Facebook acquires Kustomer: an end for chatbots businesses?
By: Murad Zamanov
Tags: Chatbots For Business, Marketing, Chatbots, Bots, Digital Marketing

Does Facebook end the era of the chatbots? Probably yes and here’s why

Recently Facebook named among 4 digital giants, Google, Amazon and Apple, to be engaged in anti-competitive and monopoly-style, guess what happened next? Exactly. Facebook acquired a top CRM platform that provides conversational services for businesses — Kustomer.

Photo from the official Kustomer’s website

Facebook, like any other digital giant, buys lots of small companies and promising startups. Most of the time Facebook just takes the technology and uses it in its own interests, less often we might come across products like WhatsApp and Instagram. I covered a bit on that here.

Looking at this acquisition, it more looks that Kustomer is going to be integrated inside of Facebook’s current business tools. Meaning that besides setting up campaigns and marketing funnels in your Ads Manager, now Facebook might let you create conversational tools for your business to better communicate with customers. Of course for specific additional pricing.

Photo by Alex bracken on Unsplash

Since how Instagram is slightly becoming a marketplace for brands by creating an opportunity to sell products, integrating conversational tools from Messenger, it is clear that Instagram is not anymore about posting selfies with friends and your breakfasts with avocado. So acquiring a CRM platform makes sense in terms of Facebook needs a strong company taking care of all the customer communication processes and it seems Kustomer is the best fit.

But what that means for the chatbot industry? Is it going to take it forward? Is it an end era for chatbots?

What will happen with Kustomer is a matter of time, while the most important question is — what will happen with the chatbots industry? To feed my own curiosity I’ll share my thoughts below.

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The Chatbot industry will be growing.

When a corporation like Facebook acquires one of the leading startups in its industry, that’s the first thing that might come to your mind. Otherwise, why would they invest? Thinking the industry will grow is okay and even logical.

There is a lot of skepticism around the chatbots and Kustomer’s success is the helping hand with huge credibility invested in the industry. From another hand, when on Earth the digital scene was limited? Well, probably never. And it won’t as the seats are available for anyone coming up with a working idea.

Need to understand that having a strong competitor is not a definitely lost game. Most of the time it even works out better.

All is good, but monopoly wins.

On a scale from 0 to 10, how would you find a logical to buy a service from external providers for the product whose platform offers the same service?

Why would you store your data in two different places?

Why would you open two browser tabs, when one is enough?

In other words, why would you buy a vehicle and engine separately?

While there might be true fans cheering a service they love to this day, Facebook’s brutal actions won’t stay aside. It maybe won’t be that brazenly as I sound it out, but Mark Zuckerberg’s owned company will find lots of suspicious activities from the external chatbot providers. And you can be sure that Facebook will do its best to prevent its users from any kind of external threat. We all know what happened when Snapchat rejected Facebook.

If all of this is still unclear, let me try this way; when Facebook offers you ready tools, wouldn’t be gloomy to go for the same somewhere else? The most important, wouldn’t it make your life difficult by running from one place to another one?

Besides Facebook’s move in a try to create a monopoly over chatbot providers, there are certain reasons to worry about even without Mark’s holy involvement.

Searches for the keyword “chatbot” in the past 5 years | Google trends

If we look at google trends, we see how the searches for a chatbot is getting down. But it is showing the truth the chatbot providers wouldn’t wish to see. In lockdown times, when digitalization took over any other field in Globe, having in a back-side nothing more than just a “COVID-19 WhatsApp Chatbot” case is a sad reality.

Technology changes and businesses must adapt.

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