Messaging Archives - MARKETECH APAC

Staying connected with customers means meeting them where they already are—and more often than not, that’s on their favourite messaging apps. Channels like WhatsApp are no longer just for personal; they’ve become the go-to platforms for brands to engage with their customers in a way that’s personal, convenient, and instant.

For businesses, these messaging apps are a game-changer. They allow brands to provide quick support, share updates, and even create tailored experiences, all in the same place where people are chatting about their day. The result? Happier customers, stronger relationships, and a smoother overall experience.

For our latest case study, we delve into how the Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) tapped Sleekflow, an AI-powered omnichannel conversation suite, as its official WhatsApp Business API provider to power its WhatsApp business channels for better customer engagement and experience for users.

The Challenge

As the telecommunications landscape continues to evolve, the Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) has recognised the need to adapt its communication channels to better reach and engage with customers. In response to the surge in scam calls and the growing preference for online messaging apps, the company decided to pursue WhatsApp as a customer connection channel. The company then set out to create official WhatsApp Business API accounts, since they noticed WhatsApp offers a more user-friendly and interactive option than phone calls or emails.

The Objective

HKBN’s objective was to leverage WhatsApp’s user-friendly and interactive features to distribute important notices, and promotions, and enhance service offerings. Customers can easily connect with HKBN, receive prompt support, and better customer service on the messaging app.

The Solution

HKBN began its reform by centralising WhatsApp management through SleekFlow integration. They decided to have separate WhatsApp API accounts for different services, such as Home Broadband, Mobile Service, and Promotion Updates. This approach allowed customers to easily recognise the distinct services offered by each account.

Within a month, HKBN seamlessly integrated WhatsApp into their operations, fostering direct engagements with customers. One important aspect of building trust with customers was obtaining official verification for their WhatsApp accounts, soon receiving the official WhatsApp verified badge next to their account name. This verification further boosted customer trust and willingness to engage with HKBN through the platform.

To streamline customer interactions and improve the overall chat experience, HKBN implemented SleekFlow’s automation tool, Flow Builder. This revolutionised how HKBN managed customer interactions by introducing automated processes that guide customers through various flows, allowing HKBN to collect context and information before assigning an agent to interact with the customer.

In addition to enhancing the customer experience, SleekFlow’s collaborative team inbox empowered HKBN’s large teams to work more efficiently. With over a hundred representatives in their customer service and sales teams, simultaneous access and engagement with customers on the same WhatsApp API account became possible. This allowed representatives to move beyond traditional sales scripts and foster genuine two-way conversations.

The Result

The implementation of SleekFlow’s solutions has yielded significant results for HKBN. One notable outcome is the boosted marketing impact and improved data for analytics. HKBN has leveraged SleekFlow’s broadcast feature to send targeted WhatsApp marketing campaigns and utilised in-built data analytics to measure campaign effectiveness.

In September 2023, HKBN launched a WhatsApp campaign targeting hundreds of inactive users who were unreachable via the service hotline for contract renewal. The engagement rates were impressive, with a 95% message read rate and a 50% response rate. These results demonstrate that WhatsApp is innovative and effective as a major means of service renewal, targeted marketing and customer engagement instead of phone calls.

***

Looking ahead, HKBN is keen on exploring SleekFlow’s advanced features, such as CRM integration, to offer even more personalised customer services. By integrating their customer relationship management systems with SleekFlow, HKBN can further enhance their understanding of customer preferences and provide tailored services and recommendations.

In short, the partnership between HKBN and SleekFlow demonstrates how leveraging innovative communication platforms can lead to enhanced customer experiences and business success.

Singapore – Twilio, the customer engagement platform known for delivering real-time, personalised experiences, has launched ‘Rich Communication Services (RCS)’ messaging globally through its programmable messaging and verify APIs, offering businesses enhanced branded communication and seamless customer trust-building without the need for code changes.

RCS elevates traditional messaging by incorporating branded sender identification directly within customers’ default messaging apps, allowing recipients to instantly recognise and trust the source of the message. This update enables businesses to send branded, verified communications that foster trust and boost customer loyalty—all without requiring any code changes.

