Smooch bridges the gap between web chat and messaging apps

Chat company Smooch added a feature to its live messaging tool today that will allow businesses to speak with customers on Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WeChat, and Line.

A conversation can even begin on a website or app, continue on Facebook Messenger, and finish on another chat app.

“We’re allowing customers to communicate with businesses on their own terms, breaking the browser jail and deciding to take the conversation from the web to chat apps,” said Smooch cofounder and head of product Mike Gozzo.

The on-site chat app typically found in the bottom right-hand corner of a website has been largely unchanged for over a decade, he said.

“I think what we’ve done is really thought about how much more useful we can make website chat to individual customers and visitors to a website, because the minute you break it free from the web page, then it turns into a relationship with the customer that lasts even after the browser is closed,” Gozzo told VentureBeat in an interview.

Smooch competitor LivePerson has plans to extend a similar feature to Facebook Messenger.

Smooch is on many chat apps because it wants to “break the walled garden of traditional customer relationship management.” As Gozzo explained, “What we’re betting is that we’ll see more and more companies who realize that they absolutely have to start managing their customer relationships this way.”