Kustomer opens up new opportunities for marketers and for Facebook. Facebook’s acquisition of CRM startup Kustomer is the latest – and biggest – sign that it is serious about allowing business marketers to better interact customers, while also allowing it to own more of the path to purchase. Here’s why. When Facebook announced in October enhanced ways for businesses to manage conversations with people in Instagram and Whatsapp, it heralded the significant growth in interactions between people and businesses on its platforms. This served as foreshadowing for Facebook’s acquisition of the customer management technology firm Kustomer. If approved, the reported $1bn acquisition will bring a robust set of tools into the Facebook fold that will give marketers new ways to automate customer service responses as well as improve interactions with customers – even when conversations happen outside of Facebook. The Kustomer platform boasts a “single screen view” of interactions across email, phone, web and messenger. This gives customer service agents a full understanding of the request at hand.