Sparkcentral Launches Facebook Messenger Support At F8 Event

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwired – April 12, 2016) – Today, as part of Facebook’s F8 conference in San Francisco, Sparkcentral announced its integration with Facebook Messenger, enabling Sparkcentral customers to deliver support through the massively popular chat app.

With 900 million monthly active users, Messenger has become one of the world’s most widely used messaging platforms and a major new channel for customers to communicate with and get support from businesses. Sparkcentral, now an official Facebook Marketing Partner, plans to make the integration available to its community of global brands.

Sparkcentral – Key Facts:

  • Sparkcentral is one of the first social customer service platforms to integrate directly with the Messenger platform, pulling all historic, threaded Messenger-based customer communications into the into its environment so care agents have the context they need, the moment they need it.
  • Messenger support extends Sparkcentral’s Facebook customer care offering, adding to existing support of public and private messages on Pages and Messenger, with the added benefit of showing user presence and structured content.
  • Sparkcentral customers will benefit from the ease and simplicity of Messenger support, powering rapid response times and quicker issue resolution, with all Messenger customer history provided to care agents.

Sparkcentral believes this integration is an important next step in delivering on its vision of providing proactive customer care, because it allows agents to be more contextually aware of their customer’s current circumstances, based on the threaded history already provided through Messenger. For example, when an airline traveler receives a notice about a flight delay in Messenger, she can immediately get more details on the reason behind the delay from a care agent. The agent can go one step further and set a reminder to follow up with the customer and let her know her flight is boarding, or check in again after she lands. Additionally, if the customer flies on the airline regularly but isn’t a part of a loyalty program, the agent can tag her as a VIP and offer proactive alerts about flight delays to improve the customer experience after the issue has been resolved.

Forrester Research’s 2015 North American Consumer Technographics Survey revealed more than 65 percent of adults had used chat services and almost 50 percent had used Facebook specifically to communicate with companies in the past year. Forrester also reports another 77 percent of customers say being shown their time is valuable is the most important factor in great customer service (Channel Management: Core To Your Customer Service Strategy, subscription required for access). Data from Applied Marketing Science supports this idea, finding customers will spend up to $20 more with airlines that respond to them on social channels in less than six minutes. For these reasons and more, Sparkcentral is already used by 4 out of 5 airlines who top the list in customer loyalty, as ranked by Brand Keys’ 21st annual Customer Loyalty Engagement Index.

Quotes:

“The science of customer relationships is simple — the value you get is proportionate to the value you give,” said Davy Kestens, CEO of Sparkcentral. “For customers, Facebook Messenger presents a frictionless, convenient way to get questions answered and issues resolved, and modern businesses know it pays to make things easy. We’re excited to help deliver customer care through this increasingly popular channel.”

About Sparkcentral

In the age of the customer, Sparkcentral is the only enterprise customer engagement platform that unifies social, mobile, cloud and contextual data to proactively deliver personalized and engaging customer experiences. Customer service teams use Sparkcentral to efficiently handle large amounts of inbound inquiries over social media and mobile apps in a fast and structured way. Sparkcentral’s client roster includes Delta Air Lines, Emirates, Netflix, Nordstrom, Dropbox, Uber, and T-Mobile. To learn more, visit www.sparkcentral.com

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