Conversations

Infobip is a global cloud communications platform, helping businesses build connected customer experiences across all stages of the customer journey at scale. Conversations is a scalable digital cloud contact center solution within its offering that enables businesses to deliver omnichannel support for customers through a single interface. Messaging services such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Live Chat, SMS and in-house chatbots can all be managed through it. Key features include:

• Empowering agents with automation: Slow response rates or having to repeat yourself as you’re passed from agent to agent leads to frustrated customers, low levels of loyalty and high drop off rates. By being able to set up rules and automate workflows customers are routed to the right or same agent if it is a return visit – or where their request is more straightforward (e.g. opening times for a shop), this can be automated. This leads to more productive agents and happier customers.
• Giving agents context: Agents will be able to access customer data from CRM systems, web shop, ticketing, and loyalty programs systems – with the added context of customer sentiment – all in one place. This enables them to deliver personalised and contextualized support, which during the current climate, is more important than ever
• Managing cross-channel conversations: Seamlessly transition customer conversations between channels, whilst retaining a full conversation history, so agents can respond to questions with ease – whether it’s a text or a WhatsApp message – straight from a single workspace.
• Improving remote agent performance through analytics: Analytics enables managers to track customer activity, monitor agent performance with real-time dashboards and reporting to identify obstacles impacting agent productivity. Using this data, managers can identify any challenges and make the necessary adjustments to optimize working practices or workloads for improved overall performance and CX.

The CPaaS market has been around since 2008 and has continued to add new capabilities over the years. This includes an expanded base of cloud communication channels along with packaged modules that perform a specific task, such as conversational messaging or user authentication. Underscoring a commitment to differentiating itself in the market, Infobip has continued to evolve in pace with – if not faster than – the larger CPaaS ecosystem. The launch of 'Conversations' in March 2020, signified an extension from a A2P communication model to a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) model. By enabling person to person (P2P) communication through a full-stack customer experience center through Conversations, clients can follow their end users’ ever-growing demands in customer care and respond via conversational messaging. On-premise contact centers are a secure, stable solution, but they are not the most adaptable, especially in today’s climate where companies need solutions that will help them keep their business running while implementing the necessary measures to keep their employees safe. Today’s customers expect to be able to contact a business at any time, from anywhere, and on the channel of their choice. And while many businesses are striving to deliver an unmatched customer experience, they struggle to transition between the variety of channels and technologies on the market. What sets Conversations above the rest, is that it brings these elements into one accessible platform, allowing companies to deliver the very best customer experience while reducing costly inefficiencies. It’s part of Infobip’s mantra to help businesses simplify the complexity of global messaging and enable them to interact with customers in a personalised way without friction. This is especially important in today’s climate, where people are craving simple, human interaction more than ever.

With the goal of establishing better customer relationships, saving agents' time, and achieving strong business results, Infobip added new features and improvements to Conversations in August 2020:

• The ability for businesses to automate their contact center processes and reduce manual work by setting up automated messages based on a specific event. This is especially helpful in situations when a customer stops replying during an ongoing conversation. Using the new feature, they can send automatic replies to customers who haven’t replied for a specific period of time
• New customer feedback feature where businesses can automatically assign a Survey to customers before closing a conversation – and track their scores and comments
• Once a company has collected customer feedback, they can track different metrics that show the overall performance of the calls coming into the contact center, such as rejected calls, unanswered calls, call duration, wait time etc. Businesses can download a transcript of a conversation to monitor customer-agent communication and identify areas of improvement
• Biometric authentication to improve security and customer experience while skipping old verification methods and saving customers and agents’ time
• Improvements to Live Chat’s in-app feature, widget, and agent panel to help agents deliver a more interactive experience on a company’s website or app. Businesses can set up a chatbot to send interactive buttons which improve agent workflow and automate communication. Agents can also use the sneak peek feature to see what the customer is typing in real time before they sent the message.

• In the newest release, it will also be possible for an agent to call the user directly from a chat conversation, where needed

When the global pandemic hit, Columbian retailer Flamingo’s call center experienced an increase in customer queries making it difficult to maintain the same level of customer service quality as before.

Flamingo’s agents felt overwhelmed for several reasons: 1) Many queries were the same or similar, so agents were repeating answers. 2) Voice calls were time consuming and limited the number of customers an agent could help in a day, since they could only help one at a time. 3) Agents found it difficult to understand the extent of customers’ needs in a short amount of time. 4) Spending most of the workday on repetitive queries took agents’ focus away from more complex queries. All these challenges resulted in negative customer feedback due to poor response time.

By implementing Conversations, Flamingo agents received a single view solution that gave them access to ongoing conversations and complete chat history, along with customer details – such as purchase history.

Flamingo’s first step was to offload simple queries from agents by setting up a WhatsApp keyword chatbot that provides instant responses to queries pertaining to financial services and payment arrangements. In cases where a customer can’t find the answers they’re looking for when chatting with the chatbot, they get redirected to a live agent for further assistance. Customers can also complete their purchase directly through chat using payment links or links to Flamingo’s eCommerce site.

Flamingo re-employed its brick and mortar employees as remote agents – growing its contact center from 8 to 28 agent. The results speak for themselves:

• The retailer’s conversion rate for online sales, which used to be 2%, grew to 13%
• The company’s NPS score grew 21% in April and an additional 39% in June
• Ratings from their customer surveys used to be 1 to 3 stars and are now, on average, 4 or 5 stars
• Sales completed through Conversations resulted in up to 2% of total sales nationwide

At present, Infobip processes approximately 10 billion interactions monthly and works with over 10,000 unique B2B customers worldwide. In June this year, Infobip attained a ‘Best’ rating in vendor performance for A2P SMS, achieving the top position in Tier 1 vendor performance for Rocco’s annual benchmarking report which surveys 353 mobile operators and 315 enterprises worldwide.

These results encourage Infobip to keep pushing and innovating, bringing the best solutions to operators and brands across the world. It’s testament to its efforts to become a pure engineering powerhouse as it looks to onboard 2,000 more engineers in 2021.

There is also no better way to show positive results or reception than via customer testimonials: “Conversations helped us automate our appointment scheduling process with a chatbot on our customers’ preferred channel – WhatsApp. Now, our customers receive fast, simple support and are routed to an agent at their chosen salon location. As a result, our agents deliver personalized customer experiences that increase sales and customer loyalty.

“We have zero window shoppers. We are very lucky to know all our customers personally by name, know what their last treatment was, and what their preferences are – and Conversations helps us show them that we care!” - Dipika Mundhara, Assisstant Manager – Digital Marketing, Enrich

“Infobip’s Conversations solution helped us grow our business during the global pandemic. Our customers are satisfied with the fast and convenient customer service, and our agents are happy they have a user-friendly and easy-to-onboard solution. We are excited to add more channels for customer communication in the future after the great results derived from our WhatsApp chatbot.” - Claudia Constanza Wilches, IT and Supply Manager, Flamingo

https://www.infobip.com/products/conversations