Graduation of Messaging, Powering Everything Everywhere

Fast, actionable, asynchronous, yet near real-time nature of messaging has led to its graduation from being a standalone communication channel to a powerful nucleus supporting variety of emerging utilities and applications. Sensing a shift in preferences, businesses are advancing from “one-way, one-size-fits-all” communication (e.g., mobile alerts, reminders, authentication codes) to “two-way, personalized” messaging. We are at the cusp of unlocking a plethora of use cases, as major messaging apps (Messenger, Slack et al) open up their platforms to developers of complementary applications. Subsequently, a variety of applications and bots will emerge on the messaging layer. Telegram, a heavily encrypted messaging app with relatively smaller user-base of 60 million MAUs, has already leapfrogged to open up its platform. Its APIs empower developers to build customized clients and connect bots to the platform.

Aside from these initial beginnings, in the US, the business-to-people interaction has so far not been very prevalent on social messaging apps, a phenomenon that has long been a way of life on WeChat in China. WeChat taps on its heavy user engagement to enable taxi-booking, food-ordering, payment, gaming etc., all within the app. WeChat has shaped into a successful “single point destination”, that offers a wide array of consumer services to its users without them needing to step outside the app. WeChat-style platformization needs deep penetration (e.g., WeChat at >90% in China) and unchallenged dominance as the single-largest app in a given geography (both QQ and WeChat are Tencent-owned, with common sign-on). In this context, an obvious question is: will platformization of messaging apps in other countries with large mobile user-base, e.g., US, India, unfold the same way as China? US has several popular instant messaging apps. Although, Messenger and WhatsApp (both Facebook-owned) are frontrunners, there is no clear single winner. It’s unlikely that either of the two will ever become an app-of-the-apps like WeChat.

On the other hand, in India, WhatsApp has fast become ubiquitous, not only among urban mobile netizens but also with rural smartphone owners. It’s fast replacing both SMS and voice calling — driven by barrage of low-cost smartphones and rapidly-declining mobile data tariffs. Although, WhatsApp is still a closed messaging platform, its popularity has resulted into businesses, large and small, organized and unorganized, informally engaging with people on the app.

It feels like everything everywhere is getting powered by messaging. To mention a few:

Commerce (Mezi, Magic, Operator, Goodbox): Messaging offers businesses a seamless, non-intrusive, and friendlier way of engaging with a consumer. It allows conversationally fleshing out purchase intent, providing personalized assistance in discovery, enabling seamless checkout, and enhancing the overall ‘feel good’ experience. “One third of our customers prefer texting as a preferred communication channel” says, JB Brown, Senior Director of Mobile App Delivery at Nordstrom. The retailer allows its customers to interact with favorite sales associates, browse personalized recommendations, and make purchases.

Workplace Productivity (Slack, Hipchat, Gitter, Popin): Driven by its spontaneity and ease of use, messaging is becoming the workforce activity hub with the spokes being other utilities like content management tools or email.

Healthcare (HealthTap, Lybrate, Tigertext): Messaging, done with privacy, significantly extends the reach of healthcare and access to doctors when needed. Texting also improves collaboration among on-the-run doctors, nurses, labs, and other healthcare professionals.

Education (Remind, Edmodo): Safe messaging empowers teachers to communicate with parents and students timely and more effectively.

Customer Service (Helpshift, Intercom): Messaging embedded within customer service workflows increases the responsiveness and efficacy of responding to customer issues and making customers happy.

Coordination (Twilio): Several online marketplaces use messaging APIs to enable coordination between its users. e.g. driver-passenger communication on Uber, pro-homeowner interaction on Porch, coordination of dating on Hinge.

Marketing (Blueshift, Kahuna): If marketing is about reaching out to a customer or a prospective customer with the right content, at the right time, at the right location, through the right channel, messaging fed by intelligence is the vehicle for doing marketing right.

And the list goes on.

While messaging brings a powerful opportunity to offer services in an engaging way, it demands significant technology and product innovation. The effectiveness of mobile push notifications is hitting a dead-end given their heavy proliferation (over a trillion notifications pushed out in 2014) and shortening individual attention spans. This, coupled with limited screen space on mobile devices, underscores the growing importance of relevance and personalization. Successful personalization over messaging will demand robust natural language processing and machine learning capabilities applied on user preference data and contextually harnessed location information. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be further augmented by efficient human intelligence (HI) to even offer services emulating that of a personal assistant for everyday life (e.g., Facebook has given early feelers of launching M, a personal digital assistant, envisioned to reside inside Messenger).

The nature of adoption of messaging will likely differ in different parts of the world, in line with local behavioral and cultural nuances. Going forward, messaging would deepen its roots not only in foreseen areas but could also touch several non-obvious areas in unimagined ways, such as internet of things (IOT), connected homes, connected cars. Though there still remain open questions, exciting times lie ahead. Done right, messaging powered services can lead to delightful consumer experience, served with order of magnitude better efficiency than the status quo.

(Disclaimer: Nexus is an investor in mezi, gitter, popin, lybrate, helpshift, blueshift, and goodbox)

Authors: @b_jishnu | @oneabhishek