In the third part of her series, Angie Bell outlines context-driven channel selection, message routing and conversations.

This is the final instalment of Angie Bell’s ‘Blueprint for Mobile Messaging’ series. Read part one and part two »

Any information you learn about your customer and their transactions can help you decide how to best reach out to them.

Context-driven channel selection

Contextual information influences the channel you use to reach a customer. For instance, if a person started a transaction on a mobile app, it may be best to use in-app chat or push notifications to reach that customer. Or if you’re sending a notification to request confirmation of suspicious activity on an account, you probably want a fast, reliable notification like SMS.

Context-driven channel selection increases your customer response rate and engagement level, while saving your business the effort of messaging customers on multiple channels.

Context-driven messaging routing

After you choose the right channel, you can continue to use context to route messages to your customers. For example, consider a real estate business. If messaging is built into the CRM, a lead can be distributed instantly to the right agent – the one responsible for the home, available at the right time, or who speaks the same language as the buyer. The business can prioritise and determine which criteria is most ideal, factor in timing, and route the message accordingly.

This way, agents receive incoming messages with the context of who is calling and what property they’re interested in. Then the agent can instantly communicate with the buyer using in-app chat or another messaging channel, like Facebook Messenger or SMS, if the buyer is no longer in the app.

Context-driven conversation

When designing your chat experience, you can adopt strategies that will add context to your customer conversations to improve the customer and agent experience. Here are a few examples:

• Pass context along: Programmable messaging APIs allow your customers and agents to interact more fully, using the information at hand. On your agents’ side, they’ll see details about customers’ recent transactions and activity within your app. When a customer is interested in a product, they can drag it into the chat, giving the agent all the data related to that product. This context informs both sides and makes the communication much more effective.
• Single agent interface: By embedding messaging and other communication modes (voice or video, for example) into the CRM browser window, the agent has a single interface for all customer interactions. This creates a strong tie between communication and CRM. Best of all, agents can still communicate on their customers’ preferred messaging interface.
• Messaging in the app: Usually, when customers need to communicate with a representative, they are directed from the app to a different phone or messaging screen. By embedding communication into the mobile app instead, customers can message support agents without ever leaving the app experience.
• Final thoughts: Integrating mobile messaging into the context of customer conversations allows you to reach your customers the way they want to be reached. It provides a memorable customer experience, which can serve as a competitive advantage in the long run.

Angie Bell is director, Asia Pacific at Twilio.

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Further reading

• Blueprint for Mobile Messaging part one: the four pillars of a great customer messaging experience »
• Blueprint for Mobile Messaging part two: which mobile messaging interface should your business use? »

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