The Online Concierge Market

With the tremendous growth of messaging platforms, it's no surprise that businesses are trying to take advantage. Facebook is trying to improve customer service allowing businesses to communicate with customer through their Messenger application.

But there is a growing market for concierge-like services through messaging. Some of the early companies include Operator (iOS/SMS), Magic (SMS), GoButler (iOS/SMS), and Scratch (iOS/web). Some of these services solely have people fulfilling your requests while other include some AI. You can ask these services for things like making reservations or buying something; all of them advertise that they have the best experts with incredible knowledge on products/locations to help you out. Right now, it seems that companies are just trying to break into this market and build a user base.

I see ways of monetizing these services (preferred retailers, selling large amounts of customer data, commission from sales) but it'll be tricky to do this completely relying on "experts" fulfilling everyone's request (on a large scale). I'm sure many plan on having automation on their roadmaps to relive manual support.

These virtual assistants will definitely become increasingly popular in the future. The biggest obstacle will be gaining customer confidence, particular in the initial phrase of setting up your account and gaining customer data/preferences. For shopping, if someone can get Amazon (or any major retailer) to join them, it could easily become a dominant service particular using existing customer data. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon offers a concierge service independently in the near future.

Interestingly enough, most of the current services avoid saying they are concierges; probably due to the historical association of it being for the wealthy.

Personally, I don't intent to use any of these services in the near future. I find it fun to see what products are out there. But I won't say I wouldn't consider it in the future for simple things like groceries or toothpaste once the services mature.

Will you give these services a try? Maybe you have already.