Apple announced “Business Chat” in June, staking a claim to a vital piece of the ecommerce landscape: the channel for customer service communication. The product went into live beta this week with about 10 companies participating, and the timing could not be better for Apple. Facebook, their main rival in this field, is bloodied from weeks of bad press over privacy issues.
Apple clearly has a vision for how customer service should work. How much will it enforce that vision when the program scales up to hundreds or thousands of companies? Can Apple take advantage of this golden opportunity?
Chat-based customer service is growing quickly. But there’s one central question that I think is not being addressed as critically as it should: Is chat acting as a substitute for phone calls? This is a harder question to answer than you might think.
