren’t typically able to respond—like when they’re out running, at the gym, driving or cooking.”

Now Spotify is joining the fray, with voice-powered ads by Unilever set to debut on the platform this month. By encouraging consumers to engage with an ad’s call to action in real time, Pandora and Spotify are hoping to help marketers overcome one of the major obstacles of voice-based advertising: Unlike web and mobile ads, which can be measured through things like impressions and clicks, traditional audio ads aren’t clickable.

OK Google, Got Milk?

Walmart is taking a more direct-to-consumer approach to voice commerce. The retail giant announced a new grocery-ordering capability on Google Assistant-powered devices.

After initiating a conversation by saying, “OK Google, Talk to Walmart,” users can order items immediately or add them to a shopping list as soon as they realize they’ve run out—an experience that better reflects how people shop for groceries. The bot maintains context by keeping track of previous orders so customers don’t have to repeat a product’s full name, as TechCrunch explains: Instead, they could just say “milk” and the assistant would know they mean the “1 gallon of 1% Great Value organic milk” they ordered last time.

The Diversity Dilemma

While these developments are promising, voice commerce faces many of the same challenges as the uptake of business messaging:

• Disappointing AI (the key to scalability).
• Questions around discoverability (those interactive ads should help).
• Growing concerns around consumer privacy (apparently Amazon may be listening after all).

Voice assistants have also been accused of perpetuating the inherent biases of their Silicon Valley-based developers.

For a Washington Post study, Researchers tested both Alexa and Google Home to see how users with different accents interacted with the devices. They found that people with Southern accents were 3 percent less likely to get accurate responses from Google Home than those with Western accents.

Alexa, meanwhile, accurately responded to people with Midwestern accents 2 percent less than those from the East Coast.

Non-native speakers had the most frustrating experiences. People whose first language is Spanish, for instance, were understood 6 percent less than those from the West Coast—which happens to be where Amazon, Google and most other tech giants are based.

Although the gap may seem small, the report suggests that as voice technology spreads, this can become a significant handicap, exacerbating issues like wealth inequality and social isolation.

Right On, Q

Software makers have also come under fire for programming their voice assistants with women’s voices, reinforcing perceptions of “female servitude,” as The Next Web puts it.

To fight back, a team of linguists, sound designers and activists have created Q, which they’re calling the world’s first genderless voice. They recorded the voices of two dozen people across the gender identity spectrum to arrive at a frequency range most people perceive as gender neutral (take a listen, it’s pretty trippy). The group is lobbying Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft to integrate Q into their voice assistants.

It won’t solve all our Big Tech problems, but it’s a step toward making automation more inclusive.

This article originally appeared in Digital Commerce 360. You can read it here.

TL;DR: Today we’re launching Forms, a new way to capture leads and customer information in the Web Messenger. Bonus: we’re also launching our new Conversational Design Kit to help product and design teams build great conversational experiences for the web.  

Who says forms are dead? The arguments against forms are fuzzy at best. Nobody wants to fill out forms? Forms aren’t interactive enough? We say no way. We believe forms have a time and place — and that place is inside conversations. How’s that for interactive?

You’re already having conversations with your customers. Conversations, as we’ve discussed, provide a goldmine of insight about your customers, and empower your agents to provide personalized messaging experiences at scale. Conversations are our raison d’être after all, and we’re inspired to make them better.

Introducing Forms for Web Messenger

Today, we’re happy to launch Forms, a new capability for Web Messenger. With Forms, businesses can combine the best of both worlds: easily capturing and structuring information from customers and prospects, delivered in the context of a chat conversation on your website.

Embedded into the chat, forms enable end users to provide the critical information your business needs — completely in the context of the conversation. Customize any field for info like names, emails, or build tailored dropdown menus for easy and intuitive data capture.

