We built Smooch because we noticed a shift in how businesses and customers are looking to communicate. Both ends of the conversation want a more direct, a more human connection - with each other. Messaging is a powerful medium that is making these deeper connections possible and revolutionizing customer experience around the world.
The relationships we’ve forged while building Smooch have made us learn an important lesson: The future of messaging rests on the quality of the software that supports it. The software makers are the leaders of this movement, they are the ones embracing this way of communicating, and building on it, finding the best ways to use it.
Software makers are the trailblazers who experience first hand the challenges of an ever expanding messaging ecosystem. They are the ones who juggle with the intricacies of aligning with customer service strategies that are not only multi-channel, but also multi-platform. As their clients’ businesses grow, they also need to scale their services across the world. That makes them the perfect recipients of the breadth, power and reach of the messaging capabilities that Smooch enables.
These software makers live and die based on the quality of their software and the experience that it delivers.
Built for software businesses
And so at Smooch, we are building a platform that needs to work for entire software businesses - for the developers, the product team, the operations teams, the security teams, executive teams - all the people involved in building, delivering and operating great software.
Smooch is a platform that enables people to create conversational experiences, built on the promise of multi channel messaging. Our customers are operating strategically. They believe that conversational experiences are a critical success factor in their business, they believe that the challenges of building amazing ones is going to get harder and harder.
We are not just solving the engineering problem of dealing with the effort and complexity of building and operating multi-channel messaging, we are addressing the broader opportunity: How do I lead the market with rich conversational experiences to power my customers’ businesses?
The people dealing with these challenges everyday are software roadmap owners - product leaders, founders, executives and developers.
Introducing new pricing
Our original freemium model was designed for businesses - working on the basis that “Free users will upgrade over time”. This helped us build a great community, but didn’t help us sift out our real customers, optimize for their experience or even help committed developers onboard or build on us well. We had optimized for businesses first, developers second, and not at all for the product folk.
So that’s why we are introducing new plans and pricing, including free and trial plans to better serve software makers.
We have announced changes to our Free plan to make it truly free for makers and businesses. We want businesses to experiment on Smooch, to investigate concepts and find the value to invest in building conversational software. Our full API is now available on a free limited trial basis. Through the trial process and newly introduced guided evaluation programs, we want to engage with makers strategically. We want to share our expertise, experience and passion for conversational software.
This translates into four major commitments:
- Increased scope and coverage of our API documentation.
- New developer references, such as our SmoochDesk sample implementation.
- Increased shipping frequency for new channels.
- Our monthly product update newsletter, The Drop.
Plans for software makers
In response to the varying demands of software makers, we have introduced two plan types:
SaaS plans - for SaaS companies and ISVs building multi-tenant software—provision your customers at scale, only pay for the channels you need.
Innovator plans - for leading brands and other innovators building messaging experiences—get access to all our channels, only pay for the apps you need.
The focus of these plans reflects our investment in the critical nature of our services:
- Dashboard with enhanced enterprise features.
- Increased security and privacy compliance.
- Extended investments in scalability.
- Enhanced availability and resilience.
- 24x7x365 support for businesses that need to operate at a global scale.
Towards a conversational future
The future is conversational, and as more and more messaging platforms pervade the life of consumers and the businesses that serve them - integrating and augmenting these experiences will become a critical part of company operations. With this new future also comes the need to stay on top of conversation native tools such AI, NLP, bots, analytics and business systems. What we guarantee to our customers is much more than security and scale, we keep them a step ahead.