Is your company looking to carve out a piece of that multi-billion-dollar pie?
With nearly 2 million apps available in Apple’s App Store and 30,000 more added every month, so is everyone else.
77.9% of mobile phone users say the mandatory app installation roadblock caused them to abandon at least one transaction in the last year with no discernible differences between men and women.
However, there’s a strong trend when broken down by age. Younger users are progressively more likely to abandon transactions if required to install an app to make a purchase, complete a sale or try a service. Over 80% of users aged 18-34 reported abandoning at least one transaction in the last year because they had to install an app compared to around 76% of users aged 35-54 and 69.6% of users aged 55+.
That’s a lot of lost business, and much of it’s likely to be new business because these lost customers haven’t installed the company’s mobile app yet.
Instead of letting new business slip away, why not try to gain new customer trust by allowing them to engage the tools that they are already using and comfortable.
Latest research from Mobilesquared shows that total business messaging traffic – covering both A2P and P2A across SMS, RCS, and WhatsApp – amounted to 1.64 trillion in 2019 and is forecast to more than double by the end of 2024. SMS accounted for 99.2% of the total business messaging traffic in 2019, but is forecast to see its market share fall to 59.3% in 2024, with the WhatsApp Business App rising to 15.8% of the total, the WhatsApp Business API up to 13.7%, and RCS to 11.3%.
Business messaging is a set of channels over which customers and businesses can interact with each other. Customers now expect to have personalized two-way interactions with businesses at their convenience just like they do with their friends or family, on the channels they prefer.
The nature of customer interactions has evolved significantly in the past year. From ordering daily supplies to making payments, customers have increasingly taken to a wide range of digital platforms and messaging channels to meet their needs. While businesses need to be on these platforms to interact with their customers, it is crucial to identify the right channels to be effective.
To help businesses better understand these channels and their features, here are few channels that are transforming the customer experience today:
- WhatsApp Business
- Facebook Messenger
- Apple Business Chat
- Google’s Business Messages
- RCS
What the channel is – for example, WhatsApp Business API helps businesses connect to over 2 billion consumers in a simple, reliable, and private way across 180 countries. Google Business Messages is a mobile conversational channel that allows Android users to contact companies across various Google entry points, including Google Search and Google Maps. Apple Business Chat is an app-based digital channel exclusively for iOS users whereas, RCS stands for Rich Communication Services and is a mobile operator-based.
What it does – Rich messaging channels like Apple Business Chat and WhatsApp offer businesses the ability to engage customers throughout their journey. With features like carousels, list pickers, quick action buttons, customers can ask queries, browse options, book appointments, and make payments without having to leave the channel. Businesses can further benefit by understanding customer expectations through these interactions and personalizing their future interactions with proactive alerts and notifications.
The need for seamless, interactive, and rich customer experiences is here to stay. Businesses that invest in creating connected experiences for customers across every touchpoint across every channel will give them a competitive advantage. To deliver a conversational and end-to-end customer experience, businesses will have to manage all customer interactions across multiple channels centrally.
Ephanti’s conversation solution is designed to cater to various parts of the business, like customer engagement and experience, by enabling them to build and deploy customer journeys of varying complexity. Powered with AI, ML NLP, and NLU, capabilities along with dynamic workflow builders that can integrate necessary systems, enterprise developers and users can significantly accelerate the delivery of rich, intelligent, and interactive customer experiences. Its out-of-the-box NLP and message processing by ML, empower enterprises to deliver smarter customer interactions faster. Ephanti enables multiple self-service use cases achieved via any messaging channel of customer’s choice, without needing to deploy a mobile app.