Supported use cases

Forms can be used in many different ways. You can send a form to ask pre-qualifying questions to a sales prospect, collect contact information from a customer, route users to the right department within the business, ask security questions, and even send mini-surveys. The possibilities are almost endless because we’ve made these forms customizable. And since forms are rendered natively with full functionality in the Web Messenger, they keep totally on brand with the look and feel you’ve given your web chat.

We’ve also given you the ability to send forms at any moment during a conversation. That might mean pre-chat capture, where you can ask for a user’s information before the start of a conversation, initializing the conversation with the business once they’ve submitted their details.

You also can send a custom form after the conversation has begun or after a bot has handed over the conversation to a human. You even have the option of stopping the conversation until the user has completed the form. It’s up to you to decide what the rules are, and when and how users can fill out forms.

How it works

In order for a business to send an embedded form, we’ve created a new native message type called `form`. A form message can be sent via the Smooch API or using a template.

To quickly enable agents to send forms, you can set them up as canned messages or ‘saved replies’ that they’ll be able to use. This can be done using Template Messages which lets you do this for any type of messages Smooch supports.

Give it a test drive now! Send this message to yourself on Smooch:

%((template: lead_capture))%

and check out the results on Web Messenger.

Form fields and field validation

Form fields will accommodate different types of data, either text, email or a dropdown list. Text and email fields come with integrated validation and you can set a minimum or maximum number of characters, which can be pretty handy if, for example, you’re asking for confirmation, order numbers or customer IDs.

Forms support up to a maximum of 20 fields, with the select field supporting a list of up to 20 options.

Receiving form responses

Every field that customers and prospects fill out gets validated and locked one-by-one. Once the form has been duly completed by the user, a `formResponse` is sent back to the business and the original appMaker form message gets updated with the appUser’s answers. More details on that here.

Oh, one more thing 🍎

Bonus release! Introducing our Conversational Design Kit for Web Messenger

The Smooch Design team is proud to launch the first version of our Conversational Design Kit. This kit, which comes as a Sketch file, is meant to help product teams (think Product Managers and Designers) to build great conversational experiences on Web Messenger. It makes creating target designs for different conversational use cases like concierge bots or reservation flows easier, removing some of the weight off your shoulders by giving you a base canvas to work with. This new kit will also help you quickly understand the branding capabilities of Web Messenger and create customized branding by changing just a few color swatches.

Version 0.1 covers chat frames, action buttons and form messages. This is still early days and we’re looking to continually build out this tool. We hope you find it helpful and would be grateful if you shared your feedback with us at design@smooch.io. ❤️

We hope you’re just as thrilled as we are with these Web Messenger updates. We’re constantly adding more features to our Web SDK to make it one of the richest on the market, empowering you to deliver truly great experiences for your customers and enabling you to power use cases that differentiate you from the pack.

Next up, we’ve been working on making our Web Messenger more visible on websites by allowing you to engage sooner with customers with proactive messaging. Stay tuned for more on that!

To take advantage of Forms for Web Messenger, make sure to update to the latest 4.18.0 version and check out our new Forms guide for the how-to.

New in Smooch this month: Smooch has joined the Zendesk family; we’re launching Forms in Web Messenger; we’ve shipped our first ever Design Kit; you can now programmatically merge two users in Smooch; we’re spilling the beans on our code review culture; we’ve got two cool events you won’t want to miss; and we’ve made a few tweaks to our APIs and SDKs.

What’s new 🎊

We've joined Zendesk!

ICYMI, we are now part of the Zendesk family 🥳. While this is definitely an unplanned — and if you asked us only a few months ago, a never-going-to-happen — outcome for Smooch, it’s one we believe will supercharge our mission to make customer relationships more human and make Smooch more powerful and transformative than we would be on our own.

Whether or not you’re a Zendesk customer, nothing will change from the Smooch you know today. Rather than changing our vision, roadmap, service or scalability, expect us to double down.

Check out our blog post to learn more about this announcement.

Forms for Web Messenger are here!

We’re excited to launch Forms, a new capability for Web Messenger.  With Forms, businesses can easily capture and structure information from customers and prospects — delivered in the context of a conversation on your site.

