Every marketer, every business, wants and needs to be able to communicate with customers. In marketing, the traditional way is by segmenting the customer base into a relevant target group and then sending out a communication to the identified people.
The business’ messages themselves are sent via a communication channel selected by the company. Of these, the most commonly used one is still email; this in spite of it being called dead for some years now. Other channels that are increasingly used are social media like Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter, even Instagram or nowadays TikTok. But most interestingly, there is an increasing amount of engagement that happens on messaging channels like WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Telegram or any other of the many available messaging platforms. Of course, there is the branded app, too.
The choice of channels is virtually endless and steadily increasing.
And more importantly, people – customers – are increasingly using them! According to the DataReportal 2021 report, the top three messaging platforms have more than 1.2 billion users each.
Source: Datareportal, via FinancesOnline
What is more, while according to Statista, in the United States about 25 percent of all Americans use WhatsApp with 88 percent using Facebook Messenger, the WhatsApp penetration is according to a 2021 study by Conversocial at nearly 100 percent in some countries.
Source: Conversocial via FinancesOnline
But there is more! According to a 2023 Spectrm report, a whopping 78 percent of all respondents have messaged with a brand. This is up from just over half in 2022.
Source: Spectrum State of Social Conversational Commerce 2023
And most of these customers are doing so more than just once. In fact, 56 percent of the positive respondents are communicating more than 10 times with brands using messaging channels. Compared to the State of Social Conversational Commerce 2022 report, this, too, shows an uptick.
Source: Spectrm State of Social Conversational Commerce 2023
People want to communicate with businesses the way they are used to communicating with each other; this means using voice and text over point and click.
And furthermore, customers do rarely care for the channel. They simply expect the business to be “where they are”, also in the digital sense. They want an engagement with organizations and businesses not according to the organization rules but following their rules, i.e., working towards their desired outcome at their time, their pace and using the communication channel of their choice.
This has fascinating implications for organizations and businesses, as it opens up a huge opportunity. Yes, businesses are offering many channels but they are mostly not set up to engage in a consistent conversation with their customers. Businesses far too often still do not talk with their customers, but at them, using uni-directional marketing communication. How many newsletters or other brand emails do we get every day? Ads coming in not only on websites but also on social media are far more common than engaging with customers and prospects in a bidirectional conversation.
Again, customers are not interested in getting blasted with corporate messages. They are more interested in a dialogue that helps them make informed decisions and efficiently solve their problems at hand.
They will have a far better experience with businesses which are able to deliver on this requirement. And numerous studies have shown that companies which offer customers a positive customer experience fare better than their competition. Other studies like this one that was published in the IJBMM in September 2022 have shown that companies that offer their customers chat and do not unduly restrict customers ability to choose their channel benefit from this.
The 1,000 dollar question is of course how businesses and organizations can leverage the huge opportunity mentioned above.
This is by far not a trivial question as most available solutions either focus on single lines of business like marketing, sales, service or on a subset of channels, e.g., either social media channels or messaging channels. In addition, many organizations have already implemented a legacy CRM system that might not even support social and messaging channels for customer communication. Others already implemented a variety of solutions for different use cases, scenarios and lines of business, which leads to the obvious integration, data consistency and process challenges – which in turn lead to reduced customer experience and -satisfaction.
The same holds true for employees.
In order to communicate with colleagues and customers, they regularly need to use multiple applications. Slack, MS Teams, e-mail, text messaging, and many more. This is surely not efficient, often not even effective. The inevitable results are wasted time, inconsistent communication, and ultimately, frustration.
So, we have not only a poor customer experience but also a poor user experience.
The solution is surprisingly simple.
It is based on the concept of the unified inbox that we have known for many years. All communications are collected in one single central place: E-mails, messages from social media, messages from messengers, and so on. Not only are they collected here, but they can also be managed here – responded to, or forwarded.Of course, communication can also be initiated from here. When connected to a CRM system and other business systems for master data and business process purposes, communication with customers and colleagues all of the sudden becomes far easier. This is true not only for service scenarios – like conversational support – but also for sales and marketing, as well as internal processes. Think of a deal room that connects participants that use communication channels as different as WhatsApp, e-mail, Slack, or MS Teams.
This covers the employee experience portion.
But what about the customer experience?
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