Why Brands Need a Messaging-First Approach to Customer Service
The last two years have proven that customer-first businesses must be flexible to thrive. That means meeting customers where they are—and where they haven’t been able to be.
How do you, as a business, satisfy the human need for social interaction amid physical distancing? How do you nurture brand loyalty when you can’t work off of facial cues? And—keeping your ultimate goal in mind—how do you convert interactions into sales and ensure a good experience remotely?
This is where digital platforms – messaging in particular – earned their supper in 2021.
From WhatsApp to Facebook Messenger, asynchronous conversations make customer service easily accessible for the consumer. It’s also more manageable for support teams: Businesses report a 20% call volume reduction when they use Apple Business Chat, which is good news since phones are more expensive to operate. Plus, messaging channels cut up to 60% off the cost of each customer interaction.
Fewer calls and a reduction in per-interaction cost is the dollars-and-cents headline, but let’s talk about the human side of it: How does mobile engagement make consumers feel, and why should that be a business’, well, business?
Customer satisfaction affects the bottom line.
Customer satisfaction is imperative for company success. A Freshworks survey found that in 12 months, a single negative experience was all it took for 56% of consumers to stop doing business with a brand. Dissatisfaction snowballs from there, affecting conversions, reputation, and revenue.
It’s cost-effective to cultivate brand loyalty. Why? Repeat customers cost less to serve, and happy consumers are more likely to refer others to you.
Successful brands have found excitement in reimagining customer satisfaction. Creating convenient customer service channels makes it easier to delight your audience.
There are three big reasons why businesses need to include messaging platforms in their customer service mix.
#1: Convenience
If you have a smartphone, you’re one text away from anyone, including the brands you buy from. Customers have come to expect an easy way to solve their problems, from troubleshooting with support staff to inquiring about an order’s status and making returns.
Luckily for consumers, messaging apps like WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and Line Chat make it possible. 68% of WhatsApp users call it the most convenient way to engage with a brand.
Here are three wins that come from embracing messaging:
- Better-paced interactions: Your support team has internal goals for email turnaround time or call length. Loosening up to let customers determine their own interaction pace makes asynchronous service correspondence feel less rushed. If you still want to measure your team’s ROI, consider issuing a pre-chat survey to gather the information you’ll need to most quickly serve customers.
- Self-service: Set up automated reply messages to encourage self-service, prompting the customer to proactively solve their own problems by reading support articles and FAQs.
- Personalization: You can personalize your messaging to, at the very least, address the user by their name. Accenture Interactive found about 70% of consumers want their communication with brands to be personalized. It’s an extra step that makes customers feel cared for, especially when they’ve trusted your brand with their phone number.
#2: Conversation
About 45% of customer service leaders say online chat and messaging apps are critical to maintaining productivity and high-quality service. Using these apps not only keeps the line open for further discussion—making the interaction feel less transactional—but it also keeps a record of what was talked about.
The benefits of maintaining records of past conversations include:
- Using the data to train team members on ideal responses and response times
- Having detailed interaction information to utilize in the event of customer disagreements
- Analyzing interactions to craft better customer engagement practices and frameworks
Here’s an example of a winning messaging-based CX strategy. With more than 10 million subscribers, regional telecom leader MTN Cameroon was one of the first businesses in the Middle East and Africa region to adopt WhatsApp as a customer service tool. Marie-Rose Daya Tchangoum, GM of Customer Experiences and Services, said the prevalence of WhatsApp usage in young Cameroonians made it obvious that MTN needed to meet consumers where they already were so that their consumers could connect with them at any time.
“It’s [about] being able to serve them, and in a way that will speak to their need,” she said.
This way, her team has improved their first response time, averaging two hours.
“The battle is not about the pricing,” Tchangoum said. “The battle is not about having a new product or services either. It’s about how you handle your customer. What are you giving them in terms of how they can contact you, how you add value to their life, to their journey, to this cycle of interest?”
Learn more from other global brands about leading with digital service here.
No longer will a support ticket be a one-off. The opportunity for an ongoing exchange of product ideas and brand impressions helps consumers feel more valuable to a brand in which they’ve invested time, money, and trust.
#3: Cost
Based on online shopper penetration, the United States is one of the leading e-commerce markets: More than 224 million U.S. people shopped online in 2019, and this number is projected to reach 230.5 million in 2021. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies struggled to maintain staff and meet customer demand.
That’s a whole lot of incoming customer phone calls. What if one agent could juggle multiple ongoing service interactions at once, with no one-to-one calling required? What’s more, what if this new method were cheaper than conventional calls?
According to a Forrester study, the math is clear: The average cost per phone interaction is $15.50, while the average cost per messaging interaction is $1 to $5. Read more stats about how modern messaging saves you money here.
Klarna, a Swedish Fintech company, knows too well the challenge of serving so many people: They have 80 million customers to wow. Their app processes up to 1 million daily transactions, and their legacy chat solution couldn’t cut it—at least, not with the brand experience they wanted for customers.
Using Freshdesk Messaging, Klarna delighted customers with fast, prioritized service referencing past interactions. They optimized Freshdesk’s offerings to quickly route a customer to the right agent, no longer needing to manually assign tasks.
Peak season? Volume spikes?
No sweat. With a digital plan in place, you won’t need to pull in folks from other teams to staff phones. Messaging makes it manageable, and cheaper, too.
Messaging is a must-have ingredient for CX excellence and customer delight.
In 2022, you’ll find that delighting your customers means easing the load on your customer service team first. Taking a mobile-first approach to customer engagement and adding messaging to your CX repertoire will result in convenient, personalized, and inexpensive interactions.
In fact, messaging is slated to be a huge focus area for CX leaders this year, alongside omnichannel service, speedy support, and digital-first customer service. Read about them in Freshworks’ Future of CX: 2022 report to ensure that you’re poised to rapidly adopt the trends that matter most to you, your team, and your clientele.
