An update to Facebook Messenger is rolling out that will let page owners toggle back and forth between personal messages and customer messages. This way, business owners can respond to customers from the same app that they use to communicate with friends and family on Facebook.
This will let businesses respond quickly without having to go between multiple apps. Any and all incoming messages are now grouped together in the same app, but will remain separated enough so that it will prevent businesses from accidentally responding to a customer from a personal account.
The business owner, when responding to messages, can choose to respond either as themselves or as the business.
This upgrade can be worthwhile to the workflow of business owners, as according to Facebook, over 90$ of business page admins are already using Messenger to chat with friends and family.
Based on research done by Facebook, most page admins don’t want to download and manage multiple apps. This means that the Messenger upgrade is a good solution to the problem.
Of course, this upgrade isn’t all about just the admins running businesses. It’s designed to improve the speed at which customers receive replies from businesses. They will have questions that frequently come up when they are deciding to make a purchase.
Being able to respond to customers in a timely manner can be the difference between the customer buying from your business versus a competitor.
This upgrade isn’t intended to completely replace the message functionality built into the Page Manager app. Business can still use the Page Manager app to respond to messages if they prefer, as well as manage posts, create and more.
There isn’t any additional steps required in order to send and receive business messages through Facebook Messenger. As long long as a page admin’s personal account is connected to their businesses’s Facebook page, the update will roll out on its own.