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Facebook’s recent announcement that it would enable businesses to accept payments via Messenger is another step forward in using chat-based messaging as a commerce tool that could benefit agents in communicating and transacting with technology-savvy clients.
“There’s a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of excitement, around using messaging as an interface to facilitate shopping and purchasing and to make it a bit more personalized and conversational,” said Douglas Quinby, vice president of research at Phocuswright.
In its announcement earlier this month, Facebook said it would enable U.S. users to make payments to businesses on Messenger. Person-to-person payments via debit cards have been possible since last year.
“We’re kicking off the beginning of messages with payments that will allow businesses to sell products and services directly to customers in Messenger,” Facebook said in a recent blog post. “Customers can check out with a few easy clicks, without ever leaving the Messenger app.”
Businesses can currently apply to be considered for a closed beta test of the payments-via-Messenger service, and Facebook said it expects the capability to roll out “more broadly by the end of the year.”
According to Quinby, Facebook’s announcement will make transactions easier. Before it was announced, any users hoping to fulfill a transaction via Messenger were either linked to a third-party browser or to a browser within Messenger, and they had to enter payment information manually.
Now, information preloaded and saved into Messenger can be used to populate forms. Quinby likened it to services such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet, which store users’ information and eliminate the need for them to fill out forms to complete transactions.
Mark McSpadden, head of Sabre Labs, Sabre Corp.’s emerging-technology incubator, called Facebook’s announcement an “important step” in offering conversational commerce to a U.S. audience (in China, a large number of businesses already accept payments via the chat interface WeChat).
Earlier this year, Facebook took another step in the direction of conversational commerce when it made it possible for developers to launch chatbots on Messenger. Several large travel companies, including Expedia, have already taken advantage of that opportunity. Like other businesses, these companies will have the opportunity to apply to be part of the Messenger payment beta test.
While an Expedia spokesman said the OTA did not have any announcements regarding payments within its Messenger bot, Irfan Mohiuddin, director of global product, did say it could be something worth looking at down the road.
“We are focused on providing experiences we know our customers want within the Expedia bot, and for us that means honing in on the travel experience we provide,” Mohiuddin said. “In the future it might make sense for us to look at this solution [Messenger payments], but as with all things at Expedia, we’ll continue to test and learn to gauge demand and then use that information to provide direction.”
However, chatbots are still in their early development stage, according to Quinby, who said they often do not offer users the best experiences.
“Irrespective of the payments question,” Quinby said, “I think the bigger question is: Is messaging as an interface and bots as a means of facilitating messaging and scaling messaging … really going to significantly impact travel shopping and booking on a large scale? And my take is, in its current form, in its current guise, no.”
Christopher Dane, president of Hickory Global Partners, said the complex nature of travel makes it difficult to sell via an artificially intelligent bot, but he also acknowledged that the technology is improving.
“I think the most fascinating thing, and the most fascinating impact on travel, is going to be artificial intelligence, and that’s coming down the pipe pretty quick,” Dane said. “I think that has the potential to create huge changes in how we do business and how we conduct business.”
As the technology improves, Quinby said, the impact of chatbot transactions on travel could grow, as well.
But he also advised that regardless of the current prevalence of bots, agents should not ignore messaging as a means of communications — and, now, of performing financial transactions — with clients. Quinby suggested they make themselves available to their clients using channels like Messenger, Skype and others “through any way in which their clients would want to interact with them.”
Many are already employing those techniques. Bonnie Lee, CEO of the host agency Travel Quest, said her agents regularly message their clients if that’s what the client prefers.
“Really, it’s about the agent having to morph into what the customer wants, not so much the customer having to morph into what the agent does,” Lee said.
The ability to securely accept payments via one of those messaging channels, such as Facebook Messenger, would be the proverbial icing on the cake, Lee said.
Cruise Planners recently rolled out an online chat feature that has proven to be popular, according to COO and co-owner Vicky Garcia. Some sales are even taking place entirely via online chat, with the exception of payment information, which is taken over the phone.
“It’s important for agents to be where their customers are, and if online chat and Facebook Messenger are the avenues, it’s another opportunity to be there,” Garcia said. Payments via chat are a trend Cruise Planners will keep watching, she added.
While collecting payments via Messenger could be useful, it will likely have a slow initial adoption rate, according to Margie Jordan, vice president of membership services at CCRA. Entering credit card information into Facebook could be an “unnerving” experience for consumers until they get more used to the idea, she said.
McSpadden of Sabre Labs agreed that consumers’ uptake on entering financial information into messaging services could be slow. But, he pointed out, when early travel sites first came about, no one expected consumers to feel comfortable purchasing thousand-dollar airline tickets online.
Source: travelweekly.com
