The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in December.

We finished the year on a high note by expanding the omnichannel experiences supported by Smooch. This included launching a new set of tools that enable businesses to invite end users to transfer their conversation to another channel without losing context or history. We also added email as an alternate channel to which Web Messenger users can transfer their conversations with a business. And finally, we introduced a brand new product demo video collection to help you get a better understanding of various use cases Smooch can help with.

What’s new 🎉

Move the conversation, keep the context

In December, we launched new tools to allow businesses to move conversations to channels that are better suited to the topic at hand, supporting a vast set of omnichannel experiences.

By posting a link or call to action into the conversation, businesses can invite customers to join them on a more secure channel, a cheaper channel, one with a richer experience or one that’s simply more convenient for the user.

This new set of APIs allows businesses to easily transfer the conversation from a chat app to in-app or web chat or any other combination of channels that makes sense.

As always with Smooch, when the conversation moves, the chat history and context moves with it, so both the business and end user benefit from a single, continuous, cross-channel conversation thread. Meanwhile, the user’s identity is unified in the business’ software, allowing brands to provide a truly omnichannel and personalized experience.

Read more about these new capabilities on our blog.

Transfer conversations from Web Messenger to email

One of the most requested features for Web Messenger has been to give end users the ability to continue their conversation with the business over email. This capability is now available and users can easily transfer their web chat conversation over to their inbox. Read our guide for more info on this.

Smooch demo videos

We’ve created a series of product videos to give you an overview of how Smooch can help you with various use cases. They cover topics like how to transfer a conversation from a chat app to the Smooch iOS SDK, how bot-to-human handoffs work, and how to authenticate users with Smooch. Be sure to bookmark this page as we’ll keep on adding more to it.

Smooch API & SDK updates ⚙

• Web Messenger configuration API: We added a new API endpoint to programmatically configure the Web Messenger UI. You are now able to customize colors, display styles, buttons, icons, etc. See the full list of configuration options here.
• Business read receipts for Web Messenger: Read receipts are now available on our Web SDK 4.5.0 so businesses can notify users that they’ve read their conversation. Check out the release notes and API documentation.
• Update Integration API: We released a new API that allows you to customize the order that channels are displayed to end-users on the Web Messenger UI. Find out more here.

Community challenge: show us your best Conversation Extension

In November, we launched Conversation Extensions, a new capability in Smooch that empowers businesses to create custom interactive experiences inside the chat window of any messaging channel.

We’d love to see what you can create with Conversation Extensions. Over the next few months, we’ll be showcasing some of the best examples on the Smooch blog and in our newsletter, which goes out to more than 30,000 software executives, product strategists and developers. Show us what you’ve got! Once you have a working example, submit your Github repo link via this form. We’ll pick the best ones to share with the world and we’ll have some awesome prizes too!