Facebook Messenger Introduces Customer Chat Plugin

As businesses continue to use the Messenger Platform to build experiences that facilitate connection with customers, Facebook have been working hard to make it easier than ever to improve these interactions and ultimately drive results.

Introducing the Customer Chat Plugin

One of the most highly requested features is the ability to extend Messenger experiences onto a business’s website. Today, Facebook released the customer chat plugin in closed beta. With the customer chat plugin, people can chat with businesses on their websites and in Messenger (across web, mobile or tablet) and transition back and forth seamlessly without losing the conversation’s history and context. This makes it easier for customers to continue the conversation with a business whenever and wherever it feels more convenient for them.

In addition to extending the conversation across multiple surfaces, the customer chat plugin supports current platform capabilities such as payments, NLP, rich media and more. To ensure the Messenger web experience is as feature-rich as the Messenger App, Facebook will continue to add new capabilities as the Platform expands.

Beta partners launching this week include: AdoreMe, Air France, Argos, Aviva (Eurofil), Bodeaz, Elves, Goibibo, Keto Mojo, KLM, Mermaid Pillow, Spoqa, Total Activation, Volaris and Zalando.

You can apply to the waitlist here to be notified when Customer Chat plugin becomes broadly available.

Improved Messaging Experiences and Page Management

In order to make image and video sharing more interactive, Facebook also released the media template, which allows businesses to attach a CTA button when sending videos, images and gifs, or when sharing content from the webview. The template also supports FB URLs. Previously, businesses were allowed to send media only as standalone items. By attaching a button, businesses can now include user actions like a share button to the video/image and increase engagement.

Automation in more Languages

Facebook launched Built-in NLP in July as a simple way to automatically detect meaning and context in every text message that a person sends, before it gets passed to a business’s bot. Starting today, in addition to English, built-in NLP is now available in Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Vietnamese. The default NLP model is able to detect the following entities in all supported languages: date & time, location, amount of money, phone number and email.

Messenger Customer Chat Plugin on Shopify

All of these integrations may have a huge impact for a better ecommerce shopper experience. We strongly recommend that you apply for the Messenger Customer Chat Plugin waitlist here.

The full list of updates can be found in the changelog.

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