Mobile Messaging : Disrupting the Call Center
By Srikrishnan Ganesan
2015 saw a huge amount of noise being made about messaging. Magic, Operator, FB messenger, Slack, all made news, and people paid more attention to learn from WeChat from the East.
A year ago, we at Konotor posted about how Messaging is Eating the World, highlighting a key trend of user engaging with businesses over messaging (we’ve been evangelizing this since 2013). Through the last year, we saw some great posts emerge on the topic : one similar to ours from Intercom, The Futures of Text by Jonathan Libov, Messaging and Mobile Platforms by Benedict Evans, this one by Rodrigo Martinez, and many many more through the rest of the year.
2016 will be the year when messaging starts to really move beyond an experiment to seriously impacting how support and customer engagement works for mobile-first businesses.
Call centers now need to invest in evolving to “chat centers” as well. Here’s why you should prioritize engaging with customers through messaging:
Customers love messaging with your business for help
No waiting in Queue - they don’t have to be on a line for someone to answer the phone/live chat. Automated first-responses / bot responses can engage the customer, and the business can engage back at its convenience
Lower friction medium - Messaging is easy, conversational, natural right inside your app. It hence is a lot less of a chore for a customer to message you, than to find the customer care number or email id and make a call or send you an email
Asynchronous - customers can read your messages at their convenience and respond when they have a window, and are learning to wait for a response (as they see how this works well on Whatsapp/FB Messenger)
Richer - the medium lets them do more! Send a screen-grab, photos or videos of a product or experience or a problem to describe it better, for example.
Lesser questions asked - The business can usually have better context to engage back smartly with the customer, so the onus is not on the customer to explain who they are, or even what they were last doing
Businesses love this too!
Agent productivity - asynchronous nature of the medium allows for better multi tasking between active conversations than a medium like phone calls or web-chat, so lower waiting and better overall TAT
Strategic to mobile retention — we know users are up to 300% better retained on your mobile app if they believe it offers a convenient way to get support from the business
Pro-active conversations to up-sell users — Messaging allows you to engage the customer without intruding their personal communication space of email, SMS or phone calls. We all know its never a good time to get those marketing calls. But what if I could message back and forth to learn about a new offering, and within the contained contextual space that your app offers?
Private — Offer an easy way for users to engage personally, and more than 60% users will first give you a chance to fix their issue engaging privately before they outrage on social media! You business can keep your social media channels more positive as a result!
No “missed chats” or “call drops” - the engagement can just continue till resolution without having to worry about interruptions or users going away as you can always engage them back through push!
Canned responses over messaging are just so much more faster than reading out responses on calls
Easy Localization - Messaging doesn’t have accent issues that come with voice support. Your support team could be anywhere, have minimal training, and use canned responses in different languages!
Automation that feels natural - Wading through IVRs are long and boring, but instant to do the same over messaging
Minimum peak-time planning - an asynchronous medium lets you set expectations on how soon you will respond, and plan your support workforce accordingly
Better ability to resolve issues online - users being able to send you richer messages like screen captures or photos can help debug issues customers are facing
Happier customers - offering a low friction channel to engage builds trust with your users, and leads to higher customer satisfaction
If its good for the business, and good for the user, the move to messaging just has to happen! If you are thinking about how this will impact your increasingly mobile-focused business, message us on Whatsapp / FB Messenger, or Twitter DM :)















