We are Living in The Messaging Economy

For majority of us maybe it means nothing, They maybe realize how powerfull the messaging apps but sadly they only using it because of FOMO. For me, as an entrepreneurs it means something more it means that something is changing. “But what is it?” Let’s talk about it!

[Messaging Economy Chart]

Almost everything that we do, we do it on messaging apps, from socializing with your circle using WhatsApp until ordering food on gofood we still going to message the driver to make sure they get the order right. All this thing means that people are too comfortable doing message instead of calling/ chatting via Email.

Most brand see this as an opportunity to reach their market, because their market is there, we just need to think on how to attract them or get them notice your brand. So seeing this, I think they are already in the right channel, but in order to survive we need to do more than just in the right channel/ place. We need to exceed their expectation by giving them the best buying experience through messaging apps. But what is the expectation? Before we talk about expectation I think it’s better for us to know the reason behind “why people prefer messaging”.

I ask 100 business people to see what is changing with two simple questions.

First, “Why people prefer Whatsapp instead of Email/SMS?” There are 3 main answer to this question.

1. It’s free!
2. It’s real-time, means that they feel comfortable to know that the conversation status between them and the one that they send the message is there to be seen by both parties in real-time. The status include: received, seen/read, the person is typing and ofline/online status.
3. It’s fast & really easy to use, that’s why everybody in their circle are using it and love it!

Second, “if you get notifications from SMS, Email and Whatsapp, which one will you click first? and will you open all the notification or just leave it there” Most of the answer is “I’ll open the Whatsapp notification, but I don’t think I ever open sms notification, for email I’ll open mostly if I’m not busy or when I check my laptop at work”.

From this 2 simple question above we know that something is shifting, the market/ the people they have a different behaviour and expectation towards messaging or conversation. They expect every messaging to be real-time, fast & easy.

So are your business already fulfill the market expectation towards messaging? or even worst, your business are not even using Whatsapp/ chat application at all? if “No” then please do your self a favor and start using chat application for your sales & marketing channel . But if you already using it, then I know you might have some problem, so let’s talk about your problem.

According to InsideSales Research, waiting five minutes to respond to a new lead resulted in a 10x drop in the likelihood of being able to connect and follow up with the leads. And after 10 minutes, there’s a 400% drop in the odds of qualifying the lead. In the other words, the longer you wait to respond after someone is reaches out, the less likely it is that person will convert.

But sadly ..

[Companies Respond Time Diagram]

So the next question will be “how long you usually keep your customers waiting for your respond?”

So again I do my small research that include 20 Instgram social commerce/ brand at 1 pm, I chat them via Whatsapp that they give in their bio, with a really simple question “are [their product name] available? I’m ready to pay if it is available”, I make a clear statement that I will pay if they respond to my message and say “yes, it’s available”. But did you know how long did I have to wait for the respond? 30-60 minutes, amazing, isn’t it?

I completely understand the situation that the brand must have, with only a limited resources, brand can’t answer all inbound message directly with a short period of time. I divide all inbound message into 4 categories/ steps.

1. Capture, brands capture the incoming message into leads. They ask question like “what is your name” etc.
2. Question, brands answer the question about the products & promotion.
3. Qualify, brands give the price and wait for the payment confirmation.
4. Proceed, brands will proceed to packaging & courier

[Gambar funnel sales, visitor, leads, opportunity, customers]

With all that 4 steps, it’s almost imposible for a person to respond to every inbound message from leads, so what if I say that we can cut all the process into a smaller step? If we can cut the process it’s not impossible that we can handle more leads as usual right? “But how?”

You can figure that step 1–3 are actually a repetitive task, brand will ask “what’s your name”, “this is the price”, “can we shedule a meeting first for demo?”, “it’s available”, and other repetitive question and on their last step the brand need to check their bank account to confirm the payment, again repetedly. no human deserve to do this boring and repetitive task and still get yelled by the boss because they don’t achive the sales target. We human deserve a better task/ job.

That’s why we can delegate the boring & repetitive task to intelligent Chatbot.

Use intelligent chatbot — - only for those tedious, repetitive task that AI is particularly well-suited for

By automating these tasks, chatbot enable brands to focus more of their time on task that require a human touch, like answering complex question, packaging, sending and building rapport with new leads.

[gambar flow qualify with chatbot]

Now using chatbot, you don’t need to ask names/ their contact number cause chatbot can capture that information automatically without even asking. So chatbot can skip the capture process and go directly to the qualify process, and if it is qualify then human will takeover or proceed it to the convertion process, so the step will be reduce & now your brand can handle more customers fast & real-time for 24/7.

[ funnel with & without chatbot]

Chatbot never sleep, they don’t have feelings, they are trustworthy and they never gets frustated or even get bored, it’s a really good thing If you expect someone to handle a repetitive & boring jobs. That’s a good part about chatbot, but chatbot can be stupid, they can’t answer a complex question and I bet that your business definitely have 1–2 customers that ask complex question every single day.

“I don’t want to frustated the customers, so I can’t use chatbot because they can be stupid if there is a complex question right?” That’s a good point. But these day, chatbot can ask brand to takeover in real-time.

[Chatbot with human takeover]

Back in the day brand answer every question but today, brand only answe a complex question that need a human touch. It’s more effective & smart. Crazy isn’t it? And Human deserve that.

Capture, Qualify, Connect

Capture, is a process to turn visitor to leads by asking the visitor’s name & contact number. This process is so simple yet so important, so easy yet so tiring but imagine, if you have to do it manually, by our research if there is no delay from both parties the “manual capture process” from asking to names to saving the number usualy need 10 second to do it, now what if they do this for 100 new leads a day? It means they will spend 1.000 seconds only to capture leads that maybe is not our customers.

There are several important thing that you can do with the “data” that you capture.

1. You can call the leads by their name, it makes the buying experience more personal.
2. You can collect the Email & phone number to do “retargeting” ads on facebook, because a little that you know that the phone number leads gave you is “maybe” their facebook phonenumber
3. By saving or capturing the data, you can follow them up easily once there are a problem or you want to give them some new information about your brand.

Qualify, There are 2 kinds of qualify leads to opportunity, it leads to appointment/ purchasing. In this state brand can identify wether the leads is fit as their customers or not.

1. Service that lead to appointment qualifying process
2. Low — Medium Ticket Product purchase qualifying process
3. High Ticket Product purchase qualifying process

Connect, Is the last process when chatbot handover the task to human, this process usually need a human touch such as packaging, meeting, phone call, strategy, reporting based on the data that the chatbot give and so many more.

There is still alot of things that we need to dig about chatbot, the use case, the “how the chatbot ask for a takeover?” And other stuff. I’ll try to explain it on my next article but in the meantime, I think you guys should just talk to a chatbot’s startup.

There are a lot of chatbot’s startup today, but I personally recommend Talkabot, just because Talkabot’s chatbot service is only focusing on the marketing & sales process and I own that startup :)

You can always schedule an appointment with our sales through our chatbot called bobb. So I hope you guys enjoy it, you can always give me your best feedback here, I know I need it! :)

Cheers,

Distra Vantari CEO & Founder at Talkabot Indonesia