Facebook Inc. is getting serious about the potential of its Messenger platform as a business marketing tool.

Today at its annual F8 developer conference in San Jose, California, it added several new features to the platform that should help companies to generate new sales leads, drive more traffic and provide better customer services.

The social network giant has a number of sessions planned at F8 today that involve how to use Messenger for business. But at F8 this morning, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) also hammered home his latest push for more privacy-focused services, including Messenger.

“The future is private,” Zuckerberg said during his keynote. “This is the next chapter to our services.”

But at the time time, it’s likely to be tricky for Facebook to balance that privacy and the desire of companies to target people on the platform with advertising — something Zuckerberg acknowledged.

“I bet a lot of people aren’t sure we’re serious about this,” he conceded. “We don’t exactly have the strongest reputation for privacy these days, to put it mildly.”

Zuckerberg took pains to emphasize Messenger’s end-to-end encryption, among other privacy-oriented features, as well as fleshing out new features for its already privacy-focused WhatsApp messaging platform.

“Consumers want to know their personal data is secure, and with the rollout of end-to-end encryption for payments and location services, among other new features, Facebook is taking all of the right steps to make good on their privacy vision,” Joshua March, CEO of the social customer experience platform Conversocial, which has offered Messenger Chat to its clients since 2017, told SiliconANGLE.

But all that’s also not stopping Facebook from introducing new features to Messenger aimed at further connecting users and businesses.

First up for Messenger is a new appointment booking tool, which integrates with people’s favorite calendars so that customers can easily select an available date that fits with their busy schedule. The service also ensures users won’t forget as it provides a timely reminder of their appointments via Messenger, plus the ability to cancel or change the time or date, if necessary.

The appointment booking service is currently available in beta, ahead of general availability expected later this year.

Image: Facebook

Adding to that is a new lead generation and qualification service for marketers using Messenger. The idea is to help marketers run campaigns directly in Messenger by adding a lead generation template via the Ads Manager portal. Leads are then generated via an automated question and answer flow within Messenger whenever someone contacts the company through Facebook. The service also comes with a “handoff” functionality that transitions from a bot to a human agent once a lead becomes “qualified,” so marketers won’t miss out on the opportunity for a quick sale.

In a session Tuesday, Facebook cited several examples of companies using Messenger to reach qualified leads. Smarters, provided lead generation to General Motors with Click-to-Messenger ads, resulting in a 30% higher conversion rate than any other online source, said Smarters co-founder Pietro Bujaldon. Mass Mutual’s Haven Life Insurance Agency used those ads to send users to an automated Q&A conversation to get the answers needed to provide a quote in real time. The company saw a 12% increase in completed questionnaires and a 23% lower cost per lead.

Third is a new capability that Facebook calls “Easy Authentication” that’s designed to facilitate customer service issues relating to billing inquiries, refunds and so on. The idea is to redirect customers who have previously been authenticated on a businesses’ website to a Messenger thread, where they can quickly explain their problem and get an instant answer from the company’s customer service reps.

The new business features in Messenger are part of much wider changes coming to the app, details of which only emerged today. In a nutshell, what Facebook wants to do is make Messenger “faster” and “lighter,” and to that end it has been working a project called “Lightspeed” that involves rebuilding the app from the ground up with an entirely new codebase.

The updated Messenger will roll out sometime later this year, and although few details are forthcoming at this stage, Facebook is promising a much lighter app that takes up less than 30 megabytes of storage space, which amounts to 70MB less than the current iteration of the app.

Other additions to the newly lightweight Messenger app include what Facebook describes as a “dedicated space for you to easily find content from the friends and family you message most.” There’s also a new video sharing feature in the works that will let users share content from Facebook to friends and family in real-time, plus a revamped desktop app for Messenger on Windows and MacOS that’s also set to launch later in the year.

In a wide-ranging set of other announcements, Zuckerberg also introduced a new version of the core Facebook app, rolling out starting today, that features Groups and Stories more prominently. The app is also losing its iconic blue bar at the top.

In addition, he revealed at the Oculus Rift S and the cableless headset Oculus Quest, which will both be priced at $399, are available for pre-ordering now and for delivery starting May 21.

Not least, Facebook debuted Oculus for Business, an enterprise service for streamlining and expanding the use of virtual reality in the workplace. It will launch this fall.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE