Why messaging has become the channel of choice for managing customer relations

Marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, companies have accelerated their digital transformation, whether in terms of tools or services used and/or marketed.

Among the hardest hit were retail players, who, with stores closing, had to invest quickly to ensure smooth customer relations. A strategy that paid off, since in 2020, 29% of companies that chose to perfect their customer experience saw a clear increase in revenues.

To achieve this, more and more companies are turning to high-performance customer relations strategies and new communication channels, including social messaging, to boost customer engagement. For example, WhatsApp has over 1.5 billion users worldwide, and at Zendesk we've seen a 352% increase in support requests via this application.

Today, companies are increasingly looking to implement customer-focused business approaches. This dynamic is underpinned by the arrival of messaging, which is at the heart of everything, especially as consumers are looking for immediacy in their exchanges with a brand, just as they do with their loved ones.

However, questions remain: what business opportunities do customer relations and the use of social messaging represent? What's the current state of corporate use?

The keys to successful customer relations

Companies that have taken up the challenge of customer relations and now have the most advanced processes in the field consider that the maturity of their customer experience operations is a decisive competitive factor in setting themselves apart from their competitors. Some are prepared to invest in these technologies for the long term, confident in the results they will deliver in terms of customer loyalty and growth. In fact, the most seasoned companies are twice as likely to have a response time of less than an hour, compared with those just starting out.

It also means giving agents the means to succeed in their missions and make the customer experience more fluid. By providing them with high-performance tools and appropriate training, they are no longer simply one-off troubleshooters, but true strategic partners in helping customers, as well as helping the company to understand the areas for improvement and progress in terms of customer experience to make interactions more fluid.

Thanks to digital solutions, the analysis and use of data can guarantee a certain agility and adaptability at the heart of companies. Valuable data to help companies understand certain purchasing patterns. Indeed, companies that base their strategic and commercial decisions on their data, particularly those relating to customers, whether it be products, support or other, can more easily act quickly on customer hooks and improve or rectify the parameters at play. Unfortunately, even today, many companies are still unaware of these parameters or the information they lack, and this can have harmful long-term consequences.

The key is to communicate with customers where they are. This goes hand in hand with the success of a seamless experience, because if customers find it difficult to get help or information about a product or service, the company could lose some of them as a result of dissatisfaction with the service or products. The rise in the use of chatbots and social messaging shows that companies are keen to engage in more dialogue with their customers, and above all that this is a reciprocal exchange, since customers are increasingly using these channels.

Social messaging at the heart of conversational commerce

More and more companies are integrating the notion of conversation into their customer relations. The number of these conversations is multiplied by the use of numerous channels. Customers are gradually abandoning the telephone and e-mail for messaging and chat.

The emergence of these new channels, and particularly social messaging, has opened up new opportunities for businesses. By communicating in a convenient and fluid way, they enable brands to exchange with over a billion users. It has also given brands powerful new roles and responsibilities that they are only just beginning to come to terms with.

Their strength lies in the fact that, with each interaction, customers can resume their exchanges with agents, thanks to the retention of their history. Agents, for their part, find their work easier, since they can deal with several customers at once and access contextual information each time the customer contacts them via a communication channel, thus enabling a fluid, personalized experience.

This is the case with Back Market, which uses an omnichannel solution to centralize and automate the e-mail, telephone and chat conversations a user may have with the brand. Finally, since September 2020, the marketplace has been using the WhatsApp social network, integrated directly into the Back Market mobile application, to make its customers' mobile experience even smoother. In just a few months of use, the results are in: a response 5 times faster than by e-mail and a CSAT 5 points higher.

This is an opportunity for companies to add real value to the customer experience, create a federated community and even generate revenue through conversational commerce. Indeed, in addition to conversations around the service, the notion of payment in messaging applications is an increasingly important part of customers' conversational journey. It's a way for companies to secure the purchasing act more quickly and make it more fluid, since everything is done from a single interface: the chosen messaging application. Above all, it diversifies sales channels and boosts revenues.

Even if the integration of social messaging into the customer journey is still in its infancy, companies that assume their responsibilities to their customers will be rewarded with a new level of customer satisfaction.-to their customers will be rewarded with engagement, loyalty and, in some cases, advocacy from their communities. It's important to remain proactive in customer conversations to reinforce consumer trust in the brand.

Sponsored article. Expert contributors are authors independent of the appvizer editorial team. Their comments and positions are their own.