To expound, Twilio RCS offers branded messaging by automatically upgrading SMS to RCS on compatible devices, including business logos, taglines, and verified sender identification, ensuring trust and engagement. It enables rich content with interactive features like call-to-action buttons, carousels, and quick replies, driving higher engagement and conversions. Importantly, businesses can adopt RCS without code changes, as Twilio manages brand verification, carrier onboarding, and fallback to SMS when RCS is unavailable.

Twilio’s RCS expansion is driven by its 2024 consumer survey, where 75% of respondents said branded texts increased their trust, and nearly half (49%) trusted messages more when logos or check marks were present. This trust led to action, with 40% making repeat purchases and 25% making first-time purchases through trusted communication channels.

RCS is a crucial component of Twilio’s broader suite of solutions for trusted, branded communications across all channels, including branded caller ID and BIMI support for email. Twilio’s APIs empower businesses to deliver engaging, recognisable messages that cut through the noise and drive ROI.

Inbal Shani, chief product officer of Twilio Communications, said, “At Twilio, we believe building engagement with your customers should be as seamless and trusted as possible. RCS makes this a reality by delivering richer interactions, improved deliverability, and most critically, building trust in your brand, without changing a single line of code.”

Paul Nashawaty, practice lead for application development and modernisation at Futurum, stated, “According to a recent study by Futurum Research, businesses using RCS have experienced a 32% increase in customer engagement and conversion rates compared to traditional SMS. Twilio’s latest announcement makes sense focussing on RCS solutions to help drive value for their customers. This is likely due to RCS’s ability to deliver richer, more interactive content, such as images, videos, and buttons, which can enhance the customer experience and drive higher ROI.”

Twilio’s RCS messaging is now available globally in public beta for Programmable Messaging and fully available in Verify. Previously limited to Android, Apple’s upcoming support for RCS on iPhones paves the way for broader adoption of the technology.

Singapore – Zendesk has announced the launch of ‘Relay,’ a new app that offers proactive messaging for companies using WhatsApp and SMS. Relay allows companies to proactively connect with customers at scale using outbound messages in WhatsApp and to manage all those conversations natively in Zendesk.

By deepening its partnership with Meta’s WhatsApp and SMS providers like Twilio, Zendesk empowers businesses to enhance their CX strategies significantly. This collaboration is designed to provide customer service teams with the tools to proactively keep customers informed, ensuring that crucial updates are delivered before customers need to seek out information on their own.

With Relay, customer service teams can improve targeting and personalisation by using dynamic content and targeted audience data, creating custom messaging templates, and boost customer loyalty, increase satisfaction, and drive higher sales through timely and relevant proactive communication.

Mike Keohane, regional vice president for business development at Zendesk, said, “Consumers now expect real-time, personalised communication from brands, akin to what they experience in their personal lives. By adopting proactive messaging strategies, businesses not only meet but exceed these evolving expectations, delivering timely and relevant information through channels that customers already use and trust.”

He added, “Relay will allow companies using Zendesk to proactively contact their customers through WhatsApp, to provide important updates that they might not be aware of. This can include examples such as reporting incidents, invites for exclusive opportunities, and requests for feedback on services or products.”

Meanwhile, Maureen Chong, regional vice president for Asia at Zendesk, commented, “Conversational commerce is becoming the new standard in Asia Pacific, with consumers desiring more seamless experiences with the brands they interact with. That said, our CX Trends Report reveals a stark disconnect between what consumers in APAC desire–for everything to happen within the same chat–and the ability of APAC businesses to provide that. Solutions like Relay will help businesses bridge this gap in expectations, ultimately allowing them to marry immediacy with engagement while delivering personalised, quality CX at scale that will improve the bottom line.”

Singapore – Despite a decrease in piracy on pirate TV boxes, pirate apps and streaming or torrent websites, the survey shows an increase in the incidence of piracy across the region on social media and messaging platforms, according to a new survey from Asia Video Industry Association’s Coalition Against Piracy (CAP), conducted alongside YouGov.

