90% of businesses use WhatsApp for customer support
While chat apps have become effective conversational channels that span the entire customer journey, service and support messages account for the sharpest increase in use among brands, according to research from Infobip.
The Vodnjan, Croatia-based cloud communications provider analyzed more than 473 billion digital communications interactions on its platform in 2023 between businesses and consumers to produce its report, Messaging Trends 2024.
Meta-owned WhatsApp may continue to dominate in terms of messaging apps, but Infobip’s data showed others are slowly gaining traction among brands and consumers.
For instance, in 2022 WhatsApp accounted for 99 per cent of support messages on Infobip. Telegram, Line, Apple Messages for Business and Viber are all being used more widely, the company said. Even Facebook Messenger, which like WhatsApp is also owned by Meta, saw an increase in usage of more than 540 per cent.
Overall, more than 62 per cent of those using Infobip are supporting two different channels, while just over 13 per cent are supporting three. Only two per cent are supporting four different conversational channels.
Despite higher costs than chat apps, a quarter of customers that use multiple channels are combining SMS with WhatsApps, the report added.
“Brands that can immediately engage with customers that reach out to them have an automatic advantage over those that rely on traditional forms of communications that are limited to office hours only,” the report’s authors wrote. “Chat apps are ideally suited as their native features complement and enrich person-to-person communication with pictures, videos, emojis and stickers, or switching to a video chat.”
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Infobip’s research may only be drawing upon its own data, but it provides a helpful look at where chat apps are being woven into customer experience strategies.
What this report doesn’t do is acknowledge the ongoing interest in the original conversational support platform: voice calls. Look through the archives and you’ll see one survey after another where consumers make it clear they continue to prefer and expect brands to let them speak to them directly.
One of the trends Infobip pointed out is the potential to combine chat apps with generative artificial intelligence (AI), where brands could train the tools on their documentation and knowledge base. This could work well for many support scenarios, provided the ability to escalate to a human agent is easy and quick.
Although this report is gated, the comprehensive landing page includes most of the data you’d likely want to explore. This includes vertical market use cases, customer case studies and even some regional data.
This research could be helpful to a customer experience (CX) leader looking to make a business case for extending support capabilities to a chat app for the first time. If so, it’s well worth looking at the other stages of the journey where chat apps can provide value to an experience, including marketing and purchasing.
