Peppering a company’s Facebook page with questions and comments appears to be yesterday’s form of communication, as the social media site announced today that it’s giving users and companies the ability to chat with each other through its messenger app.

In announcing the new venture, Facebook say it’s working to improve the way consumers and business interact by enabling real-time conversations.

The initiative is a partnership with cloud-based customer service platform Zendesk.

For now, the feature will be piloted with online retailers Everlane and Zulily, so that in addition to calling, Tweeting and emailing the companies, consumers can use Facebook Messenger to receive order information and other customer service requests.

While many companies already have online chat support for customers who don’t want to use a phone or email to contact businesses, Bloomberg reports that representatives for Facebook are confident their product is better.

“We want to reinvent the way people and businesses are communicating,” David Marcus, Facebook’s vice president of messaging products, said at the company’s F8 conference this week. “Lots of companies have tried to build chat services and a bunch of other things but they’re not that good.”

Of course, users wanting to actually utilize the business-to-consumer communication away from their desktop will have to download the separate Messenger application.

Additionally, Facebook doesn’t provide details on whether or not the consumer has to make first contact with the company or if users might be inundated with unwanted messages from over-eager business representatives.

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