The survey shows an increase in the incidence of piracy across the region, climbing from 52% last year to 59% this year. Moreover, it showed that particularly concerning are the increases in the Philippines (12% yoy) and Vietnam (13% yoy), with both countries also now having the region’s highest incidences of piracy amongst their populations, at 70% and 71% respectively.

The dominance of social media and messaging platforms as the conduit to piracy not only remains, but has grown more severe, increasing by 14% across the region. Meanwhile, only 13% of consumers in the region now access pirated content through websites, and 11% by pirate TV boxes – both down from last year.

Moreover, awareness of the negative consequences of piracy (89%) remains extremely high across the region, with consumers being most aware of criminals profiting from pirate services, the risks of malware and the damage piracy causes to local industry being most prominent.

Lastly, the impact of judicial or administrative orders requiring ISPs to block access to pirate sites is clear, with Indonesian (59%), Vietnamese (54%), Malaysian (42%) and Singaporean (28%) consumers saying they have either stopped entirely or rarely access pirate sites as a direct result of sites being blocked.

Matt Cheetham, general manager of CAP, noted, “We are greatly encouraged by the continuing downward trend of consumers accessing pirate content from illegal websites, which reflects the work done over many years in the region by industry and governments. However, it is clear that social media and messaging platforms must do more to prevent their services being used to find and access pirate content.”

As customers increasingly rely on in-person and various online channels when making purchases, marketers need to adopt an omnichannel approach to provide a seamless and integrated customer experience across all touchpoints.

An essential component of omnichannel marketing is the implementation of chat platforms as a lead generation tool. By facilitating one-to-one conversations between a brand and customers, businesses can customise interactions to align with customer preferences, introduce their latest products or services, and provide support in real-time.

Now more than ever, marketers have to navigate and resolve the challenges associated with integrating new messaging channels into their existing omnichannel strategies.

These topics were tackled at the keynote presentation of global SaaS brand SleekFlow during the What’s NEXT 2024: Marketing in Singapore conference held at Furama City Centre on March 7, 2024.

Sharing his insights as a presenter at the conference, Asnawi Jufrie, vice president and general manager for Southeast Asia (SEA) at SleekFlow, underlines the importance of customer-centricity within omni-enterprise models, as well as the role of automation in effectively managing multiple messaging channels while maintaining a consistent brand message.

Why chat is important in a conversion-driving marketing strategy

According to Jufrie, chat is an often overlooked but highly effective subsegment of the traditional marketing funnel. Research shows that 7 out of 10 people feel more connected to brands that are accessible via direct messaging, rather than relying solely on emails or phone calls. However, many CRM platforms primarily focus on tracking emails and phone calls, neglecting the potential of chat.

This is especially significant nowadays with messaging applications such as WhatsApp having over 2.5 billion monthly users, with a daily engagement rate of 70%. Among these users, 175 million of those users are communicating with businesses every day. Additionally, other messaging platforms such as Telegram and Line also attract millions of users.

When explaining chat’s significance in customer-centric marketing, he noted that conversations through chat align with how typically communicate and establish connections in their daily lives, making these channels inherently familiar and easy to use. The integration of AI further elevates the potential of chat in the marketing space, with marketers and brands exploring AI platforms like ChatGPT.

Jufrie further emphasised that brands that fail to leverage this market opportunity risk falling behind. Engaging in conversations allows for the development of stronger brands, improved customer engagement, and ultimately leads to higher conversions.

Accelerating lead generation through chat

Jufrie reiterated the need to prioritise improving lead generation through chat as an efficient means of communication when driving traffic to a brand’s website. To achieve this, brands can implement simple tools like a messaging platform widget or an embedded link. These tools allow consumers to quickly submit queries, concerns, or feedback. Offline media can also utilise chat-based lead generation strategies by incorporating QR codes that direct consumers to messaging platforms.

When leads are generated through chat, it’s crucial to qualify them. This can be easily achieved using automation features within messaging platforms, which lighten the workload for sales staff when dealing with a large number of leads.

