The dynamics of personal communication changed with instant messaging (IM). This communication revolution can be compared to the invention of the telegraph during the postal era. But instant messaging channels gain significance over earlier communication advancements as they give users the freedom to communicate from anywhere in real time.
Being accessible and flexible to users' convenience, instant messaging—combined with multimedia and asynchronous group communication—has become an essential part of our lives without compromising on privacy and security.
Top 6 Instant messaging channels for customer communication
Having a live chat widget on websites was the step first in establishing communication between businesses and their customers. After 20-30 years, it remains the same, though features that can help businesses offer better assistance have been added, like remote assist, screen share, audio calls, etc.
Meanwhile, chatbots, which don't require businesses to be on their end to welcome and answer customers, have grown significantly. From a mere rule-based skeleton, we're now witnessing the silicon intelligence of generative models, which simulate human agents better than any of their predecessors.
Over time, not just the instant messaging channels, but even social media platforms have followed the same pattern. Created for personal communication, channels like Facebook, WhatsApp, X (formerly Twitter), WeChat, Line, and Instagram, have also ventured into the commercial space as businesses are using Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp Business, X, and Instagram DMs for customer communication.
WeChat, a popular communication channel in China, is one of the pioneers in adding the business element to a personal communication platform. Started with the option to create business profiles to interact with customers, other features were added later, focusing on expanding the platform's capability to reach out to customers for proactive promotions.
Line
WeChat's Japanese counterpart, Line, opened its personal instant messaging into a business communication solution under Line@. Line brought in the ability to share rich media such as images, videos, and links, which helped the business platforms communicate with their customers better.
Facebook Messenger
After the reception and growth of WeChat and Line in the space of customer communication, the tech giant Facebook opened it's Messenger for businesses. It expanded the avenue by introducing chatbots and integrations with third-party applications. It helped businesses connect their tech stack with Facebook Messenger and take on a huge volume of queries without having to scale their support team. They were the first platform to enable payments via instant messaging, which set the base for disrupting how business transactions happen.
X
As X became mainstream, with its verified accounts, businesses had the opportunity to engage with their users and prospects in short broadcasts. X DMs became a popular way for customers to quickly reach out to the businesses for getting their attention on the queries.
WhatsApp Business
With almost half of the world's population on its platform, WhatsApp's plan to introduce an individual platform for businesses to communicate with their customers was a no-brainer. Not just for resolving customer queries, with WhatsApp broadcast, the platform provided the options to cold chat, upsell, and cross-sell for the businesses.
The visual-centric platform started a photo sharing application, with its simple interface rising to the top in no time. Businesses also started showcasing their offerings in a visual format as the consumption slowly moved from text to visuals. Business pages and verified accounts gave businesses an easy portal for their customers to reach out to them regarding any queries and helped them to provide faster resolution.
Capabilities and use cases of instant messaging channels
Being there when needed
It might not have been relevant a couple of decades ago, but businesses are now expected to be available whenever needed as they've started catering to global customers. If the customers are using/prospecting the offerings to amplify their business, they don't want to wait—they expect 24/7 support. It gives them the confidence to invest in the offerings, because if things go wrong, it reassures them that they can get help any time.
Instant messaging channels help deliver the same as via live chat; customers can initiate communication with the businesses any time of the day.
Instant responses to queries
Customers expect businesses to be available because they want to ask questions, clarify queries, or report issues. Chatbots integrated with instant messaging and social media platforms have been a game-changer as they're not only available 24/7, but with their AI and automation capabilities can take care of all the requirements by themselves.
From the available resources and knowledge base, chatbots will refer and answer customer queries and share relevant articles to resolve them. If they want to know more, chatbots integrated with the instant messaging channels can be instructed to either hand off the query to the available agents or create a ticket so that the agents can follow up with customers. Either way, with instant messaging channels, customers can be assured instant responses.
All the platforms we've seen above can be configured to be there when needed and can provide answers instantly as they can be integrated with bots. The exception here would be X as the functionality is minimal when it comes to bots and automation.
Attract prospects and collect leads
Websites aren't the only outbound way to showcase offerings—social media has also gained a significant advantage in this aspect, as we've witnessed the growth of Instagram and Facebook business pages. Expecting to be there when needed and instant responses aren't just reserved for the support operations—it contributes to marketing and sales as well.
When prospects reach out to businesses to learn more about their offerings or for queries, with instant messaging communication, businesses can collect the leads, score them based on custom criteria, and pass them through their nurturing and sales funnels. Bots can be configured to process all of this automatically.
