It’s no secret that voice calls are in decline: one in four smartphone users don’t make any traditional phone calls at all in a given week. Asking for a digits in a bar? Practically prehistoric, at least among Millennials and Gen Zs.
On the customer service front, two-thirds of consumers now identify messaging apps as their preferred way to engage with brands — ranking it above phone, email, live chat and even face-to-face interactions. Among Millennials, a paltry 12% prefer turning to the phone for support.
There’s just one problem. Fewer than half of businesses are equipped to connect with customers via messaging apps. In an era when it’s hard to imagine personal life without the convenience of rapid-fire messaging, most companies still require users to dial in.
Why Messaging? Why Now?
The top five messaging platforms — WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ and Skype — now count around 5 billion monthly active users, with new users being added at an exponential clip of a few hundred million every year.
The appeal for customer service isn’t that hard to figure out. While phone support can remain an attractive option, outrageous wait times and hard-to-navigate automated phone trees have contributed to an exodus to other channels, especially among younger demographics.
Email support, though effective in some contexts, comes with its own set of pitfalls. Templated replies and slow turnarounds mean gratification is rarely guaranteed. A recent survey of 1,000 companies showed that the average email response time clocked in at 12 hours and 10 minutes.
Social media changed the rules of the game, at least at first. But these days, only 20% of questions sent via Twitter and 54% via Facebook ever get a response. Not to mention, not everyone is comfortable sharing their dirty laundry on public channels.
And that’s where messaging comes in. Messaging offers the immediacy of phone, but because updates are asynchronous, there’s no need to sit around with a receiver pressed to your ear. Like email, messaging provides a permanent record of interaction that travels from phone to laptop and back seamlessly. Plus, pics, videos and audio can all be effortlessly incorporated, a boon for documenting problems or explaining complex issues.
But the greatest proof of messaging’s utility is its sheer popularity. Fed up with 1-800 numbers and on-hold music, nine of 10 consumers are ready to use messaging to communicate with brands.
Challenges For Brands
For all the talk of “omnichannel” customer service, however, businesses have been slow to embrace messaging. Only an estimated 20 million businesses — a small fraction of all companies on Facebook — currently use Messenger each month to talk to customers.
But those turning to messaging have seen compelling results. KLM became the first airline to expand their service to WhatsApp, allowing customers to receive flight status updates and get 24/7 service in multiple languages. H&M gives fashion advice through Kik, while Domino’s helps customers find coupons and make delivery orders Facebook Messenger.
In fairness, the shift can be jarring, as I saw first-hand when Hootsuite rolled out a new integration this year with Instagram. Our users loved the new feature, but it also lead to a record number of support requests via social, chat, email and other channels—75,000 in one quarter alone.
Keeping up with this messaging revolution requires rethinking how we do customer service, from the ground up. When customers have more ways to reach out than ever before—and can do so at a moment’s notice—how do you respond in a way that’s both meaningful and timely.
To Bot Or Not?
Messaging bots are part of the equation. I know — bots have gotten off to a bumpy start. Facebook’s first-gen bots reportedly failed to understand users 70 percent of the time. And 8 of 10 consumers still prefer to interact with a real person. But that’s largely because too many companies are trying to “build a human” with their bots — pushing today’s tech past its limits in the name of cost-cutting.
Instead, the focus for now is best narrowed to addressing the most common customer queries with bots, the ones that come up time and time again.
But that’s only part of the story. While bots represent the frontline in this brave new era of messenger-based customer service, equally critical is how efficiently—and intelligently—customers are escalated to human agents. In fact, this is what makes or breaks the whole experience. Makeup company Sephora offers a model for how to do this right, deploying an army of chatbots to help with tutorials and product suggestions but having real humans on call when a customer requires more help.
AI is proving just as critical behind the scenes. As messaging volume swells, smart tools are increasingly needed to automatically tag and route messages—whether they come in via social media, messaging apps or another channel, for human follow up. This ensures the right info quickly gets to the right person inside a company, rather than being stuck in a bottleneck.
The return for companies who invest in messaging? Early research shows customer satisfaction rates are generally 25% higher for messaging than for calling. Employees can handle multiple chats at once, versus a single call, and also report less frustration and experience less turnover than in traditional call centers. Plus, the potential of messaging as a proactive sales and marketing tool, rather than just a reactive support platform, is just starting to be explored.
What’s clear, above all, is that messaging isn’t going anywhere. WhatsApp alone is adding a million active users a day at present growth rates. And that’s just one of around a dozen major messaging platforms. For businesses, not being equipped to receive or respond intelligently to messaging is the digital equivalent of leaving your phone off the hook. Consumers will, inevitably, find someone else who picks up.
