Digital CPG Blog

Facebook has begun introducing a new feature which allows business pages to receive private messages from their fans on the social network.

The new communications option, which has appeared for Asia-based admins only so far —is a significant introduction that will allow businesses to interact more closely with customers on the service than ever before.

Consumer facing businesses will find the feature particularly useful as it enables more personal communication with individual customers, opening the possible of a greater level of customer service on Facebook. The move is also likely to cut down on the pain of off-topic comments on company pages and reduce communication lost when Facebook fans fail to take their comments to customer service channels outside of the social network.

The move isn’t an all out opportunity for business to contact customers, however, as communication must be initiated by the customer. However, once that has been done, the conversation is open to both parties.

I think this is a great move for Facebook, and sorely needed! So many customers reach out on Facebook and you’d love to be able to discuss account details, but to do so you, you must move the conversation to email or phone. Hopefully customer service teams will become familiar with these new features when they are rolled out to all business pages, and perhaps we will even see some apps that allow for increased customer service! One can dream…