The world of business messaging has come a long way. With positive customer experiences known to increase customer spending by up to 140%, organizations are looking to put customers at the centre of their communications strategy and build longer and stronger relationships. But to successfully do this, they need to move away from standard content and deliver push messages and targeted campaigns that are more aligned with customer expectations.
At the recently concluded MEF Summit “Future of Mobile”, experts from around the world provided several insights into the future of messaging. Read on to learn all about the latest trends, threats, and opportunities in the world of business messaging.
Trends
The future of business messaging isn’t about adopting a one-size-fits-all strategy to communicate and interact with customers. It is about contacting the right ones at the right time with messages that address their specific needs.
By reaching out and engaging with customers over their preferred messaging channels for marketing, sales, and customer support, enterprises can enable easy and convenient conversations and pave the way for great customer experiences.
Let’s look at the top three trends that are going to shape the realm of business messaging in 2022 and beyond:
- Metaverse communication: The many discussions (and excitement) around the Metaverse surge have proven time and again that business messaging is set to shape its ongoing evolution. As users begin to shift to a digital and 3D version of themselves, consistent and convenient business messaging will play a critical role in the end-user experience. Right from speech-to-text conversions to communication via virtual keyboards: the opportunities for companies to enable messaging in the virtual world will be aplenty.
- Omnichannel messaging: Companies looking to capitalize on the wave of transformation will have to move from plain-Jane SMS strategies to omnichannel messaging. Right from voice and video to other types of rich mobile content; brands will have to engage in conversational messaging – and not just one-way communication to drive meaningful engagement. For example, for customers who have just placed an online order, it would pay to build customer trust by providing real-time updates on the delivery status and wait times while also allowing them to connect with a live agent on demand.
- Rich and personalized experiences: Good customer experiences are key to influencing brand loyalty; according to a study, 73% of customers agree that customer experience helps to drive their buying decision. Therefore, to make a difference, companies will have to move away from boring text to rich media, transform how they connect with customers and provide experiences that deliver value. Instead of just sending random messages and campaign content on a bunch of channels, companies will need to talk to customers on channels they are most comfortable with and on which they want to be spoken to. They will need to leverage context history to deliver content, recommendations, and campaigns that are tailored to make every engagement more meaningful.
Threats
Owning, sustaining, and managing a complex relationship with customers is not without its set of challenges. Let’s look at the top challenges companies have to contend with while making the most of all the innovations in the realm of business messaging:
- Authentication: As organizations move towards personalized and rich forms of business messaging, authentication will remain one of the biggest challenges to overcome. With cases of money laundering, network infiltration, trolling, IPR theft, and sharing of misinformation surging, companies will have to look beyond SMS authentication and invest in advanced authentication and authorization tools that ensure only authorized people have access to business or customer data.
- Identity: With business communication getting increasingly digitized, organizations face a tough time in identifying genuine people and managing relationships with them. Verifying digital identities on the web and validating 3D avatars in the Metaverse requires organizations to invest in modern identity verification technologies to tie each digital identity to a physical human being while meeting a sundry list of emerging privacy requirements.
- Security: Security is yet another challenge facing the realm of business messaging. In the digital world, the probability and ease of stolen identities are immense, organizations need to establish strict security strategies and put effective controls in place that protect not only the physical identities of people but also their digital ones.
Opportunities
Allowing customers to reach out to businesses through their preferred channels, giving them the freedom to respond at their own pace, and being available 24×7 are just some of the steps businesses can take to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. If you want to move away from one-way, static SMS communication toward omnichannel rich messaging, here are opportunities you need to capitalize on:
- Leverage practical tools across the mobile value chain to deliver a seamless and secure messaging experience
- Raise awareness of issues around trust in mobile products and services within the ecosystem for stakeholders to take necessary steps
- Establish industry best practices across your enterprises across omnichannel messaging, personalization, security, and authentication
- Create a more transparent, innovative, and fraud-free market to boost business revenue while improving the trust customers have in your business
The doors rich business messaging opens for organizations big and small are many. Unfortunately, many haven’t tapped into this massive enterprise messaging opportunity. With customer-focused companies known to increase their revenue 1.4x faster than non-customer-focused companies and with businesses that prioritize customer experiences enjoying a revenue increase of 4-8% higher than their competitors, to bring conversations to wherever the customer is, you need to evolve toward a more sophisticated and tech-oriented way of sending messages to customers and create connections that count.
Reach out to us to know how you can successfully embrace the latest trends, thwart evolving threats, and capitalize on the many opportunities.