The optimal customer experience of today happens in real-time. People want instant answers to their queries and have plenty of options to choose from if they are not satisfied with a particular brand.

As a result, brands have to evolve and meet the shifting nature of customer demands. They must engage prospects on the platforms where the prospects are active.

One of the major shifts in customer engagement in the last few years has been the rise of conversational platforms such as WhatsApp, which has gone from humble beginnings to become the most widely used chat app on the planet. Nearly a third of all human beings on the planet use WhatsApp!

How did conversational messaging become so popular?

Text-based messaging has been around for a long time. Before automated chatbots, SMS was (and still is) one of the major channels for businesses to communicate with their customers. According to recent studies, businesses send over 2 trillion text messages to their audience worldwide.

As you have experienced, SMS as a medium has quite a few limitations. Most SMSes are transactional in nature and do not encourage a back-and-forth conversation with a business. Other ways to interact with a business such as a webpage or an app still require users to follow a structure and behave essentially like computers.

Conversational messaging best mimics a human interaction – it is intuitive, free-flowing, natural and does not necessarily adhere to a specific pattern. As a result, it is wildly popular with today’s customers as can be seen with the popularity of chatbots.

• On average, chatbot conversations have a 90% satisfaction rate
• Chatbots are expected to save businesses 2.5 billion hours and $8 billion in the next two years

What is a conversational messaging platform?

Conversational messaging expands the customer engagement paradigm beyond apps and websites by enabling human-like conversations related to marketing, sales, and support on channels that people already use and are familiar with such as WhatsApp.

Businesses no longer need to ask people to download their app, send them an email or raise a customer support ticket on their website. Conversations happen in real-time and offer users a wonderful experience.

Let us consider a customer support example to further explain the concept of conversational messaging.

Conversational Messaging Use Case: Torrent Power On Demand Customer Support

Torrent Power is one of India’s most prominent brands in the power sector. For their WhatsApp customer support channel, Karix designed an automation flow that would make it easy for users to get information about their power bills, submit meter readings and ask any other questions they had about their account.

Traditionally, this system would have taken a lot of back-and-forth visits to a website, sending emails and having to speak to a customer agent if the queries weren’t addressed. With the new automation solution, customers just have to enter their mobile number into a WhatsApp chat to get a conversation started with Torrent Power.

A sample conversation would go like this.

A conversational messaging platform such as Karix’s solution for WhatsApp combines the strengths of conversational messaging with the ability to create and deploy dynamic experiences for customers using Artificial Intelligence and automation capabilities using a slew of complex, interconnected tools.

Using an intelligent solution like this, you can create a series of automations that handle most common user queries completely hands-free without having to involve a human agent.

What are the advantages of conversational messaging?

Always on, 24-7 customer service

One of the most important advantages of conversational chatbots is they allow brands an always-on presence. Whatever time of the day customers need an answer, the chatbot is available to provide real-time support.

This is a massive boost to the overall customer experience, because there are no longer several hoops that the customer needs to jump through before they get in touch with your business.

Massive scalability

Conversational messaging platforms allow customer agents to have a shared inbox and respond to multiple queries at once. The automation capabilities of the platform allow you to free up your customer service agents to handle only the most complex queries which can’t be automatically handled by the chatbots.

With AI and Natural Language processing, customer questions can be translated into an understandable format before transferring them to a customer service agent.

The ability to respond to market trends quickly

Peaks and troughs are a natural market phenomenon. With conversational platforms, you no longer need to ramp up customer service staff allotment during peak seasons and ramp down during the off-season.

Your chatbots are always available to answer any volume of incoming customer queries, regardless of seasonality.

A high degree of interactivity

Chatbots are flexible and can be adopted into larger marketing campaigns and deployed across several channels. These experiences can be gamified, modified to offer platform and app-specific commands or options and embedded into a variety of mediums.

A high degree of interactivity

Chatbots are flexible and can be adopted into larger marketing campaigns and deployed across several channels. These experiences can be gamified, modified to offer platform and app-specific commands or options and embedded into a variety of mediums.

Richer, more contextual messaging

Since conversational platforms like WhatsApp allow businesses to send rich-media messages (audio/video/text/documents/location details), they can provide a more impactful experience to the user.

Instead of you telling them how great your product is, you can simply send them a video or photo of another one of your customers enjoying and sharing their great experience with said product.

For the users, they can get more detailed answers by sending real-time images and videos detailing their queries.

Richer, more contextual messaging

Since conversational platforms like WhatsApp allow businesses to send rich-media messages (audio/video/text/documents/location details), they can provide a more impactful experience to the user.

Instead of you telling them how great your product is, you can simply send them a video or photo of another one of your customers enjoying and sharing their great experience with said product.

For the users, they can get more detailed answers by sending real-time images and videos detailing their queries.

The ability to integrate with third-party solution providers like Karix to offer dynamic solutions

Conversational messaging platforms such as the WhatsApp Business API can integrate with third-party solution providers like Karix to create layered, nuanced customer experiences powered by AI and computational processing.

The result? Happier customers, more conversions and increased brand awareness.

The ability to integrate with third-party solution providers like Karix to offer dynamic solutions

Conversational messaging platforms such as the WhatsApp Business API can integrate with third-party solution providers like Karix to create layered, nuanced customer experiences powered by AI and computational processing.

The result? Happier customers, more conversions and increased brand awareness.

In summation, the rise of conversational messaging platforms has greatly increased the capabilities of businesses to reach, engage and support their customers in real-time. Chatbots have become the preferred form of communication with a business for a majority of customers.

Conversational messaging is the new frontier, and with a partner like Karix, you can offer best-in-class customer experiences and reach the heights you have envisioned for your brand.