Chapter 2
Connect where and when it matters
Customers are everywhere, and they expect businesses to be everywhere, too. Our survey indicates businesses are listening. They already use a wide range of channels to engage with their customers.
Chapter 2
Customers are everywhere, and they expect businesses to be everywhere, too. Our survey indicates businesses are listening. They already use a wide range of channels to engage with their customers.
According to our findings, email is by far the most widely used business communication channel, followed by SMS and messaging channels like Instagram or Facebook Messenger.
When we asked customers about their preferred channel to contact companies, email was a clear winner at 40%, followed by phone calls (23%) and SMS (22%).
Addressing customers’ communication preferences to meet them on their own terms throughout their entire journey is the key to delivering experiences that feel valuable and cohesive and foster lasting connections.
Each channel brings its own unique benefits to your communication strategy, but only if you use it with the right customers, and for the right purposes.
So, let’s dive deeper into channel usage and preferences at different stages of the customer journey.
When they’ve first learned about a company and have just signed up for information online, how do consumers want that company to communicate with them?
As our survey found, email is consumers’ preferred individual channel for pre-purchase communications such as promotional offers and educational content, scoring at 36%.
SMS (18%) and social media feeds (15%) were the next most popular channels.
As you can see on the chart, businesses’ communication habits are quite aligned with consumer preferences.
But when combining consumers’ votes for mobile messaging channels as a whole, they were a clear favorite: 43% of consumers and 54% of businesses ranked messaging as their top choice for pre-purchase communications. It’s also quite clear that rich messaging channels like MMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Messenger API for Instagram, and Apple Messages for Business are growing in popularity, as they accounted for 25% of consumers’ votes.
What about businesses? They’re leading the way toward more innovative communication experiences on the channels customers use. A total of 36% of the companies we surveyed said they use rich messaging channels to interact with new subscribers.
On average, consumers have a preference for messaging channels for communications surrounding a purchase or a booking such as confirmations, verification codes, invoices and receipts, or shipping confirmations. Messaging channels were noticeably more popular for identity verification and delivery notifications.
Still, an average 37% of consumers prefer email at this stage of their journey, particularly for invoices and receipts.
Phone calls also play an important role in the purchase experience, earning just under 17% of consumers’ votes for order and booking confirmations and nearly 16% for identity verification.
Consumers want to know their information is secure and their purchase is being taken care of — and they want to know it fast. Get this right and you’ll not only deliver a seamless purchase experience, but also build long-term trust in your brand and deepen customer connections.
For security-related communications, consumers clearly appreciate the speed and immediacy of messaging channels and phone calls.
For this type of communications, email and messaging channels are equally popular with existing customers, both reaching scores between 39% and 40%.
For customer service, messaging channels were a clear winner compared to email (38% vs. 29%).
This is also where phone calls really shine: Nearly 20% of people ranked it as their top channel for customer care.
Building meaningful connections with your audience requires harnessing the unique strengths of the channels they use to enhance every step of their journey. This is how you’ll meet their immediate needs, but also build positive, long-term relationships.
Consumers and businesses agree: Despite the growth of conversational messaging use cases, email remains a key pillar of the customer experience.
Over 91% of businesses use it to reach their customers and 85% of consumers check their email inboxes at least twice a day.
According to consumers, email provides the biggest benefits to their experience when used for:
of businesses integrate messaging channels in CRM systems
directly within their website or app
in e-commerce platforms
in marketing automation platforms
in ERP systems
The businesses we surveyed are well aware of the importance of mobile messaging channels.
Over 41% are planning to add one or more messaging channels to their communications mix in 2024.
And as you can see, many have already integrated them into their systems:
This applies to use cases spanning the entire customer journey, from identity verification to notifications and alerts, promotional offers, two-way interactions, and much more.
By combining traditional communication channels like email and SMS with newer, richer ones, you’ll cater to the preferences of a diverse, broader audience while setting your brand apart for use cases that require something extra.
RCS adoption — driven by the channel’s rich media, video, and conversational features as well as the granular event data available for campaign optimization — will have the biggest impact to customer experience strategies and direct-to-consumer communications since the invention of email.
You’ve been hearing this for years, and it’s still true: Consumers expect real-time, valuable interactions with businesses.
Giving your customers the opportunity to reply to your messages and initiate conversations on the channels they use with family and friends isn’t only a surefire way to enhance their experience. When done right, it can be a powerful sales channel, too.
Be prepared to see more and more mobile messaging interactions take place on rich channels in the near future. Over 40% of the businesses we surveyed plan to embrace at least one rich messaging channel this year, and this is just the beginning.
Whether it’s WhatsApp, Viber, Rich Communication Services (RCS), or Apple Messages for Business, rich messaging is perfect for creating immersive customer experiences. It also offers better security with branded messages and verified sender IDs — meaning reduced risks of spam or smishing.
From this fall, RCS will be supported on iOS 18. This means the current messaging experience between iPhone and Android users will get a serious upgrade.
And once Apple adopts RCS for business messaging, it could mean support for powerful features like full enterprise profiles, verified senders, read receipts, suggested reply buttons, multiple-choice carousels, and much more.
In some markets, widespread RCS adoption is already a reality and businesses across all industries are reaping the benefits of rich, interactive messaging experiences.
Customer Story
To strengthen their customer activation strategy during the crucial holiday season, French frozen food retailer Picard built an end-to-end, immersive conversational experience with RCS, allowing consumers to get inspiration and shop for holiday meals directly within the messaging channel.
With this campaign, Picard saw a 42% increase in customer engagement and over 10% more website redirections.
Now this is how you build mobile campaigns that can’t be ignored. Can holiday meal prep get any smoother? We think not.
Phone calls remain a welcome human touch in a world that’s becoming more technology driven with every passing day. Forty percent of businesses rate phone calls as one of their top channels for receiving customer feedback, and over 23% of consumers say it’s their favorite channel to reach out to companies.
And don’t believe phone calls are falling behind when it comes to innovation. Recent advancements in voice technology are making phone calls more engaging and secure than ever. For instance, branded calling allows businesses to display their company information when they reach out to customers.
In addition to giving brands control over their branding, it also helps tackle voice phishing and maintain trust in voice communications by assuring consumers that they’re interacting with a legit company.
Security is a critical ingredient to a lasting customer relationship, and businesses need to make every step of the customer journey feel safe and secure. How?
Use branded, verified communication channels. Let customers switch from a chatbot to a human agent. Keep identity verification quick and easy, but make it a visible part of the customer experience.
And of course, work with technology partners who put data protection and security at the forefront of everything they do.
