Consumers have made it clear: for service interactions, digital messaging is the communication medium of the future. It’s more personal, more convenient, and more comfortable.

Consumers already expect customer service interactions to take place in their preferred channels, and service brand leaders are scrambling to develop their strategies. Unfortunately, for many of these brands’ best customers, the strategy is too narrow, and therefore will not result in the desired customer service experience.

What do I mean by “narrow”? The most common example is brands adopting a strategy which limits digital service interactions to a single channel – usually text messaging.

All you have to do is stand up a text messaging channel and call it a day, right?

Not so fast.

While consumers in North America embrace text messaging, the rest of the world has a wide range of channel preferences to address. Here is a quick rundown of consumer-preferred channels from a global perspective:

Preferred Digital Messaging

AROUND THE GLOBE

If you are a global brand focused on serving your customers in their preferred channels, then this should represent a major opportunity for you. While it’s easy to get caught up in the hype of “texting for businesses,” your organization will have outgrown it before you even send your first text.

The marketplace is flooded with one-size-fits-all widgets which enable a land line to also receive text messages. If your service model is also one-size-fits-all, and you prefer to ignore the world outside of North America, then you may be ok with one of these widgets.

However, if you have a global perspective and recognize that unique customer demographics prefer an array of digital communication channels, engagement frequency, and business offerings, then Real Time Engagement is table stakes for your brand.

North America: Text messaging, Facebook Messenger, SnapChat, Instagram
Africa: WhatsApp
Europe: WhatsApp
Asia: WeChat, Line, Kakao Talk
Australia: Text messaging, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp
South America: WhatsApp
Antarctica: SMS to satellite phones

What is Real Time Engagement?

• Genuine
• representing authentic nuances of a brand
• Personalized
• embracing the complexity and individuality of those being served
• Filled with Emotion
• going beyond the head and into the heart
• Service-Minded
• not focused on generating interest, but, rather, taking care of people in your care
• Digital Messaging
• incorporating channels consumers trust for human-to-human connection

• Multi-Channel
• evolving as messaging standards and technologies change
• Global
• addressing the preferences of local markets but managed as a single platform
• Scalable
• tapping into existing service training investments without adding additional labor
• Human
• leveraging artificial intelligence as a gap filler to help teams be more professional and timely

We’re now witnessing a change beyond initial use cases for messaging which have floundered

• Single Technology Messaging
• SMS-only or social-only approaches were confined to specific demographics while creating complicated operating environments with multiple user interfaces for already stressed staff to manage
• Marketing
• promotion and advertising over messaging abused the one-on-one connection afforded by the messaging channel and is fundamentally detractive to higher level customer relationships
• Bots
• we’re still decades from true human like artificial intelligence for complex interactions and a slight miss can be catastrophic to lifetime value of a customer

Kipsu has pioneered the Real Time Engagement category, representing the only enterprise-grade solution supporting global, service-centric brands.

While text messaging is core to our solution for our North America brand partners, our international brand partners leverage our unified platform to address the needs of all their guests. If developing customer intimacy is core to your strategy, let’s have a conversation about how Real Time Engagement can help take you to the next level.

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