The future of customer communication: business messaging is creating momentous opportunities for businesses of all types and sizes.
OUR expectations of businesses have changed tremendously, in tandem with rapid digital and technological revolution.
We now expect to purchase things anytime with a click of a button, and the items to arrive at our doorstep, sometimes within hours.
The same goes for service. Instead of waiting to call a business during store hours, or scanning the website for answers to our questions, we want to get the information instantly without being put on hold or have our call transferred multiple times.
Business messaging can make all of these touchpoints possible and weave them into a seamless and connected experience.
“We’ve been talking about conversational commerce for years and the fact that people want to connect with a business the same way they chat with their friends and family.
“They don’t want to call and wait on hold, or send an email and not know whether it’s been read. They just want to send a message and get a quick, personalised response.
“But what’s new is that this behaviour has only accelerated with the pandemic.
"For mid-large businesses looking to explore a more robust and holistic business messaging strategy, our list of Meta certified partners offer enterprise solutions at scale for almost every vertical. An example of the investment we've put in this partner ecosystem is our recent acquisition of Kustomer , a one stop CRM solution that helps businesses unify messaging channels,” said Justin Murugaya, Head of Industry, e-Commerce, Malaysia at Meta.
Business messaging is the way to go
In Malaysia, we see many businesses accelerating the implementation of business messaging in their communication strategy.
For instance, beauty company Kiehl’s promoted its range of skincare products during the Ramadan festive period by running ads that click to Messenger and sponsored messages within Messenger. When people interacted with these ads, a Messenger conversation automatically opened and invited people to ask questions or make a purchase via the brand’s shop. This resulted to 34% conversion rate from conversational commerce via Messenger.
Leading Mercedes-Benz dealer Hap Seng Star achieved an increased read rate for sent messages by 55% and 30% increase in delivery rates over other channels by using WhatsApp to communicate with high-value customers, allowing them to contact the dealer at their convenience and have conversations in real time.
‘Our goal is to help all businesses to reach their full potential no matter their size and we think messaging is the best way for people and businesses to get business done,’ said Justin.
Clearly, brands are moving to improve customer engagement through conversations that bring value for both the brand and the customer, especially with the growing hybrid shopping trend.
Based on recent study by Kantar commissioned by Meta Malaysia, results indicated that Meta’s suite of business messaging apps are used regularly by Malaysians to connect with mid-large sized businesses and this provides huge opportunities for businesses to reach out and connect with consumers who will likely buy their products or services.
The statistic presented are from a pool of 500 Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp daily users aged between 18 to 60 across Malaysia, who have contacted a mid-to-large business or brand in the range of three to six months prior to engagement in the survey.
“Yet, many businesses continue to rely on conventional channels that are time-intensive, ineffective, expensive and not preferred by their customers.
“We believe the time has come for every business to rethink their conversational commerce strategy,” added Justin.
Kantar study finding
Most have this perception that business messaging is meant for SMBs and microentrepreneurs but the truth is that even mid-large size businesses can harness its benefits.
The study’s finding indicated that tailored approach for each business is significant. For instance, consumers are responsive to discounts in FMCG, retail, telco, consumer technology and e-commerce businesses while for offering free trials or samples works best for beauty business. Where else for financial businesses, consumers prefer personalised products or services.
The use of messaging has also yielded important satisfaction factors whereby over 70% of users consider messaging as a way to connect better to brands, help with purchase decisions, obtain useful information and have better customer experience.
Consumers prefer to be contacted by businesses via WhatsApp (76%), followed by Instagram DM (59%) and Messenger (52%).
Chats with financial services, telco and consumer technology tend to be marketing leads when consumers are still discovering and exploring while chats with beauty and FMCG businesses generate more sales leads.
Meanwhile, ecommerce and retail conversations tend to be a mix of both with ecommerce’s leads eventually converting to sales.
Based on the study’s finding, consumers generally contact businesses in various sectors, but more prominently in ecommerce, F&B and consumer tech.
F&B sees the highest (54%) amount of users using WhatsApp to get in contact, ecommerce sees the highest number of users (62%) using Facebook Messenger to get in touch while beauty and health emerge within the top five contacted categories via Instagram direct message.
With rising expectations, customers want immediacy, personalised, and flawless interactions with their favourite brands. Chatbots can help you bridge that gap.
Emerging trends include the increasing popularity of chatbots, whereby in Malaysia 61% of people surveyed have interacted with chatbots in the last six months and 84% say chatbots are helpful especially the 24/7 support feature (58%) and ability to provide quick response (57%).
To help facilitate the dialogue between customers and businesses, Meta is constantly developing and rolling out new features, and business messaging is one of the big focus areas in Meta’s business tools investment.
Meta’s chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg just announced that Meta is opening WhatsApp to any business of any size around the world with WhatsApp Cloud API, meaning free and secure cloud hosting services provided by Meta.
This offering allows businesses to get up and running on WhatsApp in a matter of minutes and increase speed of response to customers while developers can build on top of WhatsApp to further customise their experience.
Meta has over 200 million businesses globally relying on its technology platforms to grow. The majority of them use a number of free tools and 10 million advertisers leverage a range of its ad solutions to connect with customers, such as click-to-message.
“The way that we have developed our business tools and ads have to do with how people were organically using our tools to connect with customers – like chatting to a business on Messenger. Now business messaging is a common behaviour all over the world and the preferred way people communicate with a business,” said Justin.
The recent Kantar study mentioned earlier indicated that 63% of Malaysians uses WhatsApp, 56% uses Instagram DM and 54% uses Facebook Messenger to connect with mid-large sized businesses regularly. It is evident that the presence of businesses on Facebook and Instagram platforms enables them to push content to consumers, making it naturally easier for end-users to connect with mid-large businesses directly.
Therefore, one of the best ways for businesses to stay relevant with consumers is by keeping up with consumer trends and evolve their existing customer channel strategies in order to meet people where they are.
Set up and get started
First, find out your business’ focus area or challenges and how messaging might solve them better, such as lead generation, commerce or customers service, among others, before deciding on a self-serve or managed option to build on a platform of your choice.
>Self serve or do-it-yourself
All businesses can easily set up a WhatsApp Business Account and have a team to reply to messages.
For instance, take full advantage of the messaging templates to create business-initiated conversations in advance like customer care messages, appointment reminders, payment updates or shipping notifications.
Other helpful yet simple-to-use features include creating automated greeting messages to engage with new customers, setting away messages to inform customers when you will be back and creating quick replies to answer frequently asked questions.
> Managed
A business can also choose to engage a Meta Business Partner to build, manage and maintain customer experience that meets business goals.
Get started on business messaging now and be on the right track to winning the customer engagement race while driving successful business outcomes.