Once leads are qualified, the focus shifts to nurturing and retargeting them. Traditional methods like email marketing (EDMs) and social media orchestration are commonly used, but Jufrie highlights WhatsApp as a more effective option due to its 98% open rate and personalised messaging.

To maximise efficiency, Jufrie suggests promptly responding to leads and adopting a chat-first strategy. This can be facilitated through website form submissions and Facebook instant forms, which direct leads to chat for a seamless process. The same approach can be applied to organic social media engagements, automating responses to comments and initiating direct chats.

In addition to these processes, collaboration and smart routing are essential. Organising and assigning conversations to support or sales staff based on queues or specific conditions optimises team collaboration and ensures prompt responses to lead needs.

Considering data management is crucial for effective chat processes. Data ownership and visibility are key factors since chat conversations may contain valuable information such as mentorship processes and collaborative strategies. Locally storing data is also vital for security, especially when it involves customer data.

Lastly, Jufrie addressed the importance of driving customer loyalty through a chat-first strategy. Instead of relying on email surveys, brands can use messaging to gather feedback, providing a streamlined and personalised approach that values the customer’s voice. Moreover, a chat-focused approach increases the visibility of promotions and event invitations.

How SleekFlow empowers brands with an automated platform for chat marketing

For these channels, it’s very important to organise a chat-first strategy. By leveraging SleekFlow, marketers and brands have a wide range of features at their fingertips to efficiently streamline customer interactions and push this strategy forward towards their consumers.

“At SleekFlow, we advocate for a chat-first strategy and develop brands into an omni-enterprise by orchestrating everything into our platform. Our solution is rather agnostic, meaning that it’s versatile and can integrate with different messaging and chat platforms, making it a suitable solution for industries like education, beauty & wellness, finance, and more. If you use varying messaging or chat platforms to communicate with your customers, we are a good solution fit,” Jufrie mentioned.

To help put this strategy into fruition, SleekFlow offers brands and marketers an AI-powered Omnichannel Conversation Suite that enables a seamless and personalised customer experience across popular social and messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, SMS, live chat, and more.

Jufrie’s presentation is part of a series of presentations and discussions under the What’s NEXT 2024: Marketing in Singapore hybrid conference, where SleekFlow was a proud Gold sponsor. In it, SleekFlow led the discussion on the challenges and solutions in integrating new messaging channels, as well as how applying customer centricity with this method leads to enhanced customer experiences.

With SleekFlow’s customer engagement platform, enterprises can conveniently manage all customer interactions in one centralised hub, automating their business growth from sales and marketing to customer support. The most recent launch of SleekFlow 2.0, which includes the launch of SleekFlow AI, aims to empower companies to centre all their workflows around meaningful conversations.

What’s NEXT 2024: Marketing in Singapore is part of the trilogy of conferences from MARKETECH APAC’s “What’s NEXT 2023-2024 Series.” The conference featured a diverse lineup of marketing leaders across Singapore, representing local and international brands including DirectAsia, Grab, HP, Johnson & Johnson, Kaspersky, Singapore Management University, Singapore Post, Standard Chartered Bank, StarHub, The LEGO Group, and more.

Customer experience is founded on customer expectations. Marketing leaders must understand the evolving expectations that consumers have of their interactions with brands – this includes customer experience and support that, hopefully, meets their needs but ideally delivers above and beyond these expectations.

As the pandemic turns endemic, delivering a consistently excellent customer experience is by no means an easy feat. Safety measures to protect our health and well-being have created a next normal for marketers. In fact, brand and marketing decision-makers need to constantly calibrate and innovate how they deliver on their brand’s promise and keep an engaged audience base.

The silver lining is that this scenario provides a real case for rolling out genuine omnichannel customer delivery and engagement models – something that has, for far too long, been relegated to the back burner for many brands. By setting new goals for customer service standards, relooking operational processes, and investing in technology solutions, strengthening consumer connections is possible even in a time when change abounds and reliability is imperative.

As such, we’ve seen customer experience agents take on multiple and increasingly important roles: from technicians and consultative sellers to today’s need for them to be empathetic community managers.

