Facebook Will Work On That

With Facebook Messenger for Business, Mark Zuckerberg and David Marcus bet that some of your most useful conversations will occur with corporations.

There are now 600 million people using Facebook’s chat application, Messenger, each month. At its F8 developers conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, the social network sought to bring a new member into the conversation: businesses.

Messenger is one of several standalone consumer-facing apps in Facebook’s portfolio, which now includes Instagram (photo-sharing) and WhatsApp (mobile chat). It’s one of the company’s most widely used products and one that has probably evolved the most in the last 12 months. Last year, Facebook split Messenger from its core Facebook mobile app. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, also appointed a new executive to lead the effort: former PayPal CEO David Marcus.

Facebook seems to believe that communication between businesses and consumers is fundamentally broken. In an e-commerce purchase, for example, the buyer is typically sent multiple emails—a receipt, a shipment confirmation, updates along the way. Often the buyer must log-in to the e-commerce site in question to access this information. And all of those interactions lack any real, natural communication, says Marcus.

“Commerce is conversational,” he said, speaking to software developers at the Fort Mason Center. It is more natural, he maintained, for businesses to converse with customers rather than broadcast to them. Messenger fits the bill.

Facebook used two launch partners—clothing site Everlane and mom-focused deals site Zulily—to show off the dynamic. Everlane incorporated Facebook’s services in its checkout page to allow consumers to opt to receive updates after making a purchase. From there, a mobile push notification and an opportunity to continue the conversation—from gleaning shipping information from UPS to modifying an order or purchasing another good—within the Messenger app. (Businesses see a customer service portal powered by Zendesk.)

Engaging the buyer at the point of sale was purposeful, Marcus said, because there is a high probability at that moment that the user is willing to interact with the brand. “It’s reintroducing personal back to shopping,” he said. “This is about creating rich content and interactions between people and businesses. You could imagine that in the future, a customer could have have multiple threads open with businesses that you care about, and you could transact and buy things.”

But the bigger question is whether people want to engage with businesses in the same place where they chat with their friends. For Marcus and Facebook, the quality of the experience will be key. “If you want to change people’s habits, you need to provide them with something that is meaningfully better than what they have,” he said. If Facebook has its way, that will be Messenger.

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