With a lot of businesses exploring online for the first time or expanding their online operations, customer service is an important but also difficult part that they need to deal with. The Facebook Messenger chat plugin was a good tool for those who couldn’t afford to have their own CRM systems but only those who had Facebook accounts could use it. Now the new version of the plugin will let your customers chat with you even when they’re not logged in or even if they don’t actually have a Facebook or Facebook Messenger account.
The Messenger Chat plugin is pretty useful if you want to keep connected with your customers and if they need to ask questions about your products and services right then and there. The only problem with the previous version of the plugin was that it limited access to people who have Facebook. But they have now fixed that problem by letting users “continue as guest” if they don’t want to log in or if they want to remain “anonymous” to the business.
The update is also redesigning the look and feel of the chat, which they say actually increased customer chats by 45% with businesses who beta tested the new look. The conversation will be easier and more intuitive with this new design. They also say it will be easier to integrate onto a business’ website. All the other tools that businesses previously used to manage the conversations will still be there.
Installing it is pretty easy especially for those who already have Facebook Pages for their businesses. They can just install it with a few clicks on the Page settings. But they can also get some of Facebook’s partners to do it, like WooCommerce, ManyChat, and Caravan. If you know how to tinker with your site, you can use the setup tool or use developer steps, which includes whitelisting your domain.
While the original idea of a Messenger Chat plugin is probably to get people to use Messenger and Facebook, it seems that the limitations of having to log in may have caused businesses to not use the tool. And since there are a lot of competitors in the chat software market, Facebook had to make this decision just to get more businesses on board.
