Apple Announces Developer Preview of Business Chat for iMessage Customer Service (Jun 9, 2017)

Apple didn’t mention Business Chat explicitly during its WWDC keynote on Monday, but details about it have emerged during the week and it held a session on Friday morning at which it detailed the service for developers. What we know now is that Business Chat is an equivalent to Facebook Messenger for business to allow businesses to perform customer service tasks through iMessage. It won’t launch publicly until next year, but Apple is announcing a developer preview and all the tools necessary for businesses to create customer interactions using iMessage. The platform is pretty fully featured, offering not just text messaging but payments through Apple Pay, pickers for time slots, products, and the like, and integration with custom apps through the iMessage apps platform. Between this and the various other changes we’ve seen announced by Apple around iMessage over the past year, it’s evolving iMessage from a mere app to much more of a platform, very much along the lines I outlined in this article I wrote early last year. I think that’s super smart, and one of the best things about it from a customer perspective is that Apple isn’t doing any of this to drive new revenues or push advertising or any of the other things others in this space – notably Facebook – are doing. Apple is very aware of how personal a space iMessage is, and will prevent businesses from ever sending unsolicited messages – every interaction will be initiated by the user, from the first onwards. The platform looks clever, and giving developers and companies lots of time to implement it should mean that by the time this releases to the public next year, it should be really effective.

via TechCrunch (see also Apple’s developer page for Business Chat and the WWDC session on Business Chat)

The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.

• Apple
• iMessage

• Customer service
• Messaging

• Apple Doesn't Get Services
• Apple Wins on Privacy

Vote for or share this post

Use the Like button below to vote for this post as one of the most important of the week. The posts voted most important are more likely to be included in the News Roundup podcast episode I do each week. Or use the sharing buttons to share a link to this post to social networks or other services.