Embedded into the chat, forms enable end users to provide the critical information your business needs without taking customers out of the conversation. Customize any field for info like names, emails, or build tailored dropdown menus for easy and intuitive data capture.

Forms can be used in many different ways. You can send a form to ask pre-qualifying questions to a sales prospect, collect contact information, route users to the right department within the business, ask security questions, and even send mini-surveys. The possibilities are almost endless because we’ve made these forms customizable. And since forms are rendered natively with full functionality in the Web Messenger, they keep totally on brand with the look and feel you’ve given your web chat.

Check out our announcement to learn more and read our guide to find out how Forms work. Make sure to upgrade to Web Messenger v4.18.0 to use this new capability.

A new Design Kit for product and design teams

The Smooch Design team is proud to launch the first version of our Conversational Design Kit. This kit, which comes as a Sketch file, is meant to help product teams (think Product Managers and Designers) to build great conversational experiences on Web Messenger. It makes creating target designs for different conversational use cases — like concierge bots or reservation flows — easier, giving you a base canvas to work with. This new kit will also help you quickly realize the branding capabilities of Web Messenger and tailor your branding by changing just a few color swatches.

Version 0.1 covers chat frames, action buttons and form messages. We’re still in our early days and we’re excited to continually build out this tool. We hope you find it helpful and would be grateful if you shared your feedback with us at design@smooch.io. ❤️

Programmatically merge users in Smooch

We’ve added a new way to merge users when you’ve determined they’re the same person. Smooch was already merging users automatically as a result of a channel transfer or when an anonymous user logged in, but you can now trigger a merge on your end.

If the business is able to confirm that two users in fact refer to the same person, a merge can be triggered programmatically by providing the IDs of the surviving and discarded user to the Merge User API.

It’s important to note that Smooch does not perform any verification for merges triggered via the API. It is the business' responsibility to confirm that the two users refer to the same person before invoking the API. Check out our comprehensive Merge Users Guide to learn more about when mergers occur, how they work and how to handle merge events.

Why we let our interns review code

When our engineering team isn’t shipping awesome features, they’re dishing out awesome content. This month, Andrew Lavers, Technical Lead, lifts the veil on our code review process and discusses why everybody should be reviewing code — including interns.

At Smooch, our code review culture is built on mutual respect and strong, clear accountability, where colleagues assume the best of intentions in every PR comment. That has helped us develop a team culture where feedback is openly given and graciously received. Read Andrew’s post here.

Other API & SDK Updates ⚙

• Client schema: The Get App User Channel Entities endpoint has been marked as deprecated in favor of the new externalId field on the client schema.
• Web Messenger: v4.17.15 was released with two new API functions for managing user typing activity, Smooch.startTyping() and Smooch.stopTyping().

Check out our changelog for the complete list of updates.

Events 📅

Customer Contact Week, June 24-28

We’ll be at Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas June 24-28. We’ll be running the Chat Boutique, our conversational concierge service for exhibitors again this year and we have a few surprises for you 😉.

Webinar: The Social Media Shift to Private Messaging, June 27

We're teaming up with Falcon.io to talk about how evolving customer expectations drive the need for omnichannel engagement. Join Zendesk VP of Conversational Business Warren Levitan (former CEO of Smooch!) and Falcon's Community Marketing Lead Dino Kuckovic for a webinar on what’s up with WhatsApp, customer engagement, and AI. Register now!

Insights from the Collision Growth Summit

Warren Levitan, co-founder of Smooch and now VP Conversational Business at Zendesk took to the stage at Collision Conference’s Growth Summit last month to tell a little story.

"In 2019, we can declare that messaging is officially open for business," he said. But there's a problem.

Projected on the screen behind him is a scatter plot of enterprise software logos contrasted with popular messaging channels. Businesses-side, they're disconnected and siloed. Customers don't have it any better — they're forced to repeat themselves with every business interaction.

“This is why you have fragmented customer experiences,” Warren said under the glow of blue and pink lights.

