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Google Business Messaging is Ending – Here’s How You Should Adapt

Posted on Max Fortis

Google Business Messaging (GBM) has long been one of the primary rich messaging channels for Android, but it’s now in the process of being phased out.

GBM is being sunsetted, but that doesn’t mean your customer experience has to suffer. This piece will walk you through the main alternatives to GBM, ensuring you have everything you need to keep your organization running smoothly.

What’s Happening with Google Business Messaging Exactly?

According to an announcement from Google, Google Business Messaging will be phased out on the following schedule. First, starting July 15, 2024, GBM entry points will disappear from Google’s Maps and Search properties, and it will no longer be possible to start GBM conversations from entry points on your website. Existing conversations will be able to continue until July 31, 2024, when the GBM service will be shut down entirely.

What are the Alternatives to Google Business Messaging?

If you’re wondering which communication channel you should switch to now that GBM is going away, here are some you should consider. They’re divided into two groups. Group one consists of the channels we personally recommend, based on our years of experience in customer service and contact center management. Section two deals with communication channels that we still support but which, in our view, are not as promising as alternatives to GBM.

Recommended Alternatives to Google Business Messaging

Here are the best channels to serve as replacements to GBM

  • WhatsApp: WhatsApp enables text, voice, and video communications for over two billion global users. The platform includes several built-in features that appeal to businesses looking to forge deeper, more personal connections with their customers. Most importantly, it is a cross-platform messaging app, meaning it will allow you to chat with both Android and Apple users.
  • Text Messaging or Short Message Service (SMS): SMS is a long-standing staple for a reason, and with a conversational AI platform like Quiq, you can put large language models to work automating substantial parts of your SMS-based customer interactions.

Other Alternatives to Google Business Messaging

Here are the other channels you might look into.

  • Live web chat: When wondering about whether to invest in live chat support, customer experience directors may encounter skepticism about how useful customers will find it. But with nearly a third of female users of the internet indicating that they prefer contacting support via live chat, it’s clearly worth the time. This is especially true when live chat is used to provide an interactive experience, readily available, helpful agents, and swift responses. There are plenty of ways to encourage your customers to actually use your live chat offering, including mentioning it during phone calls, linking to it in blog posts or emails, and promoting it on social media.
  • Apple Messages for Business: Unlike standard text messaging available on mobile phones, Apple Messages is a specialized service designed for businesses to engage with customers. It facilitates easy setup of touchpoints such as QR codes, apps, or email messages, enabling appointments, issue resolution, and payments, among other things.
  • Facebook Messenger: Facebook Messenger for Business enables brands to handle incoming queries efficiently, providing immediate responses through AI assistants or routing complex issues to human agents. Clients integrating with a tool like Quiq have seen a massive ROI – a 95% customer satisfaction (CSAT), a 70-80% resolution rate for incoming customer inquiries automatically, and more. Like WhatsApp, FB messenger is a cross-platform messaging app, meaning it can help you reach users on both Android and Apple devices.
  • Instagram: Instagram isn’t just for posting pictures anymore – your target audience is likely using it to discover brands, shop, and make purchases. They’re reaching out through direct messages (DM), responding to stories, and commenting on posts. Instagram’s messaging API simplifies the handling of these customer interactions; it has automated features that help initiate conversations, such as Ice Breakers, as well as features that facilitate automated responses, such Quick Replies. Integrating Quiq’s conversational AI with Instagram’s messaging API makes it easier to automate responses to frequently asked questions, thereby reducing the workload on your human agents.
  • X (formerly Twitter): With nearly 400 million registered users and native, secure payment options, X is not a platform you can ignore. And the data supports this – 50% of surveyed X users mentioned brands in their posts more than 15 times in seven months, 80% of surveyed X users referred to a brand in their posts, and 99% of X users encountered a brand-related post in just over a month. By utilizing X business messaging, you can connect with your customers directly, providing them with excellent service experiences. Over time, this approach helps you build strong relationships and positive brand perceptions. Remember, posts—even those related to customer service—occur publicly. Thus, a positive interaction satisfies your customer and showcases your company’s engagement quality to others. Even better, the X API enables you to send detailed messages while keeping the conversation within X’s platform. This avoids the need for customers to switch platforms, enhancing their overall satisfaction.

How to Switch Away From Google Business Messaging

Even though GBM is going the way of the Dodo, the good news is that you have tons of other options. Check out our dedicated pages to learn more about SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, and you’re warmly invited to consult with our team if you are currently using GBM with another managed service provider and are not sure what the best direction forward is!

Why Your Business Should Use Rich Messaging

Posted on Max Fortis

A Brief Overview of Rich Messaging

Along with Eminem and Auto-Tune, text messaging was just becoming really popular back in the halcyon days of the early 2000s. It was a simpler time, and all our texts were sent via “short message service” (SMS), which was mostly confined to words. This was cutting-edge technology back then, and since we weren’t yet expressing ourselves with walls of hieroglyphic emojis or GIFs from Schitt’s Creek, it was all we needed.

Today, this is no longer the case. We’re spending much more time communicating with each other through text messaging and sending much more complicated information, to boot. In response, rich messaging was developed.

Technically known as “rich communication services” (RCS), rich messaging is the next step in the evolution of text messaging. It allows for better use of interactive media, such as high-resolution photos, messaging cards, audio messages, emojis, and GIFs. Even more important for those of us in the contact center industry, it also facilitates an enhanced customer experience, with things like sensory-rich service interactions.

Capabilities of Rich Messaging

Having covered rich messaging, let’s explore some of its vistas. While this is not a comprehensive list, it reflects what we believe to be some of RCS’s most important properties (especially from the perspective of those looking to leverage text messaging for contact centers).

Integrating with Other Services

Today, the rise of generative AI is changing how contact centers work, which also presents an opportunity for integration.

If your business is looking to integrate AI assistants to automate substantial parts of its customer service workflow, you’re almost certainly going to have to do that through rich messaging.

Secure Messaging and Transactions Processing

Big data and AI have both raised serious concerns over privacy. A decade ago, people wouldn’t have thought twice about sharing their location or putting pictures of their kids online. These days, however, more of us are privacy- and security-conscious, so the fact that rich messaging supports end-to-end encryption is important.

People are much more likely to talk to your customer service agents directly if they can rest easy knowing their data isn’t going to be exposed to malicious actors.

Better Analytics

Speaking of big data, rich messaging makes it possible to gather and conduct fairly sophisticated customer service data analysis. You can gather statistics about obvious metrics like reply rates or feed conversations into a sentiment analysis system to determine how people feel about you, your company, and your service.

This allows you to identify patterns in customer behavior, optimize your use of AI, and generally start tinkering with your procedures to better serve customer needs.

It also goes the other way, inasmuch as you can send real-time alerts confirming an issue was received, updating a customer on the status of a ticket, etc. Sure, this isn’t technically “analysis,” but it’ll help people feel more at ease when interacting with your customer service agents, so it’s worth bearing in mind.

Rich Channels of Communication

Where can you use rich messaging? In the sections that follow, we’ll answer this exact question!

WhatsApp

WhatsApp is a platform overseen by Meta (formerly Facebook) that supports rich text messaging, voice messaging, and video calling. With more than two billion users, it’s incredibly popular. A key reason for this is that all this data is sent over the internet, obviating the SMS fees that used to keep us all up at night. And it has a business API that will allow you to scale up with increased demand.

Apple Rich Messaging

Apple’s rich messaging service is called Apple Messages for Business. It offers potential and existing customers a way to communicate with your agents directly via their Apple devices.

This is a market you can’t afford to ignore; with nearly two billion Apple devices, the reach of iOS is simply gigantic, and it’s a communication channel you should be cultivating.

Google Rich Messaging

More than nine out of ten searches happen on Google, meaning that it has become the powerhouse when it comes to finding information online. And if that’s not enough to convince you, consider that the phrase “Google it” is now just what people say when they’re talking about looking something up.

However, you may not be aware that Google offers a Business Messages service that should be part of your overall customer strategy.

Building Trust through Rich Communication Service Messages

Being successful in business requires many things, but one of the more important ones is trust. This has always been true, of course, but it’s only become more so with the rise of artificial intelligence.

We’ve been singing the praises of generative AI for a while, and firmly believe that it will have a huge positive impact on the contact center industry. But there’s a downside to the fact that it’s now trivial to crank industrial quantities of text, video, and images.

There’s always been plenty of nonsense online, but once upon a time, the ability to create such content was limited by the fact that someone, somewhere, had to actually sit down and make it. That’s no longer the case, which means that users are more eager than ever for signs that they’re dealing with customer service they can rely on.

Rich messaging has a part to play in that, and in the next few sections, we’ll explain why.

High-Quality Interactions Will Have Customers Coming Back

Rich messaging has many tools that make it easier to ensure that customers have a first-class experience interacting with your contact center. The rich messaging services described above have APIs, for example, that allow you to better organize conversations. This means agents can stay on top of their workloads, leading to less of the kind of frustration and distress that might negatively color their replies.

These services can also be integrated with high-quality conversational AI platforms. When agents can outsource simple, standard queries to algorithms or reuse snippets, they have more time to focus on solving trickier problems.

The net result is that agents feel less burned out, and customers get better help, faster.

Consistency in Experiences

Another way to build trust is to ensure your style is consistent across channels. Just as you wouldn’t use a different logo on Facebook and Instagram, you shouldn’t use a dramatically different tone of voice on one platform than you use on another.

When people know what to expect from you, they’re more likely to trust you. Because rich messaging supports many different kinds of media, you can ensure that customer experiences remain consistent.

This is also a place where generative AI comes in handy. The best conversational AI platforms train models on the conversations of senior agents and make this available to everyone in the contact center. This means that each agent can format replies with the same empathy, patience, and understanding as their very best peers.

Verified Business Profiles

Finally, using a verified account is a basic step you can take to increase trust. If you thought getting junk mail was bad, pause for a moment and consider the absolute barrage of text messages, bogus phone calls, and DMs most of us get every single day. There is a never-ending sea of bot accounts on Twitter and other platforms trying to dupe everyone into one crypto scam or another, and this has substantially eroded people’s trust in online interactions.

The rich messaging services offered by Google, WhatsApp, and Apple all have a fairly lengthy process for verifying the authenticity of your profile. By itself, this isn’t going to ensure that customers trust you, but it helps. People want to know that they’re talking to a real business, not an imposter; the “proof of work” (speaking of crypto) required to verify a rich messaging account is a crucial part of establishing that rapport.

Rich Messaging is the Future of Text

The world today looks very different from the world of the early 2000s. Our technologies, including our text messaging, have evolved along with it, and businesses have to keep up if they want to remain relevant.

Rich messaging is a great way to build trust and loyalty, and it opens up many new opportunities. But to get the most out of rich messaging, it really helps to work with a platform that offers robust tooling, language models, analytics, and so on.

Quiq is one such platform. Reach out to us to schedule a demo, and see how we can ensure your text-messaging outreach is profitable, productive, and easy!

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WhatsApp Business: A Guide for Contact Center Managers

Posted on The Quiq Team

In today’s digital era, businesses continually seek innovative ways to connect with their customers, striving to enhance communication and foster deeper relationships. Enter WhatsApp Business – a game-changer in the realm of digital communication. This powerful tool is not just a messaging app; it’s a bridge between businesses and their customers, offering a plethora of features designed to streamline communication, improve customer service, and boost engagement. Whether you’re a small business owner or part of a global enterprise, understanding the potential of WhatsApp Business could redefine your approach to customer communication.

What is Whatsapp Business?

WhatsApp is an application that supports text messaging, voice messaging, and video calling for over two billion global users. Because it leverages a simple internet connection to send and receive data, WhatsApp users can avoid the fees that once made communication so expensive.

Since WhatsApp already has such a large base of enthusiastic users, many international brands have begun leveraging it to communicate with their own audiences. It also has a number of built-in features that make it an attractive option for businesses wanting to establish a more personal connection with their customers, and we’ll cover those in the next section.

What Features Does WhatsApp Business Have?

In addition to its reach and the fact that it reduces the budget needed for communication, WhatsApp Business has additional functionality that makes it ideal for any business trying to interact with its customers.

When integrated with a tool like the Quiq conversational AI platform, WhatsApp Business can automatically transcribe voice-based messages. Even better, WhatsApp Business allows you to export these conversations later if you want to analyze them with a tool like natural language processing.

If your contact center agents and the customers they’re communicating with have both set a “preferred language,” WhatsApp can dynamically translate between these languages to make communication easier. So, if a user sends a voice message in Russian and the agent wants to communicate in English, they’ll have no trouble understanding one another.

What are the Differences Between WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business?

Before we move on, it’s worth pointing out that WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business are two different services. On its own, WhatsApp is the most widely used messaging application in the world. Businesses can use WhatsApp to talk to their customers, but with a WhatsApp Business account, they get a few extra perks.

Mostly, these perks revolve around building brand awareness. Unlike a basic WhatsApp account, a WhatsApp Business account allows you to include a lot of additional information about your company and its services. It also provides a labeling system so that you can organize the conversations you have with customers, and a variety of other tools so you can respond quickly and efficiently to any issues that come up.

The Advantages of WhatsApp Messaging for Businesses

Now, let’s spend some time going over the myriad advantages offered by a WhatsApp outreach strategy. Why, in other words, would you choose to use WhatsApp over its many competitors?

Global Reach and Popularity

First, we’ve already mentioned the fact that WhatsApp has achieved worldwide popularity, and in this section, we’ll drill down into more specifics.

When WhatsApp was acquired by Meta in 2014, it already boasted 450 million active users per month. Today, this figure has climbed to a remarkable 2.7 billion, but it’s believed it will reach a dizzying 3.14 billion as early as 2025.

With over 535 million users, India is the country where WhatsApp has gained the most traction by far. Brazil is second with 148 million users, and Indonesia is third with 112 million users.

The gender divide among WhatsApp users is pretty even – men account for just shy of 54% of WhatsApp users, so they have only a slight majority.

The app itself has over 5 billion downloads from the Google Play store alone, and it’s used to send 140 billion messages each day.

These data indicate that WhatsApp could be a very valuable channel to cultivate, regardless of the market you’re looking to serve or where your customers are located.

Personalized Customer Interactions

Firstly, platforms like WhatsApp enable businesses to customize communication with a level of scale and sophistication previously unavailable.

This customization is powered by machine learning, a technology that has consistently led the charge in the realm of automated content personalization. For example, Spotify’s ability to analyze your listening patterns and suggest music or podcasts that match your interests is powered by machine learning. Now, thanks to advancements in generative AI, similar technology is being applied to text messaging.

Past language models often fell short in providing personalized customer interactions. They tended to be more “rule-based” and, therefore, came off as “mechanical” and “unnatural.” However, contemporary models greatly improve agents’ capacity to adapt their messages to a particular situation.

While none of this suggests generative AI is going to entirely take the place of the distinctive human mode of expression, for a contact center manager aiming to improve customer experience, this marks a considerable step forward.

Below, we have a section talking a little bit more about integrating AI into WhatsApp Business.

End-to-End Encryption

One thing that has always been a selling point for WhatsApp is that it takes security and privacy seriously. This is manifested most obviously in the fact that it encrypts all messages end-to-end.

What does this mean? From the moment you start typing a message to another user all the way through when they read it, the message is protected. Even if another party were to somehow intercept your message, they’d still have to crack the encryption to read it. What’s more, all of this is enabled by default – you don’t have to spend any time messing around with security settings.

This might be more important than you realize. We live in a world increasingly beset by data breaches and ransomware attacks, and more people are waking up to the importance of data security and privacy. This means that a company that takes these aspects of its platform very seriously could have a leg up where building trust is concerned. Your users want to know that their information is safe with you, and using a messaging service like WhatsApp will help to set you apart.

Scalability

Finally, WhatsApp’s Business API is a sophisticated programmatic interface designed to scale your business’s outreach capabilities. By leveraging this tool, companies can connect with a broader audience, extending their reach to prospects and customers across various locations. This expansion is not just about increasing numbers; it’s about strategically enhancing your business’s presence in the digital world, ensuring that you’re accessible whenever your customers need to reach out to you.

By understanding the value WhatsApp’s Business API brings in reaching and engaging with more people effectively, you can make an informed decision about whether it represents the right technological solution for your business’s expansion and customer engagement strategies.

Enhancing Contact Center Performance with WhatsApp Messaging

Now, let’s turn our attention to some of the concrete ways in which WhatsApp can improve your company’s chances of success!

Improving Response and Resolution Metrics Times

Integrating technologies like WhatsApp Business into your agent workflow can drastically improve efficiency, simultaneously reducing response times and boosting customer satisfaction. Agents often have to manage several conversations at once, and it can be challenging to keep all those plates spinning.

However, a quality messaging platform like WhatsApp means they’re better equipped to handle these conversations, especially when utilizing tools like Quiq Compose.

Additionally, less friction in resolving routine tasks means agents can dedicate their focus to issues that necessitate their expertise. This not only leads to more effective problem-solving, it means that fewer customer inquiries are overlooked or terminated prematurely.

Integrating Artificial Intelligence

According to WhatsApp’s own documentation, there’s an ongoing effort to expand the API to allow for the integration of chatbots, AI assistants, and generative AI more broadly.

Today, these technologies possess a surprisingly sophisticated ability to conduct basic interactions, answer straightforward questions, and address a wide range of issues, all of which play a significant role in boosting customer satisfaction and making agents more productive.

We can’t say for certain when WhatsApp will roll out the red carpet for AI vendors like Quiq, but if our research over the past year is any indication, it will make it dramatically easier to keep customers happy!

Gathering Customer Feedback

Lastly, an additional advantage to WhatsApp messaging is the degree to which it facilitates collecting customer feedback. To adapt quickly and improve your services, you have to know what your customers are thinking. And more specifically, you have to know the details about what they like and dislike about your product or service.

In the Olde Days (i.e. 20 years ago year, or so), the only real way to do this was by conducting focus groups, sending out surveys – sometimes through the actual mail, if you can believe it – or doing something similarly labor-intensive.

Today, however, your customers are almost certainly walking around with a smartphone that supports text messaging. And, since it’s pretty easy for them to answer a few questions or dash off a few quick lines describing their experience with your service, odds are that you can gather a great deal of feedback from them.

Now, we hasten to add that you must exercise a certain degree of caution in interpreting this kind of feedback, as getting an accurate gauge of customer sentiment is far from trivial. To name just one example, the feedback might be exaggerated in both the positive and negative direction because the people most likely to send feedback via text messaging are the ones who really liked or really didn’t like you.

That said, so long as you’re taking care to contextualize the information coming from customers, supplementing it with additional data wherever appropriate, it’s valuable to have.

Wrapping Up

From its global reach and popularity to the personalized customer interactions it facilitates, WhatsApp Business stands out as a powerful solution for businesses aiming to enhance their digital presence and customer engagement strategies. By leveraging the advanced features of WhatsApp Business, companies can avail themselves of end-to-end encryption, enjoy scalability, and improve contact center performance, thereby positioning themselves at the forefront of the contact center game.

And speaking of being at the forefront, the Quiq conversational CX platform offers a staggering variety of different tools, from AI assistants powered by language models to advanced analytics on agent performance. Check us out or schedule a demo to see what we can do for your contact center!