As constant connectivity has become the lifestyle of consumers, it is without a doubt that your target customers are always managing every aspect of daily communication from their mobile devices. Constant connectivity has resulted in a culture of immediacy, which is understood by customers as instant and timely interaction. This makes the usage of mobile devices in daily communication inevitable in all regards.
Driven by High Rates of Mobile Phone Ownership
According to “We Are Social and HootSuite”, in their collaborative report entitled “Digital in 2018 in Southeast Asia”, more than 70% of website traffic in Indonesia comes from mobile. This unsurprisingly continues to increase by 5% every year. The increase in traffic of mobile devices is caused by the efficiency and practicality of present mobile devices. Additionally, the rise in mobile traffic devices is also linked to the use of chat applications.
The reason can be found from the survey done by the Indonesia Internet Exchange (IIX), or also known as Asosiasi Penyelenggara Jasa Internet Indonesia (APJII): chat applications or instant messaging services are shown to be the most widely used applications in the country. It revealed that 89.35% of respondents are using chat applications as the main method of communication every day. Then we can assume that chat applications are extremely popular and have contributed to the rise of the ownership of mobile devices. Furthermore, users of chat applications, who users of mobile devices and largely customers, will be affected by the use of mobile devices. Understanding their behavior of needing to be immediately responded to is a valuable lesson for businesses in creating user experiences that meet their online habits.
Fast Response = Customer Satisfaction
The culture of immediacy that comes with chat applications can be used to enhance the customers’ conversational experience, which is also a differentiating factor between businesses. Businesses which operate on the desired chat application that customers want to be accessible from will be a strong factor in creating a positive user experience. For example, your customers may want things to be done directly on their mobile phones as they are used to instant gratification. This may explain why customers want quick answers when they communicate with businesses on their phones. Hubspot discovered that customers expect to get a response from customer support within 10 minutes or less from the moment they first reached out to the business. It also shows the importance of using chat applications by companies to reach customers. Customers expect businesses to accommodate to their various needs such as finding the desired goods, bargaining prices, or even completing payment transactions. They expect that customer service chats will help them solve these problems.
Multichannel Chats to Consolidate All Communication with Customers
When connecting with your customers using their preferred chat applications, the result will depend on the type of platforms used and your consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of each platform. It could also depend on the strategies that will connect the business and customers easily. However, you will be unable to reach new customers with only one platform because not all customers are engaging on that specific platform. Therefore, it is advantageous for companies to use multichannel chat applications as it allows them to connect with more leads as well as stay connected with their customers from all possible avenues. Many industries and companies around the world have realised this and are turning to multichannel chat applications to help them maintain communication with their customers.
Multichannel chat is a way of providing customers with many options to communicate with your business and brand. Companies can traverse several channels to involve customers in their chosen communication channel through chat application platforms such as Facebook Messenger, LINE, or WhatsApp. The existence of such platforms can simplify the process of responding to customers by centralizing all chat activities onto one platform. This is also all done in real-time, saving customers and companies time and money, while adding a significant competitive advantage to your enterprise.
Qiscus Multichannel Chat: A Solution for Consolidating Chat Platforms
Thanks to the culture of immediacy and social media, the integration of chat applications for businesses is no longer difficult for customers to adopt. Many companies have utilized integrated chat applications using Qiscus Multichannel Chat. With it, you can provide social media connectivity easily while easing customers to ask questions and get answers in a timely manner. Qiscus Multichannel Chat is a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider that can answer all merchants’ needs. As an accelerator package, it is an integrated way to connect customers to merchants via Facebook Messenger, LINE, WhatsApp, Web Live Chat, Qiscus chat widget, and other social media applications all on one dashboard simultaneously. This makes communication with customers significantly easier than before. Having all platforms on one dashboard makes it simpler to maintain and standardize the quality of each service chat, thus ensuring the same satisfaction for every customer even when the platforms customers use differ from one another.
Business owners need to understand this culture of immediacy and customers’ new expectations. It’s no longer about how feature-packed your product is (product differentiation) or your price point (price differentiation). It’s about how easily businesses are accessed and how quickly they respond to customers. It’s about how well businesses overcome the new culture that customers practice today; it’s all about customer experience.
