The race towards winning the customer experience has considerably accelerated with rising competition among players around the globe and growing customer expectations. Nowadays, customers have become much more impatient than ever before as they have many other brand choices lined up, craving for their attention and eagerly promoting themselves as the best brand in town. As a result, even if a company goes to great lengths to perfect its customer journey, one bad encounter can ruin its reputation and prompt customers to try something new.

According to a survey, 86% of customers expressed their willingness to pay a premium price for a high-quality customer experience, and over 70% of them selected customer experience as a deciding factor when choosing brands. Moreover, modern customers comprised mainly of Millennials and Generation Z, also have very different expectations and consumption behaviours. Therefore, it is critical to revisit the drive of customer experience and factors affecting their engagement and loyalty. 

The evolution of the customer experience landscape

Without a doubt, digital technologies have become entrenched in customer experience, assisting their engagement with a business from the first phase of information search to the final phase of purchasing and consumption. Furthermore, following the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital transformation process has picked up at an unprecedented speed, evolving constantly with the introduction and refinement of more advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and machine learning. Additionally, customers have demanded a more personalised experience, yearning for a service that best suits their needs and makes them feel special.

Also read: We need to accelerate progress at the frontier of innovation

Nonetheless, despite the quick development of digital infrastructure that considerably facilitates access to digital applications, digital transformation is by no means inexpensive. In fact, the total global spending on the digitalisation process has been estimated to reach $1.78 trillion in 2021, and it will be almost $7 trillion over the period of 2020 – 2023. Additionally, with high demands for customisation for increasingly personalised services and continuous changes in the external environment, it is no longer optimal for businesses to opt for a one-size-fits-all digital solution. Therefore, many small and medium enterprises have difficulties when embarking on their digital transformation journey.

How Sendbird empowers businesses to build unique and branded customer experience

When Sendbird first started, it also encountered the same mentioned issues as it shopped for an effective customer engagement solution. “When we first began, we just built a solution that we wanted to use for our own mobile consumer application. We couldn’t find one that was modern, easy to use, and mobile-focused in the market back then, so we had to invent one for ourselves. Our goal was to enable user-to-user conversations within social apps and games. As we onboarded more customers, we started to see that simply enabling a chat experience was not the ultimate goal for customers. They wanted to create communities, facilitate transactions, connect doctors to patients, complete food deliveries, send money, and help people date and start families. We are now seeing businesses go beyond user-to-user conversations, into marketing and support conversations as well. Hence, customers pulled us into the customer engagement space over time,” shared Sendbird regarding how the company found its mission.

To address the challenges, Sendbird introduced the two ground-breaking selling points for its application. First, by offering customers APIs and software-as-a-service, Sendbird enables customers to minimise the complexity of building and maintaining the software services on their own and connect them with needed services and information.

Additionally, APIs free businesses from having to use a pre-packaged product like a SaaS tool that lock them into their in-the-box user interface and user experience. On the other hand, companies can use APIs to tailor the software services to create their desired customer experience, but they don’t have to start from scratch which significantly reduces the costs of their digitalisation process. Through this, Sendbird brings back the power of human conversations which lie at the heart of building every meaningful human relationship and getting things done.

Also read: Gen Z is redefining global consumption. Can companies keep up?

“Whether ordering food at your favourite restaurant, buying a product at a marketplace from a seller, getting help from your doctor, or meeting the love of your life, we all rely on conversations. But in mobile experiences, some of these relationships are lost, and what’s worse, in the areas of marketing and support, the existing experiences today are transactional or unidirectional, so there’s no real relationship between brands and customers,” emphasised Sendbird. “We can evolve this into a bidirectional experience in marketing, as well as improving a ticket-based, transactional support experience into asynchronous and persistent conversations with the brand, giving customers and brands the chance to form lasting and loyal relationships,” they added.

Sendbird was determined to power businesses with the ability to send marketing messages as well as connect customers with support agents, delivering differentiated customer experiences. The company recognised that while messaging apps provided businesses with a floor to connect with a ready base of customers, they have a ceiling on the quality of experiences businesses could deliver to customers. For example, the latest case of spamming on WhatsApp in India where customers have become frustrated with being spammed with marketing promotions in what once used to be a private channel for connecting with friends and family. Consequently, Sendbird anticipated that more and more messaging would start to move inside the businesses’ own mobile app, allowing businesses to also reimagine workflows with messaging and reinvent the entire customer journey.

Sendbird’s continuous journey to lead market innovations

To become the pioneering market leader it is today, Sendbird has constantly evolved to adapt to the market, the customers, and its employees. For instance, Sendbird always tries to keep a beat in the market about the shift to app-based messaging as a way for businesses to communicate and engage with customers through thought leadership content, presence in industry forums, partnerships with other customer engagement companies, and various channels to create awareness. The company also provides programmes for both companies that are just starting out on their just customer engagement journey as well as those that are shifting their customer engagement strategy to using messaging inside their mobile apps. 

“When we first started, it was merely a dream to be able to partner even with just a few. Today, we are helping more than a quarter of a billion people every month to have conversations, and we have a real chance of powering over a billion people every day. This may seem obvious today, but it certainly was a surprise when we went from just a million users a month to 10M, then now well over 250M monthly users. We were able to partner with some of the largest brands in the world”, expressed Sendbird about the company’s proudest achievements.

Also read: Going the extra mile in digital innovation for Singapore’s commuter experience

With the core value of “Endless tenacity for customers”, Sendbird engaged with customers as though they are an extension of their team — helping them imagine and build customer experiences that serve their unique business needs. Sendbird holds at its heart the belief that with heightened globalisation, innovation is flowing across the boundaries of nations, and what used to be just a Silicon Valley thing is now a phenomenon happening across the globe. 

Sendbird expects an exciting future in which more ideas come from different parts of the world and get cross-pollinated. There will be an evolution of mobile marketing and support in the coming years. The user experience will become much more modern, mobile-native, and interactive with the rise of a secular trend of a new generation of customer engagement. Sendbird will continue doing what it has been doing best, powering more brands to build conversations with their customers across marketing and support, and introducing a novel and powerful set of tools and experiences for businesses and their customers.

About Sendbird

Sendbird believes conversations are at the heart of building relationships and getting things done. As such, it built the world’s most proven conversations platform for mobile apps across chat, voice, and video. Industry leaders like Reddit, DoorDash, and Hinge use Sendbird to drive increased transactions and loyalty for hundreds of millions of users every month.

Sendbird has over 250M MAUs from over 50 countries operating in industries ranging from marketplaces, ride-sharing, online communities, gaming, live video streaming, and healthcare. The company is headquartered in San Mateo, CA with additional offices in New York, London, Seoul, Singapore, and Bengaluru. Sendbird has raised over $220M from leading investors, including ICONIQ Capital, STEADFAST Capital Ventures, Tiger Global Management, Shasta Ventures, Softbank Vision Fund 2, and Y Combinator.

For more information, visit Sendbird’s official website here.

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This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by Sendbird.

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