Not just a touch-feely bonus: The importance of empathy today

A recent McKinsey study reported that businesses that have empathy towards the customer will have a net positive benefit on their bottom line. Among 170 publicly traded companies examined, the top 10 with outstanding empathy ratings outperformed the bottom 10 by two times on the stock market.

Today’s environment has led to general expectations of a certain level of emotional empathy, no matter who we are interacting with. And brands are not spared – digital empathy and human empathy have taken on a new urgency.

How the pandemic transformed the customer experience agent into empathetic community manager

Brands now have to understand audience emotions, their feelings, and thoughts, their pressures, their desired digital and real-world experiences, and even anticipate future reactions. Empathetic brands that are using this period to rethink, reinvent, and leapfrog will most certainly be developing evolved blueprints for the entire pre-, during, and post-transaction customer journey as a result. At the frontlines of the customer journey – the shape-shifting customer experience agent, who must now play multiple roles.

Technology as an ironic accelerator for empathy

Some may think empathy and technology don’t go together. In fact, technology can help customer experience agents manage their hybrid roles and fulfill the need to be empathetic community managers. By combining proactive support with increased automation, brands can provide personalized support engagement at scale, without sacrificing empathy.

By centralizing omnichannel communications with customers, organizations can upgrade and reinvent the role of customer experience agents. For example, with the ability to manage communication over Instagram and other social media channels through industry-leading contact-center-as-a-solution services available in the market today, customer experience agents have the ability to become community management extraordinaires. Empowering agents with 360-degree customer profiles and full conversation histories all in one place will allow them to unlock valuable insights and provide fast and personalized customer support.

Unlocking the power of social media messaging for customer support is more important than ever as we consider these stats from data from global cloud communications platform, Infobip: 70% of people globally expect to message businesses for customer service questions, and 64% would rather message than call a business.

As agents and representatives help transform customer interactions from being transactional to becoming more involved, these experiences are likely to be highly engaged, emotionally charged, and mission-critical for loyalty and retention. Consumers will also in turn anticipate that agents demonstrate they understand their problems and provide relevant reassurance.

This points to agents needing to be able to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and build quick rapport. This doesn’t just affect formats that provide visual and verbal cues – it also applies to digital channels such as chat, email, and social media, where agents cannot be certain of the tone of the conversation.

AI is maturing and here to help

While human empathy is natural, artificial empathy must be learned based on the data collected within the rules or framework set up by a human. This is where technology like artificial intelligence (AI) can come into play. AI that analyzes incoming messages and highlights factors like sentiment, helps prepare agents to respond accordingly.

Thanks to natural language processing (NLP), we can communicate with chatbots using human speech. NLP is an area of AI that helps chatbots understand the way your customers communicate.In other words, it means enabling machines, like chatbots, to communicate the way humans would.

An NLP chatbot is an AI chatbot that uses natural language processing, based on deep learning, to better identify a customer’s intent and therefore provide more valuable support.

From the customer’s point of view, NLP helps them feel understood. From a brand’s point of view, these chatbots elevate customer support, create helpful dialogue, and capture insights into your customers’ goals and challenges. This lets you build a brand voice while simultaneously providing a customer-centric approach.

Chatbots provide instant answers. And when boosted by NLP, they’ll quickly understand customer questions to respond faster than humans can. In addition to text, these chatbots can enhance the natural conversation experience by sharing helpful images (product images), videos (how-to videos, product explainers), map locations (store or service center finders), and more. These lightning-quick responses help build customer trust and positively impact customer satisfaction as well as retention rates.

Take for example Gibraltar BSN, a Malaysian life insurance company offering life and medical insurance along with saving and investment plans. The insurer had concerns that too many customers in Malaysia had not received important and sensitive documents sent through the post, especially during the pandemic. The company also wanted to optimize its contact center in a way that would allow them to engage customers using modern digital channels but still provide a critical level of empathy during a sensitive time.

By deploying AI-powered NLP chatbots, Gibraltar BSN facilitated the creation of its automated chatbot – GINA. With GINA handling simple customer service inquiries, human agents can help clients with more complex inquiries and offer a more personalized approach. Gibraltar BSN saw a 40% reduction in cost for delivering e-policies after rolling out this transformation.

