Nabilah Safira
TechInAfrica – Facebook recently acquired a startup called Servicefriend has joined the preparation of the upcoming cryptocurrency in 2020, Libra. The startup built on AI-based bot-chat clients for messaging apps, and it will help the customer service’s workload. Servicefriend is based on Israel as the acquirement news first reported from one of its investors, Roberto Singler about the deal. Ido Arad as one of the company’s co-founders referred to Techcrunch team’s questions to Facebook, and the giant social media has then confirmed the acquisition, “We acquire smaller tech companies from time to time. We don’t always discuss our plans,” A Facebook representative said.
The social networking medium hasn’t exactly specified the plans they’re currently working on, but it will mostly focus on bot building, or networks of bots for the customer service layer in the Calibra digital wallet, which has been in development by Facebook. It also plans to build a range of financial services for people who use Calibra to pay out and receive Libra, like sending money to contacts, paying bills, top-up their phones, purchasing stuff, and more. Calibra noted in its welcome page that it will provide 24/7 support for users through Whatsapp and Messenger.
But bots have been long involved with the platform, which started from 2015 where Facebook launched a personal assistant named M, followed with business-talking bots via Messenger in 2016. With hybrid bots that Servicefriend designed though, it could bring the ‘agent hours’ down to less than 20 hours for each 1,000 customer interactions as proven by the ones built for Globe Telecom in Philippines. The best effective with bots utilization is implementing the ones that could complement the service system, and it’s something that Facebook aims to reach for the customer service of Calibra.
Source: Techcrunch.com
