As Facebook continues on its mission to become a social commerce platform, the social media giant has made yet another bold acquisition move. This time it comes in the form of its agreement to acquire the customer relationship management startup Kustomer.
Why is this important? Because Kustomer’s core business is centralizing customer interactions across channels and its ‘omnichannel’ approach will enable users — that is, customers and brands — to correspond across platforms. So the two parties can now move their correspondence from Instagram to web chat to SMS without missing a beat in their conversation.
This is of particular interest for Facebook because there is a huge market to tap into when it comes to customer-brand communication — over 175 million users contact companies through WhatsApp every day and there are plenty who also use Instagram or Facebook Messenger to do this.
With Kustomer’s platform now at their disposal, Facebook is poised to capitalize on this niche market and make big moves in the social commerce arena.