Facebook builds on a key partnership

Article Excerpt

FACEBOOK INC. $275.67, is a buy. Through your shares (Nasdaq symbol FB; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average) (facebook.com; Shares o/s: 2.4 billion; Market cap: $784.9 billion; No divds.) you’re buying into the world’s largest social media network. Its apps include Facebook, Instagram, What’s App and Messenger. Advertising accounts for 90% of its sales. Facebook has now agreed to buy Kustomer, a startup that specializes in customer-service platforms and chatbots. The purchase price is reportedly a little over $1 billion. Increasingly, customers are communicating with companies by messaging instead of calling. In fact, Facebook reports that more than 175 million people reach out every day to businesses using its WhatsApp messaging service. Kustomer’s technology takes conversations from different channels (social media, chatbots, email) and puts them on a single screen. This is aimed at improving customer engagement by providing an overall view of data and inquiries. Kustomer already has a relationship with Facebook. Its offerings let companies aggregate and respond to customer inquiries that come in through Facebook Messenger…