A Year’s Worth of Acquisitions in the CX Space in 7 Days: Pt. III – Facebook + Kustomer

The economic downturn resulting from COVID-19 has impacted all industries in various ways, and the CX space is no exception. Unlike others, however, CX technology providers have afforded acquisitions recently that are creating exciting new opportunities and capabilities for their clients.

So far in this series, we’ve covered Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack as well as ServiceNow’s acquisition of Element AI and what this means for the CX space, but there’s more.

Facebook Acquires Kustomer

This acquisition is one of the rather interesting M&A activities of the week. Facebook, the world’s most widely used and most popular consumer-oriented social platform announced its acquisition of Kustomer, a smaller customer-service oriented CRM provider.

While Facebook is already leveraged to target customers by many B2C marketers, these firms have had to use their own service tools to monitor and address customer requests they observe through Facebook and other social media portals. With the acquisition of Kustomer, Facebook will now offer its own service solution to organizations for social monitoring and engagement tools to deliver social customer service.

Direct Customer Interactions Through Social Media

Aberdeen’s research shows that firms have increased their adoption and use of social media as a customer interaction channel from 14% in 2010 to 64% in 2020.

As firms grow their use of social media in their CX activities, they primarily focus on targeting consumers with intent-driven advertisements. Hence, social media is still primarily a marketing-led channel across many organizations.

Unfortunately, this means that support requests coming through social media are disconnected from the activities of the customer service team.

If Facebook can educate and get buy-in from service leaders on how to use the newly acquired support capabilities, it will make it easier for B2C firms to track and address customer issues in a more seamless manner. For this acquisition to truly succeed, it’ll be important for Facebook to educate marketing and service leaders that social media is not a marketing-only channel and clarify that social must be managed by both departments; the two can still achieve their own KPIs without concerns for channel ownership.

What’s Next?

With this acquisition, Facebook is creating an entirely new space for service leaders to connect with their customers on a different level. While social has long-been a tool for marketers, this is an opportunity for CX leaders to develop a channel that their customer base is likely already familiar with — and perhaps would prefer over more traditional channels; only time will tell.

The acquisitions we’ve already covered in this series, including this one, are altering how many CX leaders operate, and they aren’t the only ones. Stay tuned for more in this series over the next week to keep up to date with the many CX technology providers that are merging.