Messaging continues to be a growing communications medium. That goes for features and functionality that boost engagement in a given social app, as well as business-facing tools to converse with customers. The latter is the longstanding but still rapidly morphing area of “conversational commerce.”
The latest company to join the conversational commerce trend is Reputation (formerly Reputation.com). It launched a new feature this week that makes it easier for business customers to directly communicate with their customers on various platforms. This makes it a unifying layer for cross-platform messaging.
More specifically, the feature known simply as Messaging will let Reputation’s SMB customers organize multiple messaging channels from a central inbox. At launch, it’s limited to Facebook Messenger and Google Business Messages, but Reputation says that Twitter DMs, WhatsApp and Instagram DMs are coming.
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Drilling Down
Drilling down on the product details, Reputation highlights the following features
Message templates: Agents can rapidly respond to commonly asked questions with a single click. The response can include Emojis, Images, and PDFs to engage and answer the customers’ questions fully.
Resolution tracking: If the customer raises a more complex issue, the agent can assign it to the appropriate team. They can track and monitor the conversation to ensure a response is given. Agents can also filter conversations to review outstanding queries.
Review requesting: Once an engagement is complete, the agent can send a review request to get instant feedback about the service or product. If completed, this extends the positive experience into a social proof point for others to see.
Chat extensions: Reputation also provides a widget for customer websites that allow organisations to enable their customers to send a text message to the Reputation inbox.
Conversation reporting: Providing a conversational tool is almost worthless without the ability to monitor its success and make improvements to staffing or responses. The reporting available measures response rates, time to respond, time to resolution, and more.
The tool is also built for multi-agent customer service operations in that agents can pick up where others left off. This includes a dashboard that features threaded messages and customer history. In this way, it brings CRM-like functionality that can help service reps get contextual info to expedite service interactions.
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Digital Natives
For reputation, the new feature is driven by ongoing customer demand and feedback. There’s also ample evidence that consumers prefer messaging to antiquated phone trees and other voice-based communication. This is especially evident among younger digital natives for whom messaging is a bodily function.
Larger messaging platforms like Facebook (Messenger, IG & WhatsApp) and Snap have amplified this demand over the past decade. Product and feature rollouts continue to stimulate demand for messaging as an all-day communication medium among friends. And that has migrated to business conversations.
Now that messaging is more of a fixture in our mobile lives, it makes sense to develop business tools that can best equip SMBs to build it into their customer service workflows. A unifying tool is likewise logical for SMBs that need simplicity. We’ll keep an eye on this particular integration to see if Reputation’s customers bite.