“This is why business can’t get the 360 degree view of their customers that they want. Data silos everywhere. Conversations lost. This is what Smooch helps to fix.”

The way we communicate has changed. In the past year, Facebook/WhatsApp, Apple, and Google have all opened their messaging platforms as a new frontier for customer conversations. These conversations are invaluable gateways to understanding your customer — especially in an age where experience has become a key brand differentiator.

Check out Warren's keynote below:

If you want to learn more about connecting your business to messaging channels like WhatsApp, Messenger, and WeChat, drop us a line. We're always down for a chat.

New in Smooch this month: Voxable and Tisane are now available in the integrations directory; a sneak peek at proactive messaging within our Web SDK; a couple small tweaks to our Android and Web SDKs; events, articles, TV appearances and more!

What’s new 🎊

More integrations

For those of you who weren’t already in the know, we maintain an integrations directory. It’s basically a front end marketplace that allows you to easily connect a variety of channels, business systems, bots —and even hire an expert — all from the convenience of the Smooch dashboard. We regularly add new integrations to the marketplace. In June, we added two:

• Voxable designs and develops chatbots and voice interfaces. They also hold conversational workshops, which are designed to help you think more thoughtfully and intuitively about the way you build chatbots and voice interfaces. Look for them in the Hire an Expert section of the marketplace.
• Tisane is an API that performs sentiment analysis and abuse detection for your apps — in any language. With Tisane, your applications are able to find out what your customers liked or didn’t like, extract topics and date/time references, and detect hate speech, cyberbullying and sexual harassment. All this is available in 27 languages. Look for them in the Others section.

CCW Vegas

ICYMI, our Chat Boutique, which allows conference attendees to order snacks and swag through a Smooch-powered Web SDK, continued its road trip.The latest stop was Las Vegas, where we hit up Customer Contact Week (CCW) for a second year in a row!

We made some tweaks to the entire Web Messenger experience. We would send participants a carousel that allowed them to order free stuff intended to enhance their experience at the event. We also showcased our new forms feature to participants, allowing our State of Messaging 2019 report to be ordered directly from within the Chat Boutique, without ever having to leave the messaging experience.

This isn’t the first time you’ve heard about us eating our own dogfood. The more we build on our own platform — connecting Smooch to various bots and business systems the same way our customers do — the more we appreciate that building amazing customer experiences comes with unique challenges (and, of course, opportunities to amaze). We’re grateful that exhibitors really engaged with us. In doing so, we found a number of feature improvements we will look to roll out in future releases of our Web SDK.

Sneak Peek 👀

Proactive Messages

Guess what? You’ll soon be able to send visitors proactive messages using our Web SDK! Think of it as a way of driving higher engagement from visitors on your website, regardless of what your specific use case might be.

In the example below, the Web SDK automatically starts a conversation, which hovers above the chat icon and asks the visitor whether or not they are interested in WhatsApp. The visitor does not have to click the chat icon for the conversation to start. We’re still hard at work building out this feature, but we were so excited for you to see it in action that you can grab a sneak peek of it here on our website.

Other API & SDK Updates ⚙

• Android SDK has been updated in v6.1.0 so that a conversation now opens at the start of the last unread messages. In addition, conversations now display a marker incidicating the unread message count, as displayed here:

• Web Messenger now includes a new delegate method, making it easier to recover from authentication errors (which is common when using JWTs with an expiration date). The new `onInvalidAuth` method will be called whenever a request results in an authentication error, now allowing for the opportunity to renew the user's credentials. This delegate method was released in v4.19.0 and is now available in all of our SDKs.Also in Web Messenger, we added two new events in v4.19.3: `webview:opened` and `webview:closed`. Use this if you want to monitor when a user opens and closes the webview.

Be sure to check out our changelog for a complete list of updates.

