Research Indicates an Uptick of Conversational Experiences on Customer Support Platforms

While it’s still too early to gauge precisely how successful this year’s holiday shopping was for retailers, there are indications that the 2022 season was fruitful. Research from global cloud communications platform Infobip (News - Alert) has shown that Black Friday and Cyber Monday interactions on its platform reached new highs this year, as rich conversational channels become important for customer communications. Black Friday (News - Alert) interactions increased to 2.36 billion this year. Cyber Monday interactions to 2.12 billion. These figures indicate that customers and companies are trending towards more conversational experiences on customer support platforms.

While the jury remains out on actual sales figures, if multimedia customer interactions are the basis for measuring the 2022 season, the figures look brisk. Infobip’s analysis showed a 112 percent increase in multimedia messaging (MMS) and a 10 percent increase in WhatsApp interactions on Black Friday compared to a typical November Friday this year. Meanwhile, MMS and WhatsApp interactions increased by 120 percent and 13 percent, respectively, on Cyber Monday (News - Alert) compared to a typical Monday in November.

“Our data shows that businesses and brands increasingly favor rich and more conversational communications channels to communicate with their customers across Black Friday and Cyber Monday,” said Ivan Ostojic, Chief Business Officer at Infobip, in a statement. “Conversational experiences and same-day sales offers drove an increase in multimedia, chat app, and mobile app interactions. Meanwhile, in the year of its 30th anniversary, SMS continues to remain a critical channel, especially on Black Friday itself.

Increasingly, companies are striving to better understand customer needs and enabling enterprise customers to drive meaningful communication through customer support platforms. Infobip’s research also shows brands can achieve conversion rates as high as 39 percent through marketing automation across multiple channels. This can be attributed to messaging channels which have much higher open rates than some others. For instance, consumers open some 98 percent of all SMS messages.

Edited by Greg Tavarez