02/12/2019

The Major Customer Service Fail... No One Is Talking About

Fewer than half of businesses are equipped to connect via messaging apps

Amid a challenging stretch for Facebook, it’s been perhaps the one, genuine bright spot: messaging. Heads may have turned when Zuckerberg and Co. shelled out $22 billion for WhatsApp back in 2014. But the platform has since tripled in size and now ranks as the world’s most popular mobile messaging app, with north of 1.5 billion monthly active users. Meanwhile, Facebook Messenger, the network’s homegrown app, now has more than 1.3 billion monthly active users. (Plans are already in the works to unify messaging on both platforms with Instagram, creating a seamless messaging powerhouse.)

On WhatsApp alone, 55 billion messages are now fired back and forth every day — a half-dozen or so updates daily for every person on the plant. And it’s not all emojis and foodie photos. A growing percentage of users are turning to messaging to make an end-run around that most dreaded of all consumer rituals: calling customer service.  

It’s no secret that voice calls are in decline: one in four smartphone users don’t make any traditional phone calls at all in a given week. Asking for a digits in a bar? Practically prehistoric, at least among Millennials and Gen Zs.  

Please select this link to read the complete blog post from LinkedIn.