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.