Sharing multimedia
Be it customers or prospects, their queries aren't always going to be in the text format. They might want to share a screenshot to highlight the issues they're facing, or the businesses might want to share collateral the prospect is looking for. The ability to share multimedia in instant messaging has changed the dynamics of how communication happens between businesses and customers as they no longer have to use email. All the platforms we discussed above support the options to share multimedia.
Educating prospects and letting customers know of new features
By being able to connect to prospects and customers when needed, instant messaging helps businesses educate prospects on their offerings and even gives them the leeway to inform their customers about the new features they have.
This helps prospects evaluate the offerings faster and pushes them to convert quickly while helping customers use the product/service extensively, which increases the stick-ability.
Proactive outreach for promotions and cross-sells
One of the biggest disadvantages businesses have when websites were their sole medium of communication with their prospects/customers is that they could communicate only when someone visited the site. Collecting emails helped as businesses could create campaigns for personalized nurturing for further advertising and promotions.
Instant messaging channels increased the effectiveness of this strategy. Collecting prospects/customers' social media information especially helped businesses expand their outbound efforts, be it for promoting their new offerings or doing effective cross-sells.
With features like templates for WhatsApp and Bulk DMs in Instagram, now businesses can proactively reach out to the customers and prospects alike.
Sending reminders via WhatsApp broadcast
Though similar to the earlier benefit, sending reminders via WhatsApp needs to be iterated separately because of the magnitude it carries. Businesses that need to communicate important announcements to their customers, such as renewal reminders, service outages, vital updates, and more, can put instant messaging channels to use.
As the visibility metrics of instant messaging channels are better than other modes of communication, businesses can employ a WhatsApp broadcast to convey the crucial messages they want their customers to take a look at immediately.
Collecting payments via WhatsApp, WeChat, and Line
WhatsApp, WeChat, and Line supports native payment, which enables businesses to collect payments from their customers. Unlike Instagram or Facebook Messenger, these platforms don't ask the users to go to a different application for payments, which increases the chances of conversion.
Building an omnichannel network
As businesses have been doing phone and email communication for a couple of decades, instant messaging has given them an advantage to create a unified network, and that is an omnichannel network.
Since customer experience has also become one of the deciding factors, businesses can't expect customers/prospects to reach out to them only via certain channels. A omnichannel network helps customers initiate a conversation from any platform they're on, and it allows businesses to answer the conversation without having to jump between platforms and potentially losing the context of the query.
Benefits of using instant messaging channels for customer communication
Briefly discussed in the use cases, the benefits instant messaging channels offer to businesses are immense. First of all, because of its instant and round the clock availability, it nudges the customers to believe that they can get their queries and issues resolved instantly. It increases the trust factor and gets the high customer satisfaction scores (CSAT scores).
Since instant messaging communications are convenient to customers, it helps businesses deliver a better customer experience. Trust and convenience combined let businesses earn the loyalty of the customers by staying with them for a long time and becoming advocates of the business. When they stay, it naturally increases the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), which has a direct impact on revenue.
How can Zoho SalesIQ help your instant messaging customer communication?
Zoho SalesIQ, the customer service platform that features live chat, chatbots, and integrations with major instant messaging channels, transforms into an Engagement Intelligence with its AI capabilities.
Answer Bot, SalesIQ's NLP-based bot powered by our own AI technology, Zia, can be deployed on your instant messaging channels like Instagram, WhatsAppp, Facebook, Telegram, and Line to instantly address and answer visitor's queries and provide resolution. With SalesIQ's Answer Bot integrated with your IM channel, you can resolve ~50% of queries without the help of your operators.
By integrating SalesIQ with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Answer Bot uses the powerful capabilities of ChatGPT to answer queries. We also have a codeless bot builder, Zobot, that can be integrated with ChatGPT Assistant, which will enable ChatGPT to answer prospect/customer queries based on the information available on your website. You can have a unique custom flow to deliver the use cases we discussed above, like educating prospects and letting the customers know about the new features with Zobot.
You can configure Zobot to collect leads, and with CRM integration, you can push the leads to your sales team for further follow-up.
SalesIQ also offers multichannel support, as all the customer queries, irrespective of which platform they're from, can be answered from a single dashboard without having your agents need to jump multiple platforms. It also gives a complete report on your engagement metrics, including your IM channels.
Interested in getting a hands-on experience? Sign up for a free 15-day trial and check it out yourself.