FacebookFacebook has an ambitious plan to fix junk mail. You know the stuff I’m talking about. The numbingly distracting notifications that arrive after you’ve ordered a pair of jeans, say, or a new coffee maker. “At best it’s four emails” to confirm an order, says David Marcus, the former PayPal CEO who arrived last August to jumpstart Facebook’s messaging app. To say nothing of the promotional emails that follow—sales, plugs, newsletters, and on and on until you get the urge to dump the whole thing into your spam folder and be done with it already.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Or at least, that’s what Facebook believes. Today at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, Marcus is debuting Messenger for Business, a feature set to launch in a few weeks that will allow businesses to send receipts, notify customers that their packages have shipped, and provide basic customer service directly over Messenger. Marcus hopes to rethink the way people and brands talk to each other.
“The problem with email is that there is no one in between you and the business,” he says. As our inboxes grow fuller, he explains, businesses try harder to get our attention by sending more emails, which exacerbates the problem. “The fact some email providers are actually putting promotional emails in a separate folder is not helping,” he adds, taking a shot at Google.
By inserting Facebook’s supercharged algorithms between you and your jeans purveyor, Marcus hopes Messenger can strike a perfect balance, helping users get more of the customer service they want from companies—and helping businesses establish a stronger communications channel for their customers.
The move happens just as the homegrown app that people initially passed over in favor of competitors like Snapchat, Kik, or Vine hits a big milestone: Messenger now has 600 million users, nearly triple the number it had a year ago. It’s this size that makes this move significant. Facebook’s near ubiquity means its potential impact is vast. It also coincides with Messenger’s announcement that the app is now open to partnerships with outside developers—nearly 50 have signed on so far, including big companies like ESPN as well as popular photo apps like the GIF-maker Giphy.
While Marcus has no plans to charge companies using Messenger for Business initially, it’s easy to foresee a number of ways Facebook will be able to profit from these relationships in the future, such as charging businesses a fee to send messages, or incorporating a payment feature, or using the data it collects about e-commerce transactions to improve Facebook’s advertising products. “There might be a business model to find between solving a problem for consumers and enabling merchants to grow their businesses in a more effective and personal way,” he says.
Initially, Messenger for Business will start slowly, rolling out with two launch partners: the children’s toy and clothing company Zulily and the fashion basics company Everlane. When a customer makes a purchase on either of their sites, she’ll have the option at checkout to get realtime shopping updates via Facebook, matching a Facebook identity to an order. Marcus pulls up an Everlane checkout page on his laptop to show a tiny opt-in Messenger icon embedded on the screen verifying payment and shipping information. (You may remember Messenger launched a peer-to-peer payments system last week; users can send each other money on it, but they can’t pay businesses yet, so for now, it has no connection to this feature.)
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If customers opt in, they’ll receive a receipt and shipping updates in Messenger. An elegant map allows them to track a package’s progress directly from the app. Push notifications can alert users when the package arrives at its destination, and the customer can follow up with the business directly over Messenger. Like your new Everlane cotton t-shirt in navy? Send Everlane a gigantic thumbs-up image, just like you might send one to any other friend on Messenger. Want a black one just like it? No need to visit the site or make a call or even click a link. Just write back to Everlane and as long as the retailer has your credit card on file, a customer service representative will send one. Your entire correspondence history will be recorded in one message thread.
Of course, businesses will be able to tailor the feature as they desire. Not every company will, like Everlane, provide live chat. “It’s up to the business to fine tune what elements it will use,” says Marcus. Also, once the relationship has been established between the customer and the business, businesses will be able to contact customers with promotions, newsletters or other news.
In this scenario, it’s easy to imagine a future in which Facebook’s business messages are just a new form of junk mail. But Marcus says Facebook will monitor these interactions aggressively to make sure that “the signal-to-noise ratio is correct.” He references a formula on which Messenger will rely to make sure its users don’t receive too much unappealing correspondence from advertisers. That’s a strategy that has worked successfully for Facebook in choosing how many ads to show users in its news stream.
No one is more motivated to get this balance right than Marcus himself. With a host of messaging apps competing to be the default service we use to talk, pay, and hang out with each other, he can’t afford to piss off users. They would be gone in a snap(chat).
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