
At the recent F8 conference, Facebook announced that its Messenger app has 600 million users, growing 50% last year, faster than its main app. This number doesn’t even consider the other similar apps, like Facebook-owned WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber and many others that collectively have three billion accounts.
Messaging apps are clearly the killer apps on mobile, but U.S. brands and retailers have not yet made themselves available via mobile chat. When you think about all the situations in which you have to call an airline, hotel, restaurant, insurance company, etc., the fact that you can’t instead message these companies on your smartphone for updates, to place an order or make changes to a reservation is shocking.
The user experience on mobile today primarily includes search and browse, both of which have their own place in the customer journey. But messaging as an interaction layer can no longer be ignored. Messaging is an organic interface for a customer to ask for what they want on-demand in a private, personal environment that truly replicates a concierge model — which was the original promise of mobile apps.
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