As the immediacy of communicating through apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp becomes the norm, businesses are starting to re-think how they can engage with their customers. They must provide a responsive customer service that enables them to answer customer questions, solve problems, recommend products and make sales across whatever channel the customer wants to use.
This is where conversational commerce has come into play. It is redefining how consumers discover, evaluate and purchase goods and services through chat apps and conversation interfaces. A new study from Juniper Research, ‘Conversational Commerce: Market Outlook, Emerging Opportunities & Forecasts 2021-2025,’ states that conversational commerce is set to revolutionise ecommerce and could generate sales in excess of $290 billion by 2025. With conversational commerce, businesses are now able to sell directly from interactions through SMS, chatbots and other digital channels.
This personalised cross-channel communication boosts user satisfaction, conversion rates, and brand attachment. However, for businesses to truly enable a customer-centric platform, one thing they need to ensure for the SMS channel is the accuracy and speed of delivery of their messages.
Enabling a Customer-centric Service
Failure or delays in message delivery could cause a customer or end user to be dissatisfied with the SMS experience, leading to losses in not only revenue, but also trust and loyalty. The challenge for businesses is to create multichannel communications and omnichannel experiences that deliver messages effectively and efficiently. Businesses that can’t fully adapt to this new way of an interactive and responsive service could risk falling behind competitors.
According to the GSMA, by 2025 there will be 5.8 billion unique mobile subscribers, making up 70% of the global population. So why aren’t businesses utilising this platform? If businesses can offer this conversational experience, it allows them to reach, engage, and enable customers with a customer-centric service without asking them to leave their preferred communication channel.
Businesses already playing in the conversational commerce space must ensure the accuracy and speed of their message delivery to guarantee increased user satisfaction and meet customer expectations. They need to understand that having clean, reliable, secure, and up to date data is key to getting their messages delivered accurately.
At XConnect, our Global Number Portability data comes from more than 100 countries, allowing our customers to use accurate number intelligence to enhance their data and deliver direct A2P SMS routing. We ensure messages are delivered to the right user at the right time. Our service allows businesses to filter out undeliverable traffic to provide an increased customer experience with a simple, cost-efficient solution that improves customer loyalty, trust and revenue.
The Future of Customer Communication
Conversational commerce is a crucial element for businesses who want to succeed in this new digital omni-channel world. Businesses that adapt add a personalised level of customer service, increasing their customer satisfaction.
At XConnect, we enable businesses to keep their telecoms data up to date, clean, reliable and secure using accurate number intelligence. It allows them to provide an efficient and rapid service for their customers when they choose SMS as their channel of choice…and this will be the same when RCS messaging grows into a more ubiquitous channel too.
If you’d like to learn further about how we can solve data challenges or grow your business with data, get in touch today.