What is Conversational Messaging: Everything You Need to Know

Why Conversational Messaging?

Businesses need to engage with their customers in real-time. Customer engagement drives revenues, customer satisfaction and market share growth. Therefore, businesses are always looking for better and newer ways to engage customers. Earlier engagement formats such as web and app were structured formats consisting of screens, tabs and buttons – they require humans to behave like computers; conversational messaging is natural, intuitive and conversational – it forces computers to behave like humans. In that sense, conversational messaging is the most advanced format for engagement.

Conversational Messaging History

Over the last 30 years, SMS messaging has been a constant as a channel of communication, but not as an engagement channel. Globally, enterprises send 2 trillion text messages to consumers worldwide. These are mostly transactional messages notifying customers about information related to their transaction. With IP Messaging proliferating, messaging is emerging as the new customer engagement platform – a platform for developers and enterprises to engage their customers and build advanced conversational experiences. Messaging and conversational experiences are gradually transforming every aspect of the human-computer interface. Developers are building chatbots on messaging channels like WhatsApp to support specific use cases.

What is Conversational Messaging?

Conversational messaging is a new customer engagement paradigm that brings businesses and customers closer, by enabling human-like conversations on commerce, marketing and sales, on messaging channels that customers are already comfortable with. Conversational messaging solves the problem of engaging meaningfully with customers in real time.

Conversational Messaging helps businesses think beyond websites and apps. People don’t want to commit to downloading apps on their mobile devices. It’s too much of a commitment. But they do still want to be able to talk to the hotel, restaurant, taxi cab service, etc. at the time they need to use that business. A conversational messaging platform that allows the customer to speak with the hotel, book their room, order room service, as well as check-in and out fulfills both their needs and desires. And the technology is already here.

What is a Conversational Messaging Platform?

A conversational messaging platform provides two distinct but interconnected capabilities – the ability to define conversational experiences for commerce, marketing and support using chatbots and the ability to deploy these experiences on any messaging channel using a messaging API.

Here is the Gupshup Conversational Messaging Platform. Gupshup’s world-renowned single-api for messaging is tightly coupled with a conversational experience-building toolset that includes a bot platform, conversational marketing tools and Gupshup’s own IP Messaging channel, GIP.

What are the advantages of Conversational Messaging?

Conversational Messaging will enhance the way businesses communicate with consumers.

1. Businesses are Always On with conversational messaging chatbots – a business is 24×7 and can converse with a customer in any language on any messaging channel.
2. Businesses can scale with conversational messaging – conversational messaging platforms can handle millions of queries at a time and these conversations can be highly personalized. With the help of AI and Natural Language Processing, customer questions are assessed and translated into a structured and precise query that the business is prepared to answer.
3. Businesses can handle seasonality with conversational messaging chatbots – No longer will a business need to model customer footfall or volume trends to plan staff allotment to say, a hotel front desk or a restaurant table or a customer support helpdesk. Conversational Messaging helps you deal with peaks and troughs of activity.
4. Conversational Marketing is enabled by conversational messaging – marketers can make advertising campaigns interactive and personalized across any medium. Developers can embed chatbots in A2P text messages. Small businesses can merge their campaigns and catalogs into a seamless experience. Game developers can build mini-games leveraging conversations, and app developers can build mini-programs with lightweight experiences that reduce the need for expensive app marketing.
5. Conversational Messaging allows a business to send messages with rich media (images, audio, video, documents, etc.), structured cards and interactive buttons. It also enables two-way conversations along with the ability to gather-with a user’s permission-user photos and location.
6. Conversational Messaging Platforms provide APIs that can be used to integrate customer-support tools, automated chatbots or other systems. It provides secure features such as end-to-end encryption and time-bound disappearing messages. Conversational Messaging Platforms can integrate with payment systems to enable a one-click payment experience for ecommerce, gaming or content subscriptions.

Businesses are increasingly adopting conversational messaging to engage better with their customers in real time. This is how customers are looking to find and interact with your business. Conversational Messaging with a combination of conversational experiences and messaging channels, is the new digital front door and warm host that your customers have been craving for.