The report features interviews from more than two dozen customer experience product, sales, and marketing leaders from companies like Google, Twitter, Hootsuite, Birchbox, to name a few.
“This year will be the year of connecting conversations in the enterprise,” said Warren Levitan, vice president of conversational business at Zendesk. “We are seeing businesses embrace messaging as a shared platform for customer engagement, allowing them to truly unify sales, marketing and service interactions for the first time. This is a massive step toward putting customers at the centre of our businesses.”
According to the report:
WhatsApp is the leading chat app in 112 countries, up from 104 last year. WeChat remains ubiquitous in China, while Korea’s KakaoTalk, Japan’s LINE, and Eastern Europe-oriented Viber retain their regional strongholds.
Throughout 2019, as the number of WhatsApp Business API’s Zendesk saw the number of messages on its Sunshine Conversations platform grow by more than 3,000%.
Smart speakers and voice assistants are key pieces of the conversational revolution, with Amazon and Google emerging as leaders in the space, followed by Alibaba, Baidu, and Xiaomi top in the Chinese market.
7 out of 10 people have ‘chatbot fatigue’ but businesses continue to deploy bots across marketing, sales, and support, with a ‘distinctly human touch’.
Nearly half of finance and insurance businesses have embraced bots for everything from lead generation to customer support.
Business view messaging as ‘fast, personal, convenient, and secure’’.
Latin America, where WhatsApp is top, is embracing conversational business faster than other regions, with Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, and Africa following closely
Messaging apps have the highest customer satisfaction rating of any channel, with a CSAT of 98%.
