How co-creation through partnerships enables conversational experiences

Co-creation through partnership has become a driver in accelerated business growth and market adoption.

In business communication, brands can benefit from partnerships between communication platforms, telecoms, and OTT providers which enable them to communicate with their customers in the way they choose. Increased customer satisfaction, reduced costs, and greater long-term success are only some of the benefits brands can experience when using these combined services.

An example of this is our three-way partnership with Croatian Telecom and Rakuten Viber. Together, we create new paths for businesses to connect with customers through conversations.

Read on to learn how co-creating through partnerships can make meeting customer demand and delivering value easy with rewarding results.

Co-creation refers to more than one business combining its services to offer a new solution that fills a gap in the market. In other words, businesses that have a similar customer base join forces to resolve common pain points in a fast, economical way.

Infobip, Croatian Telecom, and Rakuten Viber together enable brands to talk to customers in any way they choose – building conversational experiences in the spaces they prefer. Each of us is an expert in our area, doing what we’re best in:

When you put this together, we’re able to provide a new way for brands to communicate with customers on the market.

This can be to onboard, sell, and support customers – or any other type of interaction that takes place between discovery and retention. When pieced together, these types of interactions create a conversational experience – a natural way for brands and customers to chat and conduct business.

Customers today want one-to-one communication with their favorite brands. The significant impact of recent global events has shaped a new world for business-to-consumer communication. Face-to-face interactions have decreased, and customers expect access to brands when they want, how they want, and as quickly as they want. We know that this is the key to building a long-term strategy with the customer and businesses.

Today, enabling customers to purchase products or services in the same space they receive support is important. Brands that want to build loyalty, increase conversions, and improve customer satisfaction in the long term should leverage messaging apps to sell to, market to, and serve customers all in one place.

When we refer to conversational experience, we’re referring to conversational marketing, conversational support, and even conversational commerce. Messaging apps, such as Viber, enable these experiences to take place through real-time communication, unique features, and a wide range of functionalities.

When used through an omnichannel communications platform and reliable telecom infrastructure, interactions on these channels are fast and engaging. Enterprises can also combine them with other channels to set up failover options and more use cases.

Conversational messaging has peaked everywhere – and it has become key in every market and vertical, and in every part of the world. Messaging apps that enable these experiences can be used for different interactions and in different ways depending on the nature of your business.

Logistics companies, for example, can use Viber to send important delivery information or enable customers to change their delivery address.

DPD is a good example. The transportation and logistics company wanted to increase its first-delivery rate, so they decided to implement Viber with SMS failover. This enabled them to share rich media, create a branded profile, access message delivered and seen statuses, as well as reduce message costs. As a result, DPD saw a 20% cost reduction, increased customer satisfaction, and decreased contact center workload.

Banks, on the other hand, choose to deliver card PINs or set up marketing campaigns on the channel. While eHealth is a new industry that has picked up pace on Viber by enabling customers to schedule, cancel, or change their appointments – all through a single conversation.

In our recent report, we even found that 18% of retail and eCommerce brands use Viber in their omnichannel approach alongside SMS to create end-to-end shopping experiences.

The doubled increase in Viber interactions among B2B platforms also shows us these brands are recognizing the importance of adding such digital channels and experiences to their existing offerings.

For many, the future is already here. We believe the future is omnichannel – and we expect it will continue to expand with artificial intelligence (AI) becoming a part of the bigger picture as well.

Through omnichannel cloud communications, we’re building a better understanding of our customers. Smart technology such as chatbots and AI enables us to understand their communication preferences, their behaviors, where they like to talk with brands, when they like to talk with brands, what channels they like to choose, and so on.

The future of customer communication will be a mix of different channels such as SMS, Voice, and chat apps like Viber, which brands will be combining to offer the best customer experience possible.

Co-creation will enable these experiences to happen. Independent software vendors (ISVs) that want to deliver value to customers should partner with leaders in other spaces to build a growth stack that meets market demand.