Salesforce for Messenger delivers personalised engagement

by Abhinav Mohapatra

CRM and Customer Success platform, Salesforce, has announced the Salesforce for Messenger Platform, which is a part of its ongoing strategic partnership with Facebook. Both the companies have collaborated to empower organizations to engage their clients through dynamic experiences around products, brands, and moments connected to their core business. The platform is backed by Salesforce Lightning and will deliver customized personal engagement at scale with CRM data.

Salesforce’s move comes after Facebook announced the launch of a chat bot service for its Messenger platform. This would ideally allow businesses and companies leverage the platform to communicate with their clients without the need of human interaction. The organizations will use the bots for the messenger platform API to create virtual chat agents that will have customer interactions. Industry reports cite that Messenger’s growth is skyrocketing with its monthly active users growing from 500 million in 2014 to 900 million in the first quarter of 2016. This is precisely why companies are so eager to embrace it as the new channel to extend customer engagement and create conversations.

Explaining how Facebook’s Messenger works Salesforce published a blog citing some examples such as:

  • A traveler stuck on the runway is worried she’ll miss her connecting flight. She can communicate directly with the airline via Messenger, rebook her connection for a later time and relax knowing that she’ll get where she needs to go.
  • Or, an investor who has a pressing tax question can send a message and his financial advisor can quickly reply from a mobile device while in between meetings.
  • Or, a shopper has a poor experience at a department store and posts about it on the store’s main Facebook Page. The store’s customer service rep sees this and moves the conversation to Messenger to make a direct connection and gives the shopper a refund.

With Salesforce for Messenger, companies will be able to leverage Messenger as a customer engagement channel to deliver entirely new one to one experiences across sales, service, marketing and apps. And because it is connected to Salesforce’s CRM platform, each Messenger interaction can be specifically tailored based on the context of the entire customer relationship.

For example, a retailer will be able to embed a Messenger plugin on the checkout workflow on its website so a customer can ask any final questions before making a purchase. Since this Messenger exchange is also connected to the customer’s previous sales, service and marketing account records, the company can take a more personal approach to exceeding customer expectations.

Alex Dayon, President and Chief Product Officer, Salesforce, says, “Now with Messenger, Facebook is inviting companies to engage their customers in new ways on its platform at scale. With Salesforce for Messenger companies will be able to easily connect their businesses to Messenger, creating deeper, more personalized and 1-to-1 customer journeys within the chat experience.”

Salesforce claims that it has been on a mission to re-imagine CRM for the digital era and the launch of the platform with Facebook is how it is expanding. The organization also claims that companies will have an invaluable opportunity to use Messenger as a channel to build brand loyalty and deepen customer relationships by delivering seamless experiences across marketing, sales and service with Salesforce, they can ensure that every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to create a memorable experience.