As soon as Facebook announced a feature allowing businesses talk to customers on Messenger, Dan Moriarty knew he wanted Hyatt to be among the first to try it. By early fall, the hotel chain had its Facebook integration on Messenger up and running. Anyone can send Hyatt a message. A blue dot indicates Hyatt is online and available (the same blue dot that indicates a friend is available to chat). Three gray dots pop up, indicating someone is reading the message. Within minutes, a customer service rep answers your question, initialing it so you know an actual person responded.
The experiment has been promising. By December, the number of messages Hyatt received through Messenger had multiplied nearly 20-fold. A tenth of the messages that arrive through social channels—Twitter, Instagram, and WeChat among them—now come through Facebook. Moriarty, Hyatt's director of digital strategy and activation, shared a few from January 21:
- A traveler with diamond status in Washington, DC, had a five-message exchange about his great experience as a regular guest at the Park Hyatt Washington.
- A Chicago traveler gave the address of his meeting, and asked for a hotel booking nearby on October 12.
- A traveler arriving at a Hyatt in Germany wanted to alert the hotel he’d be checking in after 9pm and needed an extra blanket because Germany, he said, was cold.
Already, Messenger is morphing into a 1-800 number for Hyatt's digital customers, a quick way to get any question answered—and the hotel chain has done nothing so far to promote it. “That's all people finding on their own," says Moriarty, "Clearly, our guests want to converse with us over Messenger."
It’s been ten months since Facebook announced Business on Messenger, which lets businesses integrate into the chat app and communicate directly with customers. Facebook's kept mum about how the feature is evolving, and offers little information beyond a page inviting companies to learn more. But many companies are trying it out, including big brands like Hyatt, Walmart, and KLM airlines, as well as smaller e-tailers like men’s fashion company JackThreads. In December Uber launched an integration allowing customers to hail a ride directly from Messenger, and Lyft will do the same within weeks.
Facebook hopes businesses will embrace Messenger to reach customers, take reservations, and even sell stuff. This already is happening in Asia. Chinese users buy movie tickets on WeChat, play the lottery on it, shop on it and even book travel over it. But so far it hasn’t been clear that people in the US want to use chat apps the same way. Unlike large parts of Asia, the US already has a large app ecosystem. If you want an Uber, it's easy enough to just pull up your Uber app. As chat apps become more popular and people spend more time on them, it's clear companies will soon have a very big role to play. But just what that role will be is still evolving. “Customer service is the earlier, better opportunity because it’s derivative of communications, which is what chat apps were designed for," says emarketer analyst Julie Ask.
If you haven’t noticed companies popping up on your Messenger app so far, that’s probably by design. Facebook is rolling out its business features slowly. It’s a purposeful strategy honed over years of developing ad products for social platforms. When Facebook introduced ads on Instagram, the company moved cautiously; cofounder Kevin Systrom reviewed each ad to ensure its acceptance by Instagram’s community. The service waited many months before rolling out Instagram ads at scale. Similarly, Facebook’s Messenger team must be careful not to inundate users with commercial messages. Nobody wants another junk mail account, and users will quickly embrace competing messaging services to chat with friends. (Facebook didn't make any executives available to discuss the feature's progress.)
Like Hyatt, however, companies are finding that customers are looking to talk to them on Messenger. Many, like BMW or Lululemon, already have messaging capabilities built into their Facebook pages. When customers reach them through this channel, responses appear in the Messenger app, and a Messenger integration allows them to deepen their interactions. With 800 million users, Messenger offers them access to more than twice the number of people who log onto Twitter, long the social media tool of choice for disgruntled customers in particular to complain about canceled flights or lousy service. And it offers them a private channel for communication. Hyatt's Moriarty points out this may lead to more authentic and productive conversations between brand reps and customers.
Enterprise social software company Zendesk believes this will be critical to building the next wave of ecommerce businesses. “What is going to differentiate retailers in the coming decade is not their ability to scale or do logistics. Amazon has nailed that,” says Adrian McDermott, a senior vice president of product management at Zendesk. “The most important thing you need to do is establish a brand personality. Messaging is a fantastic, scalable way to build one-on-one relationships with consumers.” Zendesk is providing many of the companies, including etailers Everlane and Zulily, trying Messenger with the software that allows them to respond to customers at scale.
This is Facebook's hope. Beyond customer service, it wants users to migrate to chat apps—and in particular, Messenger and WhatsApp, which it also owns---for every aspect of commerce, including discussing and tracking purchases and even buying things directly. Commerce, however, may be a harder sell for companies. As excited as many are to begin testing Messenger as a viable customer service channel, they’re more cautious about experimenting with deeper integrations. “You never know if these things are going to take off or not. Rather than spending a lot of time in development, I wanted to start using it, ” says Moriarty, adding that Hyatt doesn't care how it reaches its customers as long as it reaches them. “I don’t know how deep we’ll go.”
