Facebook Kustomer – Facebook has made one of its biggest games to build the services it offers to businesses on its platform: it is acquiring Kustomer, a company formed to disrupt the customer services industry with a modern approach to providing agents with better data and a more cohesive representation of customers by putting together the various social media and other platforms and a long history between them.
A little history of how Kustomer, now Facebook Kustomer
Customer, co-founded by CEO Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel (the two partnered across a number of other locations, including Airtime and AOL and sold a previous startup to Salesforce), raised around $174 million in private equity from investors including Tiger Global Management, Coatue, Battery Ventures, Cisco Investments, Redpoint Ventures, Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures and Boldstart Ventures. According to figures from PitchBook, it was last estimated at $710 million.
How Facebook Seeks to Benefit from Facebook Kustomer
Today, there are about 175 million people using Facebook this way, covering both those that use Facebook to connect with companies who use Facebook as their primary online “identity” instead of their own website or mobile app, companies today often simply have a Facebook page, and those companies that have channels of conversation on Facebook-owned messaging apps such as Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
175 million doesn’t sound like a lot given that Facebook has upwards of 2 billion users.
But as the company continues to see more intense competition from Snapchat, TikTok, and likely others over time, it will give Facebook a great way to lock them into the Facebook community with a better product to sell companies alongside their other services.
To supplement ads, it would also give the organization a better shot at a newer revenue source, which remains its largest cash cow by a wide margin.
How Facebook users get to Benefit from Facebook Kustomer
Customer support is, indeed, an interesting game for Facebook to make. The company has invested in and developed a range of additional features on its messaging applications for companies, most recently on WhatsApp, for instance, it began to make it simpler for businesses to let people shop and do more on the app.
A large industry that reaches far beyond the Facebook walled garden is inside the customer service.
Indeed, the basic word used by consumers and other CRM companies to describe what they do is consumer relationships with ‘omni-channel. “Which is to say, it gives the customer business users a full image of the many different places where customer “conversations” might take place, whether on smartphones, social media, blogs, chatbots, or email, etc.
The reasoning is that this makes the agent more effective and gives him/her a clearer understanding of both how the business operates through those channels and more context of a single consumer from one of those channels approaching the company, as well as a more complete picture of the customers themselves.
Conclusion on Facebook Kustomer
For Facebook, inside its app walls, its “customer relations” profile has so far been about users. This gives it a much greater chance, regardless of the medium being used, to ultimately dominate the larger image and larger relationship.