For any business, there are three sets of people who matter the most — the prospect who is a potential customer, the existing customer who is a potential advocate, and the employee who drives these two to convert, engage, and retain.
Together, these three make businesses, products, and ideas successful.
A combination of multiple channels and tools have been used by the employee to bring the prospect and customer closer to the business — to convert and retain them. One has clearly stood out in recent times: Messaging.
Today, we think communication, we think messaging. (The average open rate for private messages is 98% when compared to emails which is 20%). The pros of messaging has been spoken about at length, its differences from live chat software have been elaborated in depth, and its success has been analyzed, measured, and applauded.
Messaging has made communication with prospects and customers personalized, proactive, and contextual.
But, it’s not perfect.
Here is the problem: As businesses, we’re most often in a long distance and a short-term relationship with our leads and users.
- We engage with them in one-off and erratic scenarios — when they visit our website and app. ?The #1 rule of building empathy and connection is being where our users are.
- We communicate via fragmented tools. ?Multiple tools give us multiple and scattered insights and a frustrated and siloed experience for our prospects and customers.
- We employ mediums that makes us and them feel like we’re miles away. ?Creating short-term, fragile relationships
Today, we’re reimagining how messaging can help you build better and closer relationships with your leads and users by introducing a suite of updates to Freshchat’s arsenal called Proximity.
Proximity in the space of business messaging
While Proximity in its literal sense means physical closeness or nearness to people, for us it’s much more than that. It means being involved and present in your prospect’s and customer’s everyday experiences as they go about their business without having to deal with the company. It also means employing suitable channels that brings the business closer to their customers for better connections and long-term relationships.
We’re reimagining business messaging in two ways:
1) Introducing a combined power of text, audio, and video, and
2) Going where leads and users are instead of bringing them to where the business is
Everything under Proximity:
#1 CoBrowsing
Text, emojis, GIFs, images, videos are great. But what if you could switch from any of these to real-time audio and video with your leads and users? CoBrowsing allows you to be on the same page as your users and engage with them via screen-sharing and audio chat.
- No downloads, installs, or plugins required
- No multiple tools required
- Give better demos, educate new users, and resolve issues faster
- Everything under one product and one dashboard
While Proximity in its literal sense means physical closeness or nearness to people, for us it’s much more than that. It means being involved and present in your prospect’s and customer’s everyday experiences as they go about their business without having to deal with the company.
#2 Facebook Messenger Integration
56% of people would rather message than call customer service. It’s time to reach people at scale on their favorite messaging app — going where they are rather than bringing them to you.
- Set up the integration in a few seconds
- Add multiple pages
- Map different pages to different team member groups
- Get insights on conversations that happen on Messenger inside Freshchat.
#3 OmniChat
Give your team members the flexibility they need to convert leads and retain users using the Chrome plugin. Allow them to take the Freshchat to any tab they are on and do everything that they can otherwise do from the inbox — assign conversations, get the context they need, reply using rich media, and resolve them.
We’re just getting started — Coming soon under Proximity:
- Use live video recordings to get all the context on visitors and users
- Connect on the messaging app used by more than 1.5bn people
- Remove language as a barrier in conversations
Give Proximity a try and tell us what you think. As always, we’re all eyes and ears!
