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@craigh

You hit it right that having full customer info is an amazing advantage.

On top of that is the cross-system ability; chat from your PC at work, continue on your tablet, and finish on your cell phone.

I’m also curious how the data collected by FB on your customers will allow you to use their marketing tools more efficiently as you collect some volume of data.
 
DISRUPTION ALERT! DISRUPTION ALERT!

Was just a matter of time, IMO.

Automotive chat and text providers are going to hate this and for many reasons, but particularly:
  • the free nature of FB chat tool
  • they will be able to cross-reference / match their dB against FB chats
    • but, especially the ability to re-target those they were chatting with, back on FB
  • if they allow for capturing credentials to CRM, this is a game changer (because you know damn well FB has the money to support it)

Now, for the large chat providers retorts / blog posts against it. Please commence... :)
 
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I don't think this will be the disruption. This still requires that dealers do the work.
The disruption is when we get into bots that can replace human operators for 80% of interactions, reducing the overhead required to run chat.
The bot hands off to a salesperson only when natural language processing could not solve their request.

I've been playing around with some development using https://botman.io and it's quite promising as a future solution.
They already have support for building one chat bot that can handle customers coming from any of the following:
  • Alexa
  • Cisco Spark
  • Facebook Messenger
  • HipChat
  • Microsoft Bot Framework
  • Nexmo
  • Slack
  • Telegram
  • Twilio
  • Custom web chat
  • WeChat
 
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I don't think this will be the disruption. This still requires that dealers do the work.
The disruption is when we get into bots that can replace human operators for 80% of interactions, reducing the overhead required to run chat.
The bot hands off to a salesperson only when natural language processing could not solve their request.

I've been playing around with some development using https://botman.io and it's quite promising as a future solution.
They already have support for building one chat bot that can handle customers coming from any of the following:
  • Alexa
  • Cisco Spark
  • Facebook Messenger
  • HipChat
  • Microsoft Bot Framework
  • Nexmo
  • Slack
  • Telegram
  • Twilio
  • Custom web chat
  • WeChat
The lack of robots yes and human factors do make a difference, but the bot part is already here (as you've alluded). If dealers see a big fat FREE, with limited bot costs they are going to jump on it. The major providers are not cheap and there is no way they like this. Even if FB doesn't provide the human service component, perception is reality.
 
The lack of robots yes and human factors do make a difference, but the bot part is already here (as you've alluded). If dealers see a big fat FREE, with limited bot costs they are going to jump on it. The major providers are not cheap and there is no way they like this. Even if FB doesn't provide the human service component, perception is reality.

I agree.
I think Gubagoo is doing it right with their Resq app - bridging the gap between vendor and sales person as effectively as possible today.
Will be interesting to watch all these companies evolve as we move forward - the idea of humans offsite answering chats doesn't seem like a model that will survive many more years.
 
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