And those interactions happen in real-time, a key way to ensure engagement (a holy grail for businesses). The reason for why businesses want to do more in messaging apps is pretty clear: for a good proportion of the population who use messaging apps, they have replaced a lot, if not all, email use, and for some the more direct format has replaced their use of more open platforms like Facebook and Twitter, as the central place for interacting directly with others in a text-based format. “When Viber is one of the few apps you use, we want to make sure it’s part of how you can engage with a business,” he said. The company has around 266 million active users among its 800 million overall users, and he sees Viber’s CRM functionality as simply complementing what the others are doing, creating a framework for all messaging apps to be legitimate channels for communication. Interestingly, the fact that all the other messaging apps are jumping on the business bandwagon seems to make sense and is even a good thing, in Shmilov’s mind. (The latest date on that seems to be by the end of this year.) WhatsApp has yet to announce any business services, although it said it was planning to back in January of this year. Twitter also has been developing customer service functionality.īut if this is a certified trend, not all messaging apps are on board quite yet. There is a bigger trend where social media platforms are leveraging their audiences and analytics data to provide more direct services, as they look to expand their revenue potential beyond basic in-stream and display ads. And while Facebook Messenger came somewhat later to the party with its business launch, it’s been quick to expand and update the service with bots and other features, most recently updating the platform just yesterday. They include WeChat and Line, which have been offering business account options since 20, respectively. Shmilov is formally announcing Public Accounts today on stage at the Web Summit in Lisbon, puts Viber among several other consumer-focused messaging apps that have already started to court brands and others with special features to “speak” to those apps’ user bases. Public Accounts, Smilov pointed out, will be the first time that you (and a business) will be able to interact with each other without having each other as a contact. Public Accounts are building on a feature that Viber added back in 2014 called “ Public Chats.” This essentially let personalities - or anyone, really - run a conversation with the public, although only those who actually had the speaker as an actual contact were able to interact with him or her. “We provide the tools for bot developers. “We are focused on building the best chat experience with a scalable API, so we are not building bots ourselves,” he said. Public Accounts will also open the door to Viber hosting bots as well - although Viber itself will not be building these, Shmilov tells me. Michael Shmilov, COO of Viber, told me in an interview that by the end of November, Viber’s API will be integrated with between 10 and 15 popular CRM packages so that businesses can send a read their Viber messages alongside all of their other social media, email and messaging interactions. The customer service component, meanwhile, will be coming soon. There are some 1,000 Public Accounts that are debuting at launch, including accounts for The Huffington Post, Yandex and The Weather Channel, to send out updates and other information to users who choose to subscribe to them. Today, Viber is launching Public Accounts, a new account format for businesses and brands who want to communicate with Viber users for marketing, customer service - or a bit of both, without a user needing to add that account as a contact first. Viber, the messaging app with 800 million users owned by Japan’s Rakuten, is today taking the next step in expanding its platform as it seeks to compete against the likes of Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp not just for audience - but revenues.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |