Have you ever stopped to think about how much of our lives we spend waiting? The average person spends 235 days waiting in queues and 43 days on hold. Engaging with businesses is such a core element of our day-to-day lives, so much so that we spend significant time and effort trying to do just that. As a result, our attention is often stripped away from the things that really matter in life.
So, this begs the question: why not make it easy for your customers to connect and start a dialogue in their own time, where they already are — at the moment of search and discovery? This is where Google’s Business Messages comes in.
The rise of conversational commerce
As the length of time spent waiting grows longer, your customers’ patience grows shorter. Consumer behavior has shifted towards asynchronous conversational messaging channels like Google’s Business Messages — a trend now known as “Conversational Commerce”. COVID-19 has only acted as an accelerant to this trend. Although 60% of smartphone users have historically contacted businesses using the “Click to Call” entry point on Google Search, 79% of consumers prefer to talk to businesses using conversational messaging channels compared to legacy support channels like phone calling.
By combining the entry points of Google Maps and Search, businesses of all sizes can offer multiple low-barrier, high-intent touchpoints at key moments in your customer journey. With a 92% share of global mobile search volume, 70,000 search queries every second, and the average human making 4 search queries every day, Google is undoubtedly where your customers are digitally present, right now.
On top of that, your customers are actively transacting online, with 75% of shoppers using a Google product (including Search and Maps) in the past week to help with their shopping. By using Business Messages to organically reduce call volumes and drive rich, asynchronous messaging experiences, you can delight customers and boost sales, loyalty, and customer satisfaction. This is what makes Business Messages such a powerful communication channel to add to your omnichannel strategy using MessageBird.
But, what makes Google’s Business Messages unique?
On the surface, Business Messages conversations take place in a standard Live Chat environment. Give your customers a warm welcome from a digital agent, gracefully handover conversations to your human support agents, and trigger a CSAT survey at the end of the conversation.
However, you’ll quickly discover that there’s more to the conversation.
Business Messages is supercharged by Google’s rich media, authentication, and personalization capabilities. Suggested actions, smart automation, and assistive messaging provide immediate answers for routine questions. Product carousels help guide your customers through the conversation to exactly what they want. Built-in Google authentication enables your team to verify who they're talking to from the first message and remembers them for 30 days if and when they return to pick up where they left off. Ultimately, Business Messages creates delightful and memorable end-to-end experiences that lead to happier customers and help your brand stand out from the rest.
More channels, more problems?
With another low-barrier touchpoint comes more conversation volume and therefore, additional overhead for your support team. Fragmented communication channels with a non-unified strategy will often result in inconsistent customer experiences across channels.
This is the problem we solve.
By combining Google’s Business Messages with Bird’s omnichannel platform, your business can seamlessly unify all of your communication channels, no matter how many, and create a consistent messaging experience that delights.
With Bird, the choice is yours.
You can use Google’s Business Messages as a channel in Flows to design smart automation flows that can route conversations to the right places, answer frequently asked questions with FAQ Bot, create support tickets in Inbox. Alternatively, you can programmatically enable two-way conversations over any channel directly using the Conversations API.
You can do all of this in just a matter of minutes with Bird.
Don't force your customers to come to you. Go to where they are and give them back entire days of their lives with Google’s Business Messages and Bird.