Exploring the Expansive World of Business Messaging
When it comes to business messaging technology, the options are as varied as they are vast. Industry giants like Google, Apple, and Meta have thrown their hats into the ring, alongside CRM and customer service specialists such as Zoho, Twilio, and Zendesk. Numerous innovative startups also stake their claim as “best-of-breed” in this competitive space, and even the likes of Telegram have embraced business messaging functionalities.
Recently, Sendbird, a seasoned player with an 11-year tenure in the market, unveiled its latest offering. Sendbird’s in-app messaging capabilities are favored by a myriad of midsized companies. Moreover, it boasts a roster of large enterprises within the healthcare sector—including notable names such as Walgreens, Noom, and WeightWatchers—among its 4,000 clients. The platform’s reach extends further into the realms of banking, financial services, and even underpins the connectivity of Match Group’s dating applications.
The core of Sendbird’s offering lies in its back-end control center, designed to streamline the automation of customer communication workflows. This applies to both individual and mass messaging scenarios. Additional features of the platform boast omnichannel campaign templates and sophisticated push notification management, which are tailored according to customer preferences or triggered by specific customer actions.
AI Merges Seamlessly with Business Messaging Solutions
Business messaging encompasses an array of communication types, from appointment reminders to delivery updates, promotional offers, and alerts about scheduling changes, such as those pesky flight delays. Despite the diversity, these communications share a common need for a robust back-end system capable of discerning the most appropriate message to dispatch, the right channel to use, and the optimal timing for each interaction.
Sendbird zeroes in on in-app messaging as the pivotal element of its business communication strategy, with the capacity to extend its reach to SMS and popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat if necessary. Its “channel sequencing” feature smartly prioritizes the most cost-effective and impactful channels, avoiding the scattergun approach of bombarding every available medium.
With a unified API, Sendbird also facilitates the integration of its data streams into broader customer data platforms. The company’s recent launch of an AI-powered chatbot complements its messaging infrastructure, consuming vast amounts of customer service, sales, and marketing data. Sendbird’s CEO, John S. Kim, emphasizes their agnosticism towards large language models (LLMs), focusing instead on enabling customers to leverage these AI tools rather than creating proprietary ones. “We’re not bringing the brains to you—we have partnered with all the brains,” Kim remarks, underlining the company’s commitment to empowering clients to operationalize AI effectively.
In-App Messaging: The Rising Star of Customer Engagement
The tightening of global privacy regulations, particularly concerning email and SMS, is prompting companies to pivot towards in-app business messaging solutions from providers like Sendbird, Airship, and Pendo. In this evolving landscape, SMS regulations, which can vary significantly across regions, dictate everything from permissible text times to content restrictions. In-app messaging, however, offers a solution that elegantly navigates these compliance hurdles while simultaneously enriching first-party data without reliance on intermediaries such as Meta or Google. Michael Fauscette, the founder of Arion Research, notes the additional benefit of enhancing a company’s app, often a challenging task, with in-app messaging functionalities.
One of the digital culture challenges companies face is the growing consumer aversion to unsolicited messages from overzealous marketers. In trying to stand out, many businesses become lost in the noise, leaving consumers overwhelmed and often opting to block texts and emails. Fauscette’s research, which surveyed 1,200 consumers for Sendbird, unveiled an unexpected insight: it’s the millennials and Gen Z, not baby boomers, who are increasingly weary of text message inundation, craving alternative, less intrusive communication methods.
Article contributed by Don Fluckinger, a senior news writer at TechTarget Editorial, specializing in customer experience, digital experience management, and end-user computing. For tips, email Don Fluckinger.
