Tag Archives: wechat

Companies Want a Chat Platform. Apple and Facebook Are Happy to Oblige. What’s the Catch?

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Companies Want a Chat Platform. Apple and Facebook Are Happy to Oblige. The “chat” style of communication, where two parties type text back-and-forth, is wildly popular with consumers. Companies are eager to embrace this popularity because A) it’s smart to communicate in a way your customers like and B) it’s less costly than call center agents.

Facebook, Twitter and, as of last month, Apple are all happy to provide a platform for that kind of business-to-consumer chat to take place. (We’re going to talk about Apple’s new offering in our live panel discussion next week. Be sure to tune in and direct questions to our panel of industry experts.)

These platforms are free for any company to use. But is there a catch? More precisely: Is the agenda of these for-profit platforms perfectly aligned with a company that wants to use them as a channel to talk to customers? Read on for discussion of that question and two related ones.

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Chat vs. Messaging Comes Down to Who Owns the Channel

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Chat vs. Messaging Comes Down to Who Owns the ChannelCustomers increasingly prefer chat over other communication channels, but chat suffers from an uptake problem, particularly on mobile.

On the other hand, messaging offers basically the same experience – asynchronous text-based communication –­ but has no problem with uptake. In fact, it’s burning up the charts: Messaging apps occupy 6 of the 10 top slots on App Store (the top 4 have 3 billion users). Granted, that popularity is driven by person-to-person rather than person-to-business communication, but many companies are betting on messaging making that transition.

So we’re at a crossroads: Will chat find a way to increase uptake rates or will messaging find a way to become a B2C channel?

That’s the topic for this webinar which you can watch on demand at any time. Continue reading →

Will the WeChat Model Work in the West?

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Will the WeChat Model Work in the West?Messaging is growing at a breathtaking pace. The top 4 messaging apps have almost 3 billion users. In particular, China-based WeChat has been the center of attention both for rapid growth and for pushing the “messaging-as-interface” model further than anyone else.

For WeChat’s 600 million users, it is not just a way to chat with friends, it’s also their primary gateway for interacting with, and buying from, companies. WeChat has leveraged popularity in person-to-person (P2P) interactions for expansion into business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions. So much so, that it’s more important for a new company in China to have a WeChat account than a stand-alone website.

Naturally, many people are asking, “Who will be the WeChat of the West?” You can find variations on that headline in articles from Re/Code, Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and GigaOm. But is that even the right question? Continue reading →

Is Messaging the Messiah for Customer Service?

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Is Messaging the Messiah for Customer Service?The eternal conflict in customer service is between delivering a good experience and keeping costs low. For example, pushing callers to self-serve IVR lowers cost, but customers hate dealing with phone menus and “talking to the machine”. The industry has always sought a way for customers and companies to interact that is enjoyable for the former and cost effective for the latter. Hopes are high that “messaging” is that messiah.

“Messaging” differs from “chat”, which companies have offered via their website for over a decade. We’ll discuss the distinction shortly, but let’s start by looking at where chat has fallen short so that the upside potential of messaging is clear.

Web-based chat has been around for over a decade. Its effectiveness is well-established: Cost-per-contact is substantially lower than phone calls, and customer satisfaction is generally high. Its shortcoming is uptake: Chat deployments rarely resulted in a significant reduction in phone calls. For many people, the default action of picking up and dialing the phone was too hard a habit to break.

Then came the smartphone era. This should have been a boon for chat-based customer service, but instead uptake has been hampered by an inadequate user experience. The hope is that messaging will solve chat’s “mobile UX” problem. Continue reading →