Facebook is notorious for its continuous and persistent development across all its service platforms. A most recent update is tied to its chat application, the Facebook Messenger. The company announced on Thursday the Messenger Platform 2.1, which is the newest feature that will simplify the process for business to use its bots, conduct sales, and perform Customer Service tasks.

Unveiling its newest platform

According to Facebook, the new platform is targeted to provide not only better features and services but also revenue opportunities in the future. The newest add-ons will facilitate an easier setup for payments and check out services using the chat function. Specifics such as changing the typical "Send Message" button on the Facebook profile can be changed to "Shop Now," "Play Now," or "Get Support."

It was also reported that the update includes a more automatic natural language processing (NLP) detection. This provides faster recognition for the bots to read the full content of senders' messages, even their location.

The new set of tools under NLP will be replacing the previous bot tools that Facebook introduced in 2016.

Also, back-end tools are also incorporated to give companies the option to switch between a bot that answers simple requests to a customer service employees addressing complex inquiries. It is claimed that user will not even notice a difference between the two during conversations.

The business advantage

If one would look at the numbers, more than 1.2 billion people use Facebook Messenger every month. Within this number, 2 billion messages are sent by users to businesses on a monthly basis. In fact, a study conducted by Facebook and Nielsen reveals that 63% of the survey participants increased messaging with companies in 14 different markets for the last two years.

It is an undeniable reality that with the Messenger, Facebook upgrades the performance and service quality of some companies and businesses that utilize its services. One of the company's main goals is to help them achieve more success. This has been initiated when Facebook introduced the chatbots. Although it took a while to take off, the company has openly stated that the chatbots were never an end product, rather a means to an end.

With the Platform 2.1, it is hoped to enable more meaningful and useful conversations between customers and businesses. And to begin, Facebook shifted its focus to helping people discover these businesses, which they managed to accomplish with the Messenger Platform 2.0.

Other new features of the Platform 2.1 includes chat extensions for Global Pages, which is a feature aimed to build collaborative experiences for business. Also, developers are notified when a bot has a policy issue or has been blocked. Facebook continues to encourage companies to use its latest platform, and with the promising service updates, it is highly likely for the company to achieve both its audience and investment return.