Consumers choose WhatsApp: Telviva helps your business integrate it seamlessly

As technology evolves and customers need to communicate in real time with self-service options, businesses are required to evolve with paradigm shifts to support customers on the channel of their choice.

Looking at these shifts, data — in SA and globally — has shown that 70% of customers not only want the businesses that they engage with to support them on the channel of their choice, but also enable them to do self-service at their convenience.

If we look at recent statistics, WhatsApp has been at the forefront globally as the channel that many consumers prefer to engage with — from general enquiries on services or products to frequently asked questions, but also to have the option to communicate with a human agent when required, be that on voice or any text-based channels. The “digital when you want it and human when you need it” strategy in the consumer space still holds true. 

Therefore, in order for organisations to enable consumers to be able to communicate on all the channels of their choice and engage with self-service options at any time of the day (looking at the consumer convenience factor), they are required to enhance their communication offerings to meet their consumers’ needs.

The enablement of additional channels to support consumer requirements does however come with its own set of challenges that many businesses face today: the absence of a unified communication strategy to prevent siloed communications and the lack of automation in a unified environment.

Of course, technology has evolved to the point where businesses no longer need to suffer this fate. The Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) innovations offered by Telviva, a market leader in cloud-based business communications, are a case in point.

Telviva One Premium customers are already able to support their consumers through a single unified communications platform that’s voice, video, WhatsApp, web chat, customer relationship management integration and automation ready. 

Let’s take a closer look at how this plays out in practice. Intercape is a bus company that transports people around SA and beyond. In this industry, customer experience and customer service is key. Intercape knew that to achieve a good customer experience, it needed high-quality voice communications for its call centre, as well as a well-thought-out interactive voice response system that ensures calls are routed to the right people.

However, as with all industries, Intercape knew that while communication was traditionally almost entirely telephonic, this would no longer be the case as customers’ choices evolved. Most people use WhatsApp today. It has gone mainstream as a messaging platform and, as we know, the rate at which companies are incorporating it is increasing. Intercape made the important and successful decision to integrate WhatsApp into its business as a communication channel.

Intercape has seen a 200% year-on-year growth in the use of WhatsApp and web chat, while the volume of voice calls has declined. In terms of efficiency, chat engagements reduce the burden on call centre employees, with a single agent able to attend to four chats simultaneously, as opposed to telephonic queries, where agents can only service a single caller at a time. As a result, when looking at chat interactions, the company has seen an improvement in turnaround speed for resolution, while a searchable historical record of communications has helped in providing a more personalised service.

Intercape, working with Telviva, knew that WhatsApp messaging should not be run in isolation and needs to be used through a platform that brings together multiple communications channels into a single platform so that they can be used efficiently. Leveraging Telviva’s UCaaS capabilities, Intercape has been able to give its customer-facing teams a single, user-friendly view of all the channels on a browser that they can access anywhere, on any device, for a more authentic, immediate customer experience.

Understood in the context of real-world application, Telviva’s UCaaS technology creates efficient digital customer journeys with minimised manual intervention, which, in turn, frees up agents for complex interactions. As Telviva customers such as Intercape can attest, this level of customer experience can be scaled to the tune of many thousands of interactions.

Is your business interested in enjoying the benefits of enriched customer communication by integrating WhatsApp seamlessly and simply into a rich unified communications platform, and then leveraging the power of automation? Contact Telviva to find out how to get started.

• About the author: Martie de Beer is a CCaaS executive at Telviva.

This article was sponsored by Telviva.