Gartner predicts that, by 2019, requests for customer support through consumer messaging apps will exceed requests for customer support through public social media, and Messenger customer chat directly reflects this trend, offering an invaluable resource for brands catering to the next generation of consumers.

Messenger customer chat is particularly valuable for customer service teams, enabling them to provide consumers for the first time with a single, seamless experience across devices. Unlike traditional web-chat, which lives only on a business's website, consumers can now chat with a business on its website and in Messenger (across web, mobile or tablet) and transition back and forth seamlessly without losing the conversation's history and context. With early access to Messenger customer chat, Conversocial customers with already progressive customer care programs are now able to more broadly promote Messenger as a customer support channel.

"The future of customer service is messaging - it's more effortless and convenient for customers, and more efficient for brands. With Messenger customer chat, the benefits of messaging can now be expanded to include live conversations on their website," says Conversocial CEO and founder Joshua March. "We're excited to be one of the first customer care platforms to offer preferred access to this game-changing format for Messenger to our clients, who can now promote private messaging and create a truly seamless, effortless customer experience, ushering in the next generation of social messaging for customer care."

Among the select Conversocial clients invited to pilot Messenger customer chat are UK retailer Argos, Latin American airline Volaris and German fashion retailer Zalando, all of which have launched seamless chat with customers in-app and web via Messenger. Argos, the retail giant with over 845 stores across the UK and a website that serves nearly 1 billion visitors annually, has made a serious commitment to Facebook Messenger as a customer service channel over the course of 2017, in large part empowered by its confidence in Conversocial to help the brand handle an increased volume of customer conversations.

Since initially promoting Messenger across customer service touch points, Argos has instantly seen a significant increase in daily incoming messages via Messenger, while email volumes have simultaneously dropped. "Our customers clearly prefer using personal messaging apps like Facebook Messenger to reach out to us for assistance. Messenger customer chat supplements existing live chat and gives our customers a familiar and convenient way to contact us, while allowing Argos to further promote private messaging as a channel, reducing instances of public complaints while increasing customer satisfaction and convenience," says Chris Tomlinson, Digital Product Owner of the Customer Management Centre at Argos. "The increase in messaging volume is allowing us to address broader types of issues without hampering our ability to deliver good service. Conversocial's intelligence, automation and workflow truly enables us to meet our SLA benchmarks while handling increased messaging volume."

This announcement comes on the heels of Conversocial's recent launch of platform enhancements enabling brands to conduct social messaging for customer care at scale—including the industry-first capability to survey CSAT and NPS Via Facebook Messenger—and demonstrates their commitment to bolstering the advancement of personalized, convenient social messaging, and driving the broader adoption of social customer service.

To learn more about how Conversocial can help integrate Messenger customer chat and other social channels into your customer care program, head to http://www.conversocial.com/customer-service-via-facebook-messenger