5 Ways of Creating an Engaging and Effective Customer Experience Using Messaging

Bazaars are buzzing, shops are decked up and customers are happy shopping – online and offline. The festive season has truly brought cheer to businesses and customers. As shopping picks up, another interesting consumer trend is unfolding in India – rise of business messaging.

Communication has always been the core of customer care. Good communication leads to good service, high-quality issue resolutions, and satisfied customers. Conventionally, brands have relied on phone calls, emails and other forms of communications for customer engagement. However, the landscape of communication is changing – especially with the global adoption of messaging.

India, with rapid adoption of mobile internet, is riding this transformation. The global ‘Business Messaging Usage’ research by Kantar, commissioned by Meta, highlights that 86% of online adults in India message a business at least once a week, considerably higher than the global average of 66%.

People in India increasingly prefer messaging over other forms of communication such as email, call or website. More than 70% of Indians surveyed said they prefer to message businesses rather than sending an email, calling or visiting their website. 75% Indians surveyed said they are more likely to do business with/purchase from a company that they can contact via messaging.

It has become common for Indians to message a business for buying clothes, exchanging purchases, booking holidays, or even paying for utilities. This trend is not restricted to metros or big cities. Here is how messaging can equip businesses to enhance customer experience, thus giving them a sense of familiarity and trust:

• Flexibility and Convenience – Traditional communications required customers to call within limited hours, wait on hold, and sometimes be forced to call back later due to call volume. The asynchronous nature of messaging allows customers to communicate with businesses at their convenience. It follows the digital experience of immediate satisfaction.

• Chatbots for customer service – Use of a chatbot not only helps to immediately reply to a message but also provides answers to common and simple inquiries immediately. Offering immediate response times provides the customer with a feeling of being valued, and gets them the answers they need on their schedule. Similarly, customer service agents can focus their efforts on more complicated and essential tasks.

• Personalised Engagement – Integrating existing CRMs and CMS systems with automated messaging helps in creating a system that connects customer data and addresses queries quickly. This also enables a business to initiate personalised and relevant interactions everytime a customer engages via messaging.

• Cost Reduction – With its streamlined communication, chatbots, and library of tools, messaging reduces customer care costs for companies of all sizes. Customer 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.

• Revenue Generation – Messaging can do more for a business’s bottom line than just reduce costs. 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. Businesses can utilise these interactions to showcase new products, encourage repeat purchases, and keep customers engaged.

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 businesses the ability to create an engaging and personal care experience.