What is Business Messaging and What Does It Mean for Your Business?

What is business messaging, you ask? Oh, it’s only a way to get better customer engagement, attract more customers, and deliver a better customer experience is all. That seems like a tall order for something as simple and commonplace as messaging right? The truth is, the simplicity and reach of business messaging is what makes it so powerful for your business and preferred by your customers.

In this post, we’re going to define what business messaging is and what it isn’t. We’ll also highlight what business messaging means for your revenue growth, your customers, and your employees. Basically, everything that keeps your business going. Let’s get started.

First, let’s talk about messaging and get really clear about what business messaging is. Business messaging is a set of channels over which companies and consumers can communicate with each other. The most common messaging channel is SMS or text messaging. We’ve all had experiences with shipping notifications, marketing offers, promotional campaigns, and appointment reminders. These are the kinds of messages we typically associate with business messaging.

But business messaging isn’t just one-way and it isn’t just SMS/texting. Business messaging can happen on any digital channel where your customers already spend their time and it’s expected that dialog can flow both directions.  Here are a few scenarios that happen all the time:

• A home security subscriber who needs help setting up their new video camera.
• A shopper on your website who needs help finding a product and reaches out via web chat for help
• A loan processing officer texts an applicant to send in missing paperwork to complete an application
• Direct messages exchanged over social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Kik to provide one-to-one customer service
• A heating and air conditioning company setting up an appointment to install a new unit
• A retailer proactively communicating shipping and delivery information to consumers to help prevent an inbound phone call

Business messaging delivers the ease and convenience consumers have come to expect when they engage with family and friends to pre-sales and post-sales interactions with companies. In fact, 66% of consumers rank messaging as their preferred channel for contacting a company.

What Messaging Means to Your Customers

Your customers want to message you.  Research conducted by Market Strategies International has found that consumers are looking for a company to:

• Meet them where they already are – on mobile, social, and on the web
• Proactively reach out to them with relevant products and services
• Make it easy to do business with you

Quiq Clients like Overstock, Office Depot, Pier 1, and Brinks Home Security have discovered that messaging is an indispensable solution to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. These innovative companies have implemented Quiq Messaging to open new channels of communication with their customers – available wherever and whenever they need it.

CONVENIENCE: Messaging means that customers can reach out to you on any channel they already spend their time on like SMS, Facebook, and live chat when they’re on your website. It also means that your customers can respond to conversations with your company at their pace – as it fits in with their busy lives – versus stopping everything to make a call. With messaging, they can respond and engage in 5 seconds, 5 minutes, or 5 days.

EASE:  Customers keep their mobile device within arms reach at all times. Business messaging makes it easy for customers to shoot off a message whenever they need and then get on with their life. They don’t have to wait until they are in a quiet place to call or vigilantly watch their email for a response.

FLEXIBILITY: Messaging means flexibility to your customers. Customers have the real-time response of a phone call with the ease of reference that an email provides. That flexibility around their busy lives is more than a welcome mat. It’s more like the red carpet and it’s what differentiates companies among competitors and turns prospects into customers.

Increasing revenue is the number one thing that companies focus on. Every strategy and tactic is a means to that end. Often, companies will consider introducing a new product line or service or increasing prices as a way to bolster revenue.

Sure, those paths could lead to higher revenue, but they definitely aren’t the easy way to go. Developing a new product or product line can be a big time and money investment accompanied by the risk that customers won’t buy. Price increases provoke the ire of customers and may even cause some to turn to competitors.   

Ah, but let’s not forget, there are people out there who want to buy what you already have. Oh, and don’t forget your established customers who could come back more frequently. Many companies now look at customer experience as a way to attract more customers and increase the frequency in which they purchase. This is where messaging makes the biggest impact.

Messaging makes it easy for consumers to engage with your company when, where, and how they prefer. Prospective buyers can have questions answered with ease, speed, and convenience. Returning customers get timely service and support at their moment of need, which means, they’ll be back for more and will tell others how great you are.

Consider these examples and how your business can help customers move closer to purchase with business messaging:

• Service companies win when their prospects are able to get the answers they need to make a decision on a provider. Prospects can book an appointment to receive an estimate easily with business messaging. Messaging avoids delays and missed calls that can drive consumers to take their business elsewhere.
• Companies in the travel and hospitality industry use messaging to provide a premium experience from the very first interaction. Questions on weather conditions and cancellation policies are answered quickly so that potential guests can ease right into the booking process with peace of mind.

In any other day and age, allowing customers to engage with your company through so many channels would have been overwhelming. But it’s not that day and we’re past that age. In today’s modern messaging world, Quiq makes it easy for employees to manage conversations.  

In fact, Quiq Messaging can help optimize agent performance by providing advanced productivity features that improve the customer experience. With Quiq, employees are able to handle multiple messaging conversations at once, thereby increasing their efficiency and reducing the cost to serve.

There isn’t any downtime for training. Adding business messaging is a pretty flat learning curve for your employees. They are likely using messaging in their daily lives and are familiar with sending and receiving messages. The only difference is they’ll have an easy way to manage conversations.

All messaging conversations are managed within a single, unified desktop with features that help employees prioritize conversations, monitor customer sentiment, and make every conversation more personal and effective. Employees can feel empowered to provide the best customer experience possible.

Business messaging makes a significant impact on two ways to grow your business – get new customers or have your existing customers buy more.

• Attract new customers – Make your business accessible so that it’s easy to do business with you.
• Keep existing customers happy  – Empower your customers to get service 24/7 through business messaging. Make it easy for customers to address questions and issues that may arise after the sale and they’ll be more likely to come back again.

The key takeaway here is that business messaging isn’t just good for your business. It’s a main ingredient to the secret sauce that can keeps your business running successfully. Ready to see Quiq Messaging in action? Sign up to try it right now for free or have one of our experts walk you through a custom demo.