Facebook buys a startup to offer customer service to companies

Purchased Kustomer, specialized in customer support, communication and management services. Facebook thus consolidates its position in services dedicated to commercial activities

Facebook (Omar Marques / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images) Facebook aims to grow its services dedicated to commercial activities. The Menlo Park giant announced that it has closed the acquisition of Kustomer, an omnichannel platform specializing in customer management and customer communication solutions. Although the details were not disclosed, according to what reported by Techcrunch Facebook would have paid about a billion dollars for this operation, aimed above all at enhancing the tools that the company wants to make available to companies that exploit its platforms for sale. of different products.

The startup Kustomer, born in 2015 in New York, helps companies manage communication and exchanges with customers via phone, sms, email or specific chatbots that integrate with applications such as WhatsApp and Messenger, already part of the Facebook universe. In five years, it reached a market valuation of more than $ 710 million after closing $ 174 million in investments from funds such as Cisco Investments, Canaan Partners and others, Crunchbase reported.

By integrating the services offered by Kustomer, Mark Zuckerberg's company therefore aims to provide small businesses with new ways to sell and advertise their products through its channels. The social network in fact makes it known that over 175 million people every day now use WhatsApp as a privileged channel to contact sellers and businesses.

And in the last few weeks, the technology giant has developed new tools to allow customers to buy online directly through WhatsApp Business or use the Messenger and Instagram services dedicated to companies, which allow them to reach a number more and more customers. Again in terms of services to commercial activities, Facebook in May also presented its Facebook Shops, which allows companies to show and advertise the products for sale on their pages.

In short, with this new acquisition Facebook no longer seems to aim only to grow its user base, which has now reached 2.7 billion active users every month, but aims to consolidate its position in the world of online commerce, providing new tools to companies that already use its platforms for communication and sales. In this way, according to the analyzes of Cnbc, the company guarantees itself new investments in advertising, a sector that is worth about 99% of the company's total turnover.