Facebook has announced the acquisition of Kustomer, a CRM solution that lets businesses manage customer interactions across all channels.
With messaging becoming more and more important these days, Facebook is looking to give businesses the tools to stay connected with customers and provide great customer service and support.
Two recently-announced API updates on WhatsApp and Messenger will allow further integration with third-party tools, letting businesses get more out of both platforms. Further to that end, Facebook is expanding its technology around customer service messaging solutions with the acquisition of Kustomer – a CRM that lets businesses effectively manage all their customer interactions across channels.
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Described as an “omnichannel CRM platform,” Kustomer brings together different customer conversations from various channels, giving businesses a single-screen experience. Apart from this, it lets businesses “automate repetitive tasks,” giving customer service agents more time to interact with customers.
As part of the deal, Facebook will support Kustomer’s operations, providing resources to “scale its business, improve and innovate its product offering, and delight its customers.” The ultimate goal is to let more people benefit from faster and richer customer service experiences.
Facebook says that Kustomer is only one of the available solutions in this area and that it will “continue to support” the other options as well – to make sure that “businesses of all sizes and across all industries […] discover the value of messaging.” Facebook says the availability of a “vibrant partner ecosystem” is important, as it provides more choices for businesses.
Businesses using Kustomer will continue to own the data from interactions with their customers, but that Facebook should eventually host Kustomer data on its own secure infrastructure.
When that happens, Facebook will act as a service provider at the instruction of business customers. Finally, the company says it won’t “automatically use Kustomer data to inform the ads that a user sees”; instead, businesses will be able to use their data at Kustomer for their own marketing purposes.
The acquisition deal’s financial terms were not disclosed, but multiple sources quoted it as being $1 billion.