Text for Traction
The brands engaging in digital channels in Bangladesh cannot ignore the role of business messaging in their respective customer journeys. Whether it is on Whatsapp, Viber or Messenger, customers will soon be opting to communicate through these channels over the more traditional ones like phone and email.
This brings a change to how customer support teams across organizations function, because these messaging platforms, in a bid to keeps users’ on their platform, will emphasize the quality of support that is provided by organizations to its users.
Therefore we see community management teams fussing over the response rate badge on their Facebook pages, and Whatsapp for business actually charging businesses in the range of 0.5 cents to 9 cents for sending marketing and customer servicing messages through its platform.
For the growing business, it becomes very difficult to accommodate large customer service teams without incurring incremental overheads. At the same time, customer service teams typically interact with customers the most but it is little or no means for business to leverage this interaction for greater ROI.
In October 2018, Facebook IQ published an article titled
Ways Messaging is Changing The Path To Purchase”. What made the article interesting was that it was based on a survey
In the interest of preserving geo-context, let us look at the survey results from Indian users:
– 73% feel more confident messaging than making a phone call.
– 74% feel more confident messaging then filling out a website form.
– 72% feel more confident messaging then sending an email.
Furthermore, if we were to dig a bit deeper into why people were using Messenger:
– 92% make a general inquiry
– 89% ask about a product or service
– 82% make a purchase
– 80% schedule an appointment
– 82% get product or service support.
– 83% comment about a product.
The Value Proposition of Chatbots:
Chatbots or virtual agents operate at the intersection of customer service and channel engagement as they provide an opportunity for organizations to scale servicing operations and also leverage it as a digital channel.
Intelligent virtual agents offer an interface, whether that be Whatsapp, Viber, Facebook Messenger, or a business’s own website or application, for users to interact with and avail a wide variety of services.
At the same time, it paves the means for digital marketing opportunities for brands by leveraging Facebook & Google advertising networks through custom audience creation. For e.g., if a person is interacting with an online store for iPhone X specs and purchases from that store, the store can choose to serve ads for iPhone X cases to that user on digital platforms.
In the Bangladeshi context, the main challenge remains in the aspect of Natural language processing. In other words, how will the software be able to detect what users’ are asking about given our “Banglish” usage on social media platforms? At the same time, developing the software itself can be expensive & time to consume for organizations who are not versed in the best practices for chatbot development.
There are a lot of online tools that allow developers to create chatbots for different platforms, however, none of those platforms provide for Bangladesh’s unique use case.
One of the platforms working specifically to provide chatbot solutions for Bangladeshi brands is ChatLeads.
“Web 3.0 will demand more natural and conversational experiences because of the generation of digital natives,” says Shadab Mahbub, C.E.O of ChatLeads. “Toddlers who grew up interfacing with technology will demand real-time gratification for all of their experiences which will change how businesses interact with them. Therefore the inception of automated retail stores and self-driving cars.”
Chatbots are a must-have tool in the arsenal of organizations embracing digital transformation as a means to grow their business while focusing on meaningful customer experiences. Your customers want to receive contextual and immediate feedback from the brands they choose to interact with, and technology is the ideal means of achieving such business goals.