Most successful businesses today use mobile messaging apps to communicate with their customers. Many clients find such an approach more convenient than submitting their queries through the companies' official sites, or calling them by phone, or sending emails to them. A great messenger application should enable you to personalize your communication strategy sell your products more efficiently.
Popular Mobile Messenger Apps
First, let's try to understand why businesses need messaging apps at all. Most likely, you have a live chat on your official website. Thanks to this tool, your team members can attend to several clients at once. Plus, you can automate the communication process thanks to chatbots. Rule-based bots can offer your customers a predefined selection of the most popular questions. When the user clicks a certain question, the bot will share an answer from the knowledge database. AI-based bots can recognize the user's intent and imitate live human speech. The client types in their request and receives a personalized answer. So what could potentially go wrong with live chats?
To access your chat, people need to visit your site. They need to either click the link or type your site's address in the browser bar. It might seem like a tiny effort — but many clients would prefer to get in touch with you through communication channels that they use every day. They feel more comfortable when talking to you in the same app where they receive messages from their friends and family members. 55% of consumers prefer to communicate with businesses through such messengers. Such apps have 20% more active users than social media networks. You can integrate many of such messengers into your help desk to deliver your clients precisely the quality of service that they would like to receive.
Below, we'll analyze the specifics of the most popular apps that companies of nearly any sphere and size can use. Depending on the industry that your business belongs to and your geographical location, you might consider some other alternatives. Yet the apps listed below should help you to reach the widest audience and make the largest number of clients happy.
Available as a cloud, on-premise and mobile solution. Staff members will be able to install the Bitrix24 as a mobile app on their iOS and Android devices. Technically, it is not a messenger but a large and versatile system with an excellent in-built contact center. It supports nearly all communication formats that you can imagine: text messaging, email, audio calls and videoconferencing. If a client starts a dialog in a text message but suddenly decides to switch to audio, you'll be able to do so right from the Bitrix24 dashboard, without keeping your customer waiting.
Compared to all the other solutions mentioned in this article, Bitrix24 features a full-fledged CRM. Other messengers can save the history of your client interactions (unless you set a timer to delete it). But it might not be too convenient to manually search for specific words in that history. And when you need to check the user's profile, you'll be limited to the concise data that this person has indicated in their profile description. Bitrix24 can not only save all the precious data in a well-structured format but also generate insightful reports based on it and come up with smart suggestions. Next time you'll reach out to that client, you'll be able to identify the optimal communication channel, time of contact and the content of the message.
Facebook Messenger
This one has over 105 million active users worldwide and grows together with the social network that it is linked to. You can easily integrate this messenger into most of your helpdesk solutions. The productivity of your team should increase thanks to the following features:
● Personalized greetings
● Automated messages
● Instant replies
To start a chat thread, users just need to click the Send Message button — and some of your staff members will promptly respond to them.
In October 2021, Facebook announced a major rebranding. The company as a whole will be called Meta because it will focus on developing a metaverse. But Facebook as a social network will allegedly continue to function as usual and its messenger won't change too drastically.
WhatsApp
This app also belongs to Facebook/Meta but is not connected to its social network. In 2021, its monthly active audience exceeds 2 billion users, which makes it the most popular messenger worldwide. WhatsApp is available in over 180 countries. It got famous thanks as an advanced alternative to SMS that doesn't make you pay per every single message, even if you send it to a foreign recipient.
Support teams of various businesses love WhatsApp because it allows them to easily send documents of nearly any format, be it photos, PDFs, slideshows, spreadsheets and so on. Plus, you can pre-record voice messages and send them along with the text. The functionality of this app is spot-on for troubleshooting.
Instagram Direct
With over one billion monthly active users, Instagram attracts businesses first and foremost as a platform where you can promote your goods and services with photos and videos. No wonder its chat supports video calls as well. Support managers can use this function to show to the client which buttons they should push and in which order — or share any other short tutorials. They can loop in their colleagues in the call to share in-depth knowledge. Customers appreciate it because they don't need to wait when the specialist who initially attended to them is transferring the chat to another professional.
Twitter Direct Message
Twitter is focused on the rapid sharing of information and thus is ideal for prompt customer service. This platform has over 206 million daily active users. 82% B2B content marketers rely on it and 19% of retail banks attend to their customers through Twitter messenger. Some clients might ask questions to your company representatives in tweets. But many people would feel more comfortable when talking in a private chat, where all the phrases that you exchange will be consolidated into one thread. Plus, it should be easier for your staffers to review the history of client interactions in a chat rather than searching all over the platform.
WeChat
You might want to use this one if your business caters to China. In that country, WeChat is the most popular mobile messenger that has over 1.1 billion clients. One of the reasons for its exceptional popularity is the fact that some international social media networks might be not legally available to Chinese residents. To save time and better protect your sensitive information, you'll be able to use a barcode scanner to quickly add contacts to your database. Thanks to this tool, you'll never need to send your private details directly to third parties.
Telegram
Security is the primary priority of this cloud-based messenger. To prevent unauthorized access to your conversations with customers, you can encrypt your dialogs and set self-destruction timers for them. The latter means that the app will automatically erase your message after a certain period of time. This feature comes in particularly handy for companies that operate in the B2B segment and go to great lengths to protect sensitive data from hackers. The monthly active audience of Telegram counts over 550 million users and keeps growing.
Skype
Launched in 2003, it became one of the pioneers in its segment. Today, it remains relevant in spite of very intense competition: its active monthly audience exceeds 300 million people. In Skype, you can choose from the following communication formats:
● Accept a voice call from a customer or call them
● Talk with them face to face on video
● Exchange instant text messages
This messenger is ideal for 1:1 customer service. You might want to use it if your client base is not too large and your support team is not too numerous. In Skype, it should be very convenient for you to have rather lengthy dialogs with clients and discuss their issues in detail.