Harnessing the full potential of the customer experience function

With the right level of support given to customer experience agents, the potential for businesses to exceed consumer expectations in a digital world is limitless. Today, customer experience, service, and support – an oft-neglected function – have the aid of readily available technology to bring another dimension of brand success.

For marketing leaders, working with CX is about quickly adapting to and adopting emerging technologies for their benefit. Be one of the first businesses to leapfrog and handle messaging at scale on social media, connect to new customers, and strengthen relationships with existing ones.

This article is written by Viven Ang, regional manager for APAC at Infobip.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Malaysian higher education institution SEGi College Subang Jaya has tapped digital solutions provider elfo to improve the institution’s digital transformation strategies by being its corporate partner for integrated performance-based marketing and automation.

Included in the partnership is the utilization of elfo’s marketing automation platform elfoMAP and its application-to-person messaging platform elfoA2P, which have been used by SEGi’s marketing and recruitment division for its email and SMS campaigns for the past four months.

Sri Yosephin, head at elfo, believes that leveraging digital technology is crucial for the higher education sector, to ensure the sustainability of enrolment strategies and student retention.

“Our user-centered solutions will help simplify redundant administrative processes and provide real-time, comprehensive data such as open rate and click-through rate. These key metrics allow SEGi College Subang Jaya to model student retention and apply that model to forecast successful enrollment,” Yosephin stated.

Calvin Chan, acting principal at SEGi College Subang Jaya, agrees as well, stating that it is important for the institution to position themselves as an industry-driven higher learning institution, moving towards Industrial Revolution 4.0, which is in line with Malaysia’s nation building agenda.

“Working closely with a MAdTech expert like elfo helps us make our necessary technological shifts seamless and enables us to focus more on the college’s recruitment needs and serving our students. The straightforward onboarding process and reliable professional support are definitely convenient, cutting short our learning curve and making the integration effortless,” Chan explained.

In addition, Li Chun Young, digital marketing lead at SEGi College Subang Jaya, also noted that two of the email campaigns optimized by elfoMAP had seen a promising return. Scholarship-offer emails sent to potential students had a 90% open rate and emails sent to Australian recruitment agencies had a 30% open rate. On top of that, the college also saw a 100% increase in conversion from the email campaigns

“This is impressive considering the average open rate is only 24.9% for the education-related campaigns. These numbers and responses are unlike what we’ve seen prior to our partnership with elfo,” Young said.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Despite concerns of WhatsApp users on its new privacy policy, which the platform announced in January of this year, 7 in 10 of users in Malaysia are still shown to stick to the messaging app, a recent study by marketing data insights platform InsightzClub shows.

The new terms require users to share their personal data with Facebook. WhatsApp clarified that it has nothing to do with the messages and profile data, and instead is related to business advertising purposes.The new policy stirred panic among users worldwide, with a large portion migrating to other messaging applications such as Telegram and Signal.

According to the report, reliance on WhatsApp usage among Malaysians increased during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, swelling to 68%, compared to pre-pandemic periods. Even when the platform amended its privacy policies, Malaysian patrons were shown to stay, which majority, or 65%, use for personal and professional communication.

Still, amid the changes, Malaysian users were still shown to be in tandem with majority of users of the platform, creating a mild state of paranoia, worrying about their location sharing (60%), stored private messages (56%), and accessing media files (54%).

The report stated that Malaysians’ loyalty is necessitated by circumstances to remain on the platform, and only 3 out of 10 users installed an alternative app compared to the big chunk of WhatsApp users worldwide, which is said to be 82%, who have installed one or more additional messaging apps recently, like Signal and Telegram, owing to the bandwagon effect.

Meanwhile, the small portion of Malaysian users who made the switch were due to concerns over migrating personal circles (48%), and simply, curiosity (32%).

Telegram is already capitalizing on this opportunity in the coming year, as they have set a target of gaining 1 billion a user base by 2022 – something that’s unimaginable just a year ago.