How to use Viber Business Messages to increase customer engagement – with examples

For many consumers, digital channels are becoming the most popular way of interacting with brands. In this blog, we explore how adding Viber Business Messages to their channel mix can help brands deliver a rich and engaging experience for customers already using the app to communicate with family and friends.

We also include three examples of companies using Viber successfully to drive demonstrable results, and our one-on-one interview with Viber’s Sales Director, Berina Tanovic.

Viber is one of the most popular messaging apps in the world with over 1 billion registered users in 190+ countries. In addition to standard features like messaging, voice and video calling, group chat and sticker packs, Viber offers enhanced messaging solutions for businesses. Chatbots, business messages, branded stickers and display ads all provide multiple opportunities for companies to engage with customers and prospects at scale.

What makes Viber such an attractive channel for business is that 63% of its user base is made up of people in the key 25 to 50 age bracket. Globally, more than 8,500 brands are already using Viber Business Messages to engage with this dynamic and affluent market and the list is growing. In 2021 alone there was a 55% increase in the number of new Viber Business Messages accounts.

According to Insider, in 2021 the number of monthly messaging app users worldwide increased by 6.1% to 3.09 billion. It is anticipated that more than three quarters of internet users worldwide will be using messaging apps by 2024.

As new communication and commerce channels challenge the need for brick-and-mortar stores, both new and established businesses are trying to figure out how to engage with customers who are now far more likely to check their message inbox than their email.

Studies have shown that the focus of B2C communication should be on experience. Specifically, the personalization of communication throughout the overall shopping journey.

It has been proven that consumers who have an emotional connection with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value. A key first step to start winning this affection is to interact with them on the channel that they prefer.

This is where Viber Business Messages can play a key role. With it, brands can communicate with customers throughout the customer journey, including:

Viber Business Messages therefore helps companies to attract, interact, transact, and stay in contact.

Brands can also keep their customers updated about the status of their orders, new bank transactions, or delivery schedules—all thanks to transactional business messages, delivered conveniently through the customers’ favorite app. And tapping into the trend of real conversations, brands can establish a dialogue with their audience. Conversational messages help increase conversions, provide around-sales customer support, build loyalty, get customer feedback, and much more.

A global leader in messaging communication, Viber has an active, payable audience around the world. It offers all business solutions a brand needs for each step of the customer journey: branded Stickers and Lenses, Viber Ads, Business Messages, and Chatbots—everything to help brands build awareness, influence consideration, drive conversion, and nurture loyalty. 

As Viber was the first messaging app to offer business messages to brands, Infobip became one of its first official and trusted partners on a mission to elevate brand-user communication. 

When used through an omnichannel communications platform, brands can set up Viber Business Messages alongside other channels such as SMS. SMS fallback enables customers who have limited internet access to receive time-sensitive messages from their favorite brands – increasing delivery rates and customer satisfaction. Businesses that work and sell online can use a customer engagement solution to decrease cart abandonment rates with personalized reminders – while reducing costs by up to 30%. 

The possibilities for brands and users are limitless, especially with Viber’s long-term vision to become a super app: a single gateway to multiple services. Super apps enable users to do more – explore products, receive updates, make purchases, seek support, and chat with brands, family, and friends – all in the same space. In other words, they enable brands to set up conversational experiences across the entire customer journey.

We sat down with Berina Tanovic, Sales Director at Rakuten Viber, to discuss the benefits of our partnership, Viber’s vision as a B2C communication channel, and the ways we aim to help brands achieve their long-term customer communication goals.  

Now that you’ve seen the benefits of Viber Business Messages, you will be keen to find out how you can start using it in your own business. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with options for any use case.

If you have a contact center and are looking to introduce live messaging and chatbot capability you can benefit from the Viber Business Messages solution through our contact solution Conversations and our chatbot building platform Answers. This combination offers a host of benefits:

Your live agents and chatbots can work in tandem to address your customers’ queries with a quick, reliable, and seamless experience. Our solution will speed up issue resolution, reduce the burden on the contact center, improve both the customer and employee experience, and become an effective tool for lead generation and sales.

Are you looking to use Viber in your customer engagement campaigns?

No problem, our Moments customer engagement solution enables you to use Viber Business Messages to create connected customer experiences covering every use case from real-time alerts to conversational marketing and nurture flows.

If your business already has development resources and you need more customization, the Viber Business Messages API can be used to do this. Incorporate rich messaging and video to create attention grabbing and engaging experiences, with a flexible pricing model that includes either pay-per-message or conversation options.

As digital channels increase in popularity, customers are choosing brands that offer conversational two-way experiences on the messaging apps they already use.

Businesses that can adapt and incorporate popular channels like Viber have an automatic advantage when creating personal brand-to-consumer connections that drive revenue growth.

To better understand how brands are using Viber in practice, let’s explore how three leading businesses in the retail, finance, and on-demand markets have incorporated Viber Business Messages into their communication strategy.

With headquarters in the Philippines and a presence in 10 countries from Southeast Asia to Australia and the UK, retailer Primer has a diverse portfolio, covering both industrial and energy efficiency products and services.

During the pandemic the company wanted to provide a safe option for customers to buy the products they needed by encouraging them to purchase online rather than in physical stores.

Viber Business Messages was key to this process. Research showed that the messaging app was heavily used by customers and provided all the tools to engage with customers in a human and empathetic way.

The results were impressive – the brand achieved a 53% code redemption conversion rate and a 401% increase in total sales.

These days customers expect to be able to interact directly with banks in a conversational way, just like they do with their favorite retail brands. People also expect quick responses to their enquiries and problems. This has required financial institutions to adapt their services to meet the expectations of modern customers.

By adopting Viber as a messaging channel, banks and other financial institutions can support instant two-way communication with customers covering all sorts of useful use-cases including:

NLB Bank in Montenegro has been a forerunner in adopting new channels for communication. Noting that Viber was one of the primary messaging apps used by their customers, and that it was able to ensure the security of data, they started to use it for both transactional and event-triggered messaging.

Retaining SMS as a failover channel, the bank used the two-way capability of Viber Business Messages to promote their “Arrange a meeting” offer – resulting in a 30% increase in meeting requests compared to previous campaigns.

By incorporating Viber into the sales process, they have also achieved a 30% increase in sales leads and 15% increase in overall sales – all attributable to the conversational experience that the app provides.

Companies in the travel, ridesharing, and logistics industries have an ongoing requirement to exchange information quickly, accurately, and easily. Instant messaging tools have become an important part of this process and can be used for all sorts of purposes:

The ridesharing company BlaBlaCar had an issue with message delivery and network problems preventing key notifications from being delivered. For example, when drivers had to cancel a trip, customers were sometimes left unaware.

After getting a multitude of requests to introduce Viber as a messaging channel, the company introduced a dual Viber Business Messages and SMS solution to communicate with both drivers and customers. This ensured that messages were still delivered if there was no data signal, and now covers booking confirmations, status updates, and last-minute ride requests.

Crucially, BlaBlaCar’s support team can now track real-time message delivery statuses and respond when required to ensure a smooth customer experience. This has resulted in: