Customers
Creating An Engaging and Effective Customer Experience with Messaging
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October 5, 2022
Messaging with your customers is key to transforming your customer experience from transactional to conversational
When it comes to making your customers happy, communication has always been the core of customer care. Good communication leads to good service, high-quality issue resolutions, and satisfied customers. And while phone calls and emails have been the go-to for decades, the landscape of communication is changing – especially with the global adoption of messaging.
By offering your customers the opportunity to connect with your business in messaging apps they’re already using, you can give them a sense of familiarity and trust. But it’s more than that. The asynchronous nature of messaging allows customers to communicate with you on their schedule. And media-rich messaging allows your service agents to get more detailed information faster – like images, videos, audio clips, documents, locations, contact information and more – leading to better issue resolutions.
By reducing the need for waiting on hold or managing confusing email chains, messaging decreases costs while increasing productivity, creating a more streamlined customer care experience. These features help reduce call volume, streamline processes, and create more opportunities for revenue generation.
Communication in the Digital Age: What’s changed, and how can you adapt?
Asynchronous Capabilities
Asynchronous conversations are a core part of the messaging experience. Traditional communications required customers to call within limited hours, wait on hold, and sometimes be forced to call back at a later time due to call volume. Asynchronous messaging does away with all that, and follows the digital experience of immediate satisfaction.
Automation and A.I.
A big contributor to that sense of immediate satisfaction is the use of chatbots. Not only are they able to reply immediately to a message, chatbots can also pull from a vast library of information, allowing them to provide answers to common and simple inquiries immediately.
Up to 70% of customer inquiries on Meta Business Messaging are answered automatically with chatbot functionality.1
Offering immediate response times provides the customer with a feeling of being valued, and gets them the answers they need on their schedule. By reducing the time agents spend on simple issues, they’re able to focus their efforts on more complicated and essential tasks.
Additionally, you can integrate your existing CRMs and CMS systems with automated messaging to create a system that connects to all your customer data and can respond quickly. This helps create a personalized and relevant interaction every time your customers engage with you via messaging.
Cost Reduction
With its streamlined communication, chatbots, and library of tools, messaging reduces customer care costs for companies of all sizes. Your agents can communicate with multiple customers simultaneously in the time it would take to resolve one issue via phone call, which can increase their productivity and reduce the amount of customers returning with the same problem. On top of that, agent turnover is reduced1 when using messenger compared to traditional communication methods.
77% of WhatsApp Business Platform users surveyed reported an average of 24% reduced agent turnover with WhatsApp.1
Less turnover can save your business money on training new agents and can keep service quality high by avoiding new hire mistakes/hiccups. This turnover reduction and increased efficiency helps create a smaller team of expert service agents who can provide your customers with fantastic service. This kind of improved productivity is worth between $467,000 and $4.6 million1 over three years, depending on business size.
Revenue Generation
Messaging can do more for your bottom line than just reduce costs. The Forrester data shows that, when used properly, it can also help boost your revenue. Companies successfully using messaging have deployed revenue-building strategies like offering in-messaging purchasing, creating personalized content, developing relevant message flows including reminders, and marketing via business-initiated messages.
Customers surveyed report a 20% increase in average order values after customers interact via messaging.1
And by keeping your customer data connected, you can create personalized, relevant message flows. These can send customers personalized deals and discounts based on their purchase history, or follow up messages after care interactions to proactively provide additional support. These additional touch points are good upsell opportunities as well. Use these interactions to show off new products, encourage repeat purchases, and keep customers engaged.
Increased Efficiency
Moving away from traditional communications means agents can spend less time on the phone and answering emails, and work with multiple customers in the time it used to take for just one conversation.
Messaging requires 35% less agent time on average compared to legacy solutions such as phone and email.1
Meta messaging solutions, like the WhatsApp Business Platform, offer built-in interactive and media-rich templates to help agents respond quickly and consistently – making it easier to resolve common issues. And with the reduced turnover rate we mentioned earlier, the average agent may be more experienced with your business and its products, allowing them to better serve customers.
Improved Customer Experience
Over the past twenty years the focus has shifted from customer care to customer experience. You need to do more than just meet customers’ needs, you need to make sure they’re happy with the way you solve their problems. With messaging, customers get a personalized experience that gives them the help they need, when they need it, while instilling a sense of value and trust.
90% of customers questioned by Forrester said customer experience improved with Meta Business Messaging, and 74% and 67% were able to report improvements in Customer Effort Scores and Net Promoter Scores, respectively.1
Messaging offers a cost-saving, revenue-generating method to help improve customer care experiences for both your customers and agents. Solving many of the issues presented by traditional communication, messaging is an asynchronous communication system based on familiar apps that many customers use daily.
With its proven efficiency and ease of use, messaging in customer care is the future. Its ability to create a conversational care environment, as opposed to a traditional transactional model, gives your company the ability to create an engaging and personal care experience. Your business can become a resource customers are happy to go to for help, instead of an unpleasant phone call.
Want to know more about how messaging can impact your business? See our post on how The Rise of Enterprise Business Messaging.