Reduce Cost Per Engagement, Increase Return on Investment

Facebook research has uncovered that more than 70% of users want to use Messenger for customer service while 59% use it to message businesses for making purchases

George Malim

Reducing cost per engagement, boosting ROI

Social media now counts approximately 3.96 billion active users, which is about 55% of the world’s population and this growth continues undimmed. WhatsApp has two billion monthly active users while Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion. Other social media channels also have vast user bases and dominate in specific geographies. It’s therefore clear that users are very familiar with social channels and organisations need to provide them with the choice of how they would like to engage with them.

“Initially, social channels were set up more for personal use, but that has changed over the years,” said Meenal Prasad, the director and head of product management at SAP Digital Interconnect. “Millennials are very comfortable with interacting with brands via social channels, and 64% of people across all age groups would rather message a business than call or email.”

Prasad points out that Facebook research has uncovered that more than 70% of users want to use Messenger for customer service while 59% use it to message businesses for making purchases. “Social channels offer a much more interactive, two-way conversation that users are looking for when they engage with businesses, and it is less about receiving just one-way broadcast notifications,” she added.

[caption id="attachment_30736" align="alignright" width="200"] Meenal Prasad[/caption]

SAP Digital Interconnect has developed its Social Channels 365 offering to bring all of the different channels together in a single API which simplifies the process of integrating the multitude of social channels for a brand. “Most social channel APIs are available, but it is complex to integrate these into systems and applications, and requires developers to look up and conform to all their different specifications, authentication and security requirements,” Prasad explained. “Our offering brings together multiple channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, Viber, Telegram and others, and we continue to add channels as they become prevalent in markets.”

“For enterprises, not only does this one-time integration give you access to the different channels, it also means a smaller configuration charge and quicker activation,” she added. “There’s also the ability for brands to connect this back to their own apps and have a single view of the customer across different engagement channels like SMS, social media or even the brands’ own mobile apps.”

[caption id="attachment_30737" align="alignleft" width="170"] Marut Gaonkar[/caption]

A further benefit is that social channels offer very accurate delivery and read receipts which helps ensure that messages are delivered promptly, reliably and opened, and therefore have a better likelihood of generating a response from customers. “The capability to offer read and deliver receipts means a brand can decide to fail-over to a channel like SMS if they need an urgent response, or if they want to make sure that a customer has received and read a high priority message thus improving their customer engagement metrics,” said Marut Gaonkar, a senior product manager at SAP Digital Interconnect. “The experience is also much better for the user because in addition to receiving messages on different channels, they can also send and receive messages with multimedia content such as audio, video, images and documents. This enhances user experience as brands can now provide enhanced notifications, updates, and superior support or service to their users.”

“For brands, the ease of integration of the API is an important criteria and makes connecting, irrespective of which social media channel, a lot quicker and easier because we have abstracted away all the integration work,” he added.

“For users, it’s as easy as using the channels themselves, it’s up to them which channel they choose to use”

Organisations also benefit. “There’s a reduced cost of engagement compared to SMS and voice because most social channels are free to the business as well as to end users, especially if a user initiates the interaction,” Prasad said. “It’s another key advantage of the offering and most importantly, by providing customers the choice of channel that they would like to use to engage with them, enterprises will be enabling a much better brand experience.”

To know more, visit SAP.

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