Smooch in the news 🗞

• Our Editorial Director Dan Levy wrote a piece this month on voice commerce, breaking down how businesses are already using it despite its limitations, and looking at the social implications of female-presenting voice assistants. Check it out here.
• With the announcement of Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra, Dan also wrote about the messaging platforms making moves in crypto, and what this could mean for conversational commerce. Give it a read here.
• Smooch co-founder Mike Gozzo shared our acquisition story with journalist Andrea Howick on Global News and gave a primer on businesses messaging. You can watch it here.
• Our other co-founder Warren Levitan took the stage at Collision Conference in Toronto twice. First, he spoke during the Growth Summit to tell our startup story. You can watch a clip from that talk here. After, he sat down with Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane and journalist Sean Silcoff to discuss the state of SaaS and how Smooch fits into Zendesk’s big picture. Check out the full discussion here!
• Lastly, we teamed up with our friends at Falcon to put on a webinar on the shift from public social networks to private messaging. Falcon’s Community Marketing Lead Dino Kuckovic talked about what messaging means for marketers, while Warren focused on conversational business, answering questions about chatbots, RCS, and the future of messaging. Watch the full webinar here — it’s a doozy!

How India’s Largest Crowdfunding Platform Doubled Donations with WhatsApp

In college, I worked in retail. When I wasn’t folding jeans or cleaning diapers out of changing rooms, part of my job was convincing customers to sign up for daily SMS promos.

“But I’ve already signed up for the emails,” they would say as I cornered them between stacks of denim.

“This is different,” I would lie.

Every morning they’d get a message letting them know which stretch pants were 70% off. It didn’t sit right with me. Daily automated good-morning texts from a company begging you to spend money? Not cool. It wasn’t like these people could reply, either. The company was hurling leggings into the void and hoping people would catch them.

The outbound SMS mess

The problem with SMS is that outbound marketing messages aren’t conversational. There is no guarantee, for example, that a customer replying to the stretch-pants sale notification will get a response from the company. Too many businesses have been treating SMS as a funnel for junk and missing opportunities to create personalized conversational experiences.

It’s not entirely the fault of eager marketers. Existing infrastructure hasn’t made it easy for businesses to use messaging channels effectively. Often, the system that sends out the notification and the one dealing with customer support are separate systems that don’t talk to each other. Responses might land in a customer service agent’s inbox, but the agents lack the context to know what prompted the reply, or even who they’re talking to.

On top of that, customers can’t be sure who the message is coming from. SMS notifications are often sent from a random number that can look suspicious and unprofessional.

The light at the end of the convo

While we patiently wait for RCS to replace SMS as the standard text messaging protocol (any minute now….), billions of people have migrated into richer messaging channels with better features.

Consumer chat apps are open for business, and their rich features make them better for businesses. WhatsApp, the definitive messaging app for users in India, South America, Europe and the Middle East, released their Business API in 2018, making it possible for enterprises to connect WhatsApp to their existing business software — thus becoming more accessible to 1.5 billion users.

Features like Verified Business Profiles add credibility. Customers know who the message is coming from, rather than spending time trying to figure out if a random string of numbers is the real deal.

Despite the fact that WhatsApp is now open for businesses (in early access), marketers who want to take advantage of its rich features need to proceed with caution. Businesses using the API through Smooch have the added benefit of using the technology we’ve built on top of it for better, more thoughtful customer experiences.

Notify me

To prevent misuse, WhatsApp approves messages created by brands who sign up through official WhatsApp Business Solution Providers like Smooch. When brands want to send outbound WhatsApp messages, they have to assure their customers have opted in, and submit a template to WhatsApp for approval. Approved messages can be sent and personalized with details like names and account information.

Smooch’s Notification API connects the system sending the notification to the business’ customer service platform of choice. This means customers won’t have to repeat themselves and agents will have the context they need to support and engage the customer.

Because the basis of WhatsApp is entirely conversational, businesses would be remiss to send out notifications without being ready to reply and continue the conversation.

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Milaap, India’s largest crowdfunding platform, works with Smooch as their WhatsApp Business Solution Provider. With Smooch, they’re able to chat with customers from their Verified Business Profile and send them outbound, conversation-starting notifications.

The vast majority — 95% — of Milaap’s customers are considered to be WhatsApp-first, meaning they spend most of their internet time on WhatsApp instead of inside mobile browsers or other apps. Clocking in at 400 million Indian users, it's estimated that nearly every smartphone owner uses WhatsApp. With Milaap, they can set up campaigns to raise money for medical and financial emergencies. The ability to forward messages in WhatsApp makes it easy to share campaigns through their networks.

A campaign that started on WhatsApp, for example, raised the $800 USD needed to help two-year-old Kohana Attru receive cochlear implants. Another WhatsApp campaign raised $37,000 USD from over 1200 supporters, in order to pay for a lung transplant.

When Milaap’s customers receive a notification about campaign updates, they can reply for more information. Smooch connects the system sending the notification with their customer engagement software — Zendesk Support — providing agents with the original context of the notification alongside other relevant conversational data.

Rather than intruding in a private, social space, Milaap empowers their customers to organize, build, and improve their communities through conversations.

If you're interested in building a custom conversational solution, or want to learn more about how businesses are using messaging to create better customer experiences, chat with us.

New in Smooch this month: Our authentication mechanism got an overhaul; We’ve made a couple of updates to Facebook Messenger and Line; Get your website ready for our upcoming WhatsApp button; and a new customer spotlight.

What’s new 🎊

Introducing basic authentication

Calling all developers! 📣 Smooch is very excited to announce that we've released a new authentication mechanism for our API called ‘basic authentication’. This authentication method allows users of our API to make requests directly with an API key (previously known as a ‘secret key’).

Those of you already using our API know very well that we require users to generate JWTs to access our API since our initial release in 2015. Authenticating this way was especially challenging for those who were not familiar with JWTs and who had to learn how to use them just to be able to access our API. 😐

We’ve known for a while that there was a better way to do this and we’re glad to have finally delivered. Basic authentication removes the clunky step of generating a JWT and should help you get started with our API much more quickly. Both our API libraries and our postman collection were updated to support basic authentication. Enjoy!

Channel updates

• We shipped an update to our Facebook Messenger integration yesterday that adds support for postback actions in the welcome message of click-to-messenger ads. We also added a section in the guide to explain how click-to-messenger ads are supported at Smooch, as this functionality exists on other channels as well.
  
• We’ve also released a small update to our LINE integration, allowing a `qrCodeUrl` to be specified when creating or updating a LINE integration via the API.
  

Sneak peek 👀

WhatsApp button

Just because it’s summer doesn’t mean we’re all on vacation sipping piña coladas and soaking up the sun! 🏖 We’ve been working on a handy new feature for our WhatsApp customers: you will soon be able to add a Message us on WhatsApp button directly to your website! 🥳

With the simple click of a button, visitors will immediately be able to message you through WhatsApp. If browsing via desktop, the visitor will be sent to web.whatsapp.com, which will trigger the desktop app. If browsing on mobile, the visitor will be sent to the WhatsApp native app. We’re just putting the final touches on this and documenting everything you’ll need to make use of this feature as soon as it’s ready, so stay tuned.

Other API & SDK updates ⚙

• Android SDK In version 6.2.0 we added the ability to retrieve conversation metadata using the getMetadata() method.
• iOS SDK In version 6.15.0 we added the ability to retrieve conversation metadata using the metadata property.
  

Be sure to check out our changelog for a complete list of updates.

Smooch in the news 🗞

Customer spotlight: Milaap was profiled by Facebook Business this month, highlighting the success of their WhatsApp integration. Milaap is the largest crowdfunding platform in India, and they use Smooch to power customer conversations on WhatsApp. You can read about how they used WhatsApp to carry out 240,000 conversations, doubling their gross donation volume!

This month on the blog, we wrote about how Milaap uses our Notification API to proactively reach out to customers on WhatsApp, and why it’s been so difficult for brands to reach out to their customers until now. Give it a read here!

