Well-managed customer communication is essential for business success.
Today, companies are closer to their customers than ever before. Customer relationship management is a must-have for every business; without it, a business can’t stand the market competition. If your company doesn’t establish a connection with clients, they simply don’t know about your brand and your services.
To manage customer communication, companies use various online communication tools. Our business should have modern products for sales, marketing and support to connect with customers and grow faster. Web chat is an active tool for enabling users receive online help from a product team in case they have some queries or inquiries. But a chat platform alone can’t provide complete customer support, which is why businesses need customer messaging platforms.
Many businesses go by customer messaging apps because of the numerous benefits and features it provides. There are many platforms that are widely used by big companies, Intercom being one among them. However, many Intercom users remarks that the platform is half-baked and charges too much. Now the question is why we have only very few competitors for Customer Messaging App in the market? This is the topic that I want to discuss today and pull your attention to.
What Does Customer Web Messaging Platform Have To Do With Business?
Customer messaging app is software developed for messaging/chatting within web applications. Such web apps allow a company’s employees to create profiles that is made visible to both by colleagues and by the customers with whom they’re chatting. Employees can even share emojis or GIFs.
For businesses, Customer Messaging Platforms like Intercom provides three main blocks each covering one specific activity.
- The first block is a live chat block where product teams can communicate with customers in real time.
- The second block is focused on user onboarding. It includes automated email and pop-up systems to keep users interested. Such auto-popup chat windows target converting the website visitors into customers.
- The third block allows you to create useful articles that answers the most frequently asked questions and publish them to a public platform.
The newest versions of web messaging platforms unify customer conversations across varied channels including email, mobile apps, and the Facebook messaging platform.
How To Create An Effective Customer Web Messaging Platform?
If you want to create an effective customer messaging platform, you need to consider all of strengths of popular customer messaging app like Intercom. It would be a good idea to commence with a Minimum Viable Product or MVP. Let’s see what the key features of a customer messaging platform MVP are.
1.Live chat tools– Live chat provides fast and personalized communication. It helps to capture leads and convert them into real clients. Besides, it’s the better way for a product team to deliver customer support by answering users’ queries in real time. The main features in it comprise file sharing, typing indication, pre-defined responses, chat tags, message delivery status, unlimited chat history, last message correction/deletion, waiting message, short and long notifications etc.
2.Customization options – You should be able to change the chat color, texts, logo, agent avatars, and to customize the look and feel of the chat widget (icon, tab, button).
3.Auto message triggers– You should be able to set triggers and send auto messages based on specific criteria.
4.Proactive messages – such messages let you start talking to visitors via chat or email. They can be one-off or automatically triggered by actions initiated by any customer.
5.Tracking and analytics– you should be able to keep track of customers’ actions on your site and adjust your marketing strategy. User data tracking helps to identify who’s visiting your website. It can also show where your users come from, the data they access on their first visit, and their activity on your site.
6.Email features– Manual and automated emails are made possible in it for following up, onboarding, marketing campaigns, and promotional content. Answer templates are also embedded into customer messaging app so the product support team can easily understand the query and reply to customer inquiries.
7.Integration with your product. An option to merge customer support platform with your own website or app and automate your activities.
8.Active offline mode – When your agents are not available or online, your live chat should continue functioning, gathering customers’ details and accepting incoming messages. It would be perfect if your product team could provide customer support 24 hours a day, but to do so you would need to hire a night shift, where big cost is involved. An automated messaging system is the right panacea for this problem as it doesn’t let users wait for your answer and decreases the chances of losing leads.
9.Ticketing features- This feature allows you to better your support on customer requests effectively, and let your customers track the ticket status and collect the customer ratingfor every support experience.
10.Real-time notification system: Notifications are an important part of any platform and application that involves communication. A notification system should work for both sides—for the product team and for customers. The product team needs notifications, so they can respond to their customers as soon as possible.
How To Compete With A Customer Web Messaging Platform Like Intercom?
If you have in mind to develop a product that competes with customer web messaging platform like Intercom, you’ll need to learn from Intercom’s mistakes. Based on evaluations from Intercom users, the most frequent complaints are as depicted below. Let’s also see what solutions you can provide for each problem.
Problem 1. Complicated interface: Many users find the Intercom interface complicated and say that it takes too much time to figure out how it works. Moreover, a complex interface slows down the customer interest and decreases the effectiveness of the tool.
Solution: The user interface need to be simple and user-friendly that will suit to any users regardless of the grade of their technical knowledge. When people use a product for the first time, it’s important to help them learn how to interact with it.
Problem 2. Mobile-friendliness: Many users comment that they find it difficult to use the Intercom mobile app because it is often hangs in sending or receiving messages and performs slowly. This problem may be connected to complicated functionality and few other features that Intercom provides.
Solution: Smartphone users contribute to businesses in the current world. So, it’s vital to create a mobile-friendly customer messaging platform. We need to ensure that your live chat looks and works efficiently on mobile devices since many users prefer accessing the web through their smartphones. Moreover, your platform’s interface should be quick in response so that your customers can answer their leads from anywhere.
Problem 3. Poor performance: An all-in-one customer web messaging platform is a great step which is why thousands of companies use customer messaging app services. The great competitor, Intercom, focuses mainly on quantity rather than quality of features. The problem is obvious— but once they sign up, they receive a tool with poor performance and bugs.
Solution: Reduce the number of features and create an effective tool with a few useful features. This way users will be able to perform certain tasks much faster and more efficiently.
Are you looking for Web Messaging App Development Company in India?
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Then this is the right time to contact us .You can reach out to us at [email protected] or you can call us +91 63610 54076. We’re sure we can take to the next level!
