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!