A thorough primer on conversational commerce by Chavie Leiber — “Why brands are sliding into your DMs” — mentions Smooch joining Zendesk alongside a slew of examples of brands who deal in the business of conversations. Check it out here in Business of Fashion!

Another news flash 🔥 hot off the press: Our bi-weekly newsletter, The Message, was named as a finalist for best e-newsletter in the 2019 Content Marketing Awards! Shout out to Dan Levy from all of the Smooch team on this amazing accomplishment! 👏

Messaging has been in the news a lot lately, and it's not just about chatbots and conversational commerce.

As we've explored in The Message and other outlets, the rise of private messaging — particularly over channels that are end-to-end encrypted like WhatsApp, iMessage and Telegram — comes with tradeoffs.

On the one hand, end-to-end encryption means private messaging conversations are, well, private, as messages are only visible to the parties sending and receiving them. That means not even the channel hosting the conversation can see read its content.

On the other hand, encrypted messaging makes it far more difficult for law enforcement, journalists and the chat platforms themselves to combat hate speech, harassment, illegal activity and the potentially dangerous spread of viral misinformation.

Over the past month or so, the chat platforms have faced mounting pressure to undermine end-to-end encryption by creating a backdoor for law enforcement.

But a growing number of organizations are tackling the challenge head on. And they’re doing it through messaging apps themselves.

Check mate ✅

Last week our partners at journalism non-profit Meedan launched a suite of tools for reporters to use during global elections, natural disasters and other time-sensitive events.

Called Check, Meedan’s platform uses Smooch to connect to the WhatsApp Business API so that citizens can submit photos and news stories via WhatsApp for journalists to verify or debunk.

The Smooch-Check integration was piloted during the Indian elections last spring. But with massive elections in Australia, Argentina, Canada and the U.S. expected in the coming year — and with access to all the world’s messaging channels via Smooch — the Check platform has the potential to tackle the problem of viral misinformation on a global scale.

Game on 🎮

Meanwhile, investigative journalism startup Point is trying to fight messaging-based misinformation — and raise funds — by creating its own video game.

On their Kickstarter page, Point’s Jay McGregor explains that “Misinformer” will be a “text-based detective style mobile game” in which the player has to “crack a major misinformation-based conspiracy before an upcoming election.”

Essentially, it’s a fictionalized version of Meedan’s Check platform – putting the player in the role of “citizen journalist.”

If the game is effective, it could teach people to think twice before sharing unverified information in real-world messaging apps.

New kid on the blockchain 🗞

The New York Times is also throwing its newsboy hat into the ring.

Led by The Times’ R&D team, The News Provenance Project aims to establish the authenticity of images by publishing the originals to a blockchain. The idea is to prove where an image originated from and whether it’s been edited along the way.

This isn’t the first attempt to “fix journalism” via blockchain, as Matthew Beedham points out in The Next Web. A similar initiative called Civil failed last year, despite being backed by respected media brands like Forbes.

You can read more about Check and Smooch's partnership with Meedan in this great article on Poynter.  

A free interactive report on messaging in travel

Introducing the State of Messaging: Travel, a collection of insights from across the travel and hospitality industry — from luxury hotels to budget airlines, and chatbots to the companies who build them.

We talked to industry insiders and broke down the traveler’s customer journey to learn about the creative ways chat is used to create memorable, personalized customer experiences by airlines, online travel agencies, and hotels.

The report is full of surprising findings — read about how hospitality brands are leveraging chat to provide better CX, why “luxury chatbot” is often an oxymoron, and when messaging actually delivers measurable results.

To go with the report, we created Trippy, the Conversational Concierge, to show you what messaging can create memorable travel experiences.

Check out the report below👇

The team behind the report

• Jesse Martin
• Dan Levy
• Faustine Gheno
• Riley Brook
• Scott Morin
• Paul Lalonde

Huge thanks to everybody who worked hard to put this report together. 🙏