Messaging - Most Effective Channel in Customer Service

Be it in any form – SMS, Whatsapp, Chat, Messenger, or Social Chat, Businesses unanimously vote for Messaging as one of their must-have channel mixes.

Over the last five years while the world is talking about the advances in voice recognition, voice bots, and speech-based customer service, messaging has been silently evolving, proving its worth and even changing the game for customer service delivery. Take a cue from the success story of the WhatsApp Business App and API. It is a clear example of how a simple chat-based app can grow and scale into becoming a successful customer service delivery platform for businesses. This is true for other instant messengers like Facebook messenger, WeChat, Viber, and Apple Business Chat as well.

Messaging interactions, irrespective of the platform are mostly nonvoice and synchronous in nature that means related conversation that is conducted in a dialogue format one after the other

Customers prefer synchronous channels when the urgency level is high. Also with the new generation of customers, there is a growing preference of non-voice channels. So messaging is becoming more popular with the new generation customer pool for both one-off and synchronous interactions.

Again in its findings based on a consumer survey of the use of messaging for customer service revealed that by 2020, around 50 million consumers will opt-in to receive business SMS! The survey also showed that consumers love the convenience of messaging but struggle mightily with its experience silo and lack of integration. In order to understand which messaging platform to incorporate in your channel mix lets individually evaluate the pros and cons of each messaging tool as a customer experience delivery channel – Whatsapp, Livechat, chatbot, SMS, messenger, and other social chat.

Content

1. WhatsApp

Pros

• Widely used platform in both domestic and international markets.
• Provides access to global customers at a limited cost
• Easy integration with contact center tools like CRM, Chat, and Chatbot to attend several messages at once
• No additional platform adoption cost
• Option of template message for mass and repeated distribution
• The document interaction API allows sharing text, photos, videos, audio notes and music files, pdf documents, contact cards, web URLs with customers over the platform
• Provides its own analysis on delivered, read, unread messages
• Most importantly it gives information on the customers using WhatsApp and the ones not using it, so a business can plan its channel-wise content delivery

Cons

• Penalises if a customer’s messages are not responded to within 24 hours
• It's not necessary that the customer will be using Whatsapp

2. Chat

Pros

• Provides one-click access to customer support agent
• Chat allows customers to multi-task, even when they are waiting for an answer they can do other work
• The conversations can be saved by a customer for future reference
• The present-day proactive chats ensure that a business reaches out to customers at defining moments, like when they are on a transaction page or have left things in the cart for some time.
• It is an inexpensive way of engaging with a company and agent can handle multiple chats simultaneously
• Chat integrated with ticketing or service CRM, help agents raise and share tickets in one click
• It can be integrated with other contact center tools like CRM, chatbot, Omnichannel, etc.
• Analyzing an agent’s performance is simple with chat analytics
• Disposing and collecting customer feedback after completing a conversation is simple and straightforward with live chats
• Allows sharing of documents, web URLs, images over the chat platform
• A chat software brings functionalities like screen share, chat conferencing, chat transfer, etc to make the service delivery accurate and to achieve resolutions in the first interaction

Cons

• Providing 24X7x365 chat support can become cost-intensive for businesses
• Agents' time can be better utilized in handling complex scenarios, than answering the routine question. Time optimization, therefore, becomes a challenge with live chat
• It is ill-suited for most mobile devices unless properly integrated in mobile apps
• Depending on the chat provider, some chats don’t stay if a customer navigates to a different page on the website
• Seeing a chat agent offline does not leave a good impression on customers
• Customers have to visit the website or app to initiate a live chat, which may not be of their interest

3. Chatbot

Pros

• Provides 24X7 availability
• Available in both rule-based and conversational formats
• The rule-based chatbot has a low scope of failure due to its guided flow
• The conversational bot has the power to engage with near-human interaction skills
• Chatbots can easily handle regular or repetitive queries
• Most of the chatbots have the option to transfer to a live agent when it cannot handle the queries or the customer prefers to move to a live agent
• A chatbot can be integrated with CRM, Chat, Social Media, and Omnichannel to deliver holistic customer service
• It works as an important self-help tool for customers
• Allows sharing of documents, web urls, images over the chatbot platform
• Chatbots improve the efficiency of agents by freeing them to handle complex interactions
• Scaling a business with chatbots is cost-effective

Cons

• Training a conversational bot is a continuous process and can’t be achieved in a day
• Investing in a chatbot is costlier than some of the other messaging platforms like WhatsApp, SMS, social chats etc where the communication can be asynchronous but is cheaper than live chat
• It is ill-suited for most mobile devices unless properly integrated in mobile apps
• Depending on the provider, some chats with a chatbot don’t stay if a customer navigates to a different page on the website

4. SMS

Pros

• SMS is a non-intrusive way of communicating with customers
• It is a cheaper alternative to some of the other messaging platforms for bulk distribution of content
• Good for uni-directional communication like reminders offer promotions, bank updates, etc.
• SMS is highly popular for OTP verifications, making them a good identification and verification tool

Cons

• Two-way interaction is not always possible with SMS as broadcast messages are limited by Telecom providers as uni-directional
• A business can only share web URLs over SMS, unlike other messaging platforms that allow businesses to share multimedia contents like documents, images, videos, etc.
• Taking customer feedback over SMS is not as frictionless as it is with some other messaging tools.
• DND restrictions reduce the reach of SMS messages

5. Social Messages

Pros

• Provide availability to businesses on channels where customers frequent – be close to customers!
• Has seen tremendous growth as a service platform in recent years
• Depending on the provider, a social messaging platform can furnish a greater understanding of a customer, by providing their social profiles
• A grievance managed promptly and correctly on social media, creates instant word of mouth and good PR for a business

Cons

• The virality of social media is a double-edged sword

Now that we have seen the pros and cons of each messaging channel, lets try to place them on a matrix to evaluate them on the basis of their cost versus platform adoption efforts, scalability, and ease of use for customers.

From the comparison above, you can infer that investing in personalized messaging channels that have widespread applicability can bring more bang for your bucks. These are also channels that can be integrated with other experience delivery tools with ease to provide a complete 360-degree experience to customers in a frictionless manner.

It is worth reminding ourselves that messaging saves a lot of time owing to its simplicity and its asynchronous nature. Different messaging tools add different strengths to a business’s customer experience strategy. If we can agree that customer service between people essentially happens via conversations, and think about the traits of messaging discussed above, we begin to realize how powerful this channel can be. Messaging as a channel brings with it all the characteristics that could very well make it the “final frontier” in customer service, or the broader area of customer engagement and customer experience.
Relatively few companies today have defined a comprehensive messaging customer service strategy. However, many are actively exploring it, and we want to say it makes all the sense in the world.