Manage the Global Messaging Maze with Omnichannel Communications
To meet customers’ ever-evolving standards of convenience, businesses need to be present and available where their customers are. And with some 2.5 billion smartphones in play around the world, engaging customers on mobile is key. A recent Adobe survey confirms, reporting that 92% of respondents use their smartphone as their primary device.
But the mobile app marketplace may be on the brink of over-saturation. There are more than two million apps available for the iPhone alone. And, while the App Store generated $33 billion in revenue for Apple in 2018 and exciting new products and services are creating new apps every day, a recent report from ComScore shows a new side effect is starting to emerge for consumers: app fatigue. These days, just 35% of smartphone users are downloading new apps, and 85% of consumers’ app time is spent on just five apps.
For customers, navigating all of those apps is hardly a friction-free experience. So, forward-thinking businesses are reevaluating mobile from the ground up, building interactions and transactions that take place entirely within their customers’ favorite messaging apps. With billions of customers already spending hours each day on these apps, channels like WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat and the like present an unprecedented opportunity for customer engagement.
Take retail — an industry at the forefront of the shift to mobile-driven experiences. Smartphones have overtaken computers as the top e-commerce traffic source, with mobile devices pushing 68% of e-commerce visits and 46% of orders during this latest holiday shopping season, according to Salesforce. From driving awareness to consideration to transactions, it’s clear that mobile is a crucial element of the retail path-to-purchase.
From Rituals to Hugo Boss to SuitSupply, MessageBird is helping innovative global retailers find ways to personalize customer experiences on a deeper level. Whether for delivery updates, special offers based on customer preferences, location-specific promotions or feedback surveys, retailers are seeing sales, loyalty and engagement rise with the integration of an omnichannel approach into their communication strategies.
What’s more, with products like Programmable Conversations and Flow Builder, these solutions are more accessible and painless to implement than ever. With Programmable Conversations, retailers are building global, friction-free experiences that tailor to each customer on an individual level, while the Programmable Conversations API takes care of the technical heavy lifting—automatically adjusting messages to adhere to different channel requirements, unifying interactions across channels into a single customer conversation thread, defaulting to a customer’s most-used messaging channel when a new message is sent, and more.
For technical and non-technical teams alike, the no-code Flow Builder is enabling retailers to build omnichannel communication flows that handle customer calls, power chatbots, manage subscriptions and opt-outs, and automate customer feedback requests in mere minutes.
Across channels and countries, cloud communications is helping businesses drive sales and brand loyalty while escaping the pitfalls of app-fatigue and poor customer experience, by empowering them to connect to billions of customers on the channels they already use and love.
