Infobip has recently launched an omnichannel customer engagement hub, Moments. It empowers brands to segment their customers by demographics and behavior alongside other metrics, thereby driving contextual messaging and rich experiences across major marketing channels. The four main points of this are Easy cross-channel campaign management, Unified customer data smarter audience segmentation, Dynamic marketing automation, Powerful analytics.
Aliasgar Bhopalwala – Sales Expert, Infobip SaaS certified product expert, who takes a wide view of the whole communication system and creates a conversational experience for large enterprises. He understands that the customer is the single most valuable asset an enterprise can have and is driven by the relenting pursuit of customer-driven focus, ideals, and user experience.
In an exclusive chat with MediaNews4U, Aliasgar Bhopalwala – Sales Expert, Infobip speaks on the recent campaign and the growth of the company.
Infobip recently launched ‘Moments’.Can you take us through it and what was the strategy behind launching it?
The digital lines are blurring very rapidly as customers today are using multiple channels and social media platforms including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, etc. to express their digital identity, connect with their peers, service providers, and favorite brands. Brands, then, need to be available across all channels, be able to collate a diverse range of data, and derive granular insights to create an accurate profile of the customer. This allows the brand to optimize the effectiveness of its campaigns by designing each campaign in line with the preferences and sensibilities of each customer who is a part of its target demographic. This is precisely what ‘Moments’ empowers businesses to do. At present, it has become a critical business imperative for brands to adopt a robust omnichannel strategy to reach out to their customers and create meaningful relationships by making them feel seen and valued. Customer engagement solutions such as Moments leverage AI-based automation and powerful analytics to provide an all-round view of every customer which can be used to automate ‘multi-step communications flows’ and ‘behavior-triggered messages’ across different channels. The idea is to deliver the right set of messages to the right customer at the right time over the right communication channel.
How do you think Advance Automation helps in communicating the right message to the consumer?
Brands can leverage advanced automation to instantly deliver event-trigged messaging to the customer by contextualizing past interactions. The technology analyses how a particular customer reacted during each step of the customer journey in the past and based on the extracted insights, it can drive targeted campaigns over the preferred channel of the customer in a hyper-personalized manner. For instance, brands can deploy this solution to provide a discount offer to a customer on special occasions such as their birthday maximize the probability of conversion. This technological intervention not only enhances the effectiveness of the engagement campaign but also drives loyalty and retention.
Data is the new oil. How does Infobip collate the required data for its clients?
The metaphor of oil underscores the value that data possesses in today’s digital economy. In a sense, data is the fuel that powers the economic engine by enabling brands to understand not only their customers’ needs but also the optimal manner in which these needs can be met most effectively. Having said that, the customer engagement solutions by Infobip leverage its state-of-the-art technology to collect and connect all of the data of a brand’s customer base onto a single platform from its CRM, booking or payments system, mobile apps, websites, etc. The idea is to create a comprehensive picture of the engagement ecosystem on the back of individualized profiles of customers and empowering the brands to categorize their customers into relevant segments. This allows the brands to create personalized marketing campaigns for each segment to drive the maximum results.
How do Moments help the brand drive its marketing campaigns to reach out to its TG?
It is important to understand that data is like crude oil. It needs to be mined, processed and refined to extract value from it. This is where Moments enters the picture. This omnichannel customer engagement solution accrues customer data from across different channels onto a single platform and leverages the power of automation and analytics to categorize the customer base into smaller segments. In doing so, it enables brands to get a richer understanding of the different needs and sensibilities of each customer segment and design personalized engagement strategies to target it with. Using this solution, brands can create automated, multi-step customer journeys across various channels while monitoring results at every step of the communication flow. It also allows brands to set up goals and seamlessly track engagements, conversions, downloads, etc. It further equips the brand with the ability to fine-tune the campaign strategy using its A/B testing feature to figure out which message would work better in a particular context and what is the best time to deploy it to maximize the success rate.
Today there is a huge concern on Data privacy. Your thoughts on this?
With changing regulations and policies along with increased awareness on data collection and usage, the focus on consent and preferences fundamentally changes how companies access and use data, and makes privacy-conscious data collaboration essential to a sophisticated and modern data strategy. Without proper permission systems to completely control how data is used, you may not only be limiting scale, but also the trust required to have a robust ecosystem of collaborative partners. The world’s most popular messaging app is in the midst of navigating a crisis of confidence sparked by an update to its terms of use and privacy policy, which has eroded user trust in the security of the app so it is very important to respect consumer concerns around Data privacy if you wish to play in this space.
How are the markets in Srilanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh in terms of digital spread?
The number of internet users in Sri Lanka rose by 399 thousand (+4.1%) between 2019 and 2020. In January 2020, the country hosted an internet penetration level of 47% and 10.10 million internet users, 6.40 million social media users, and 31.80 million mobile connections. During that time, social media penetration in Sri Lanka stood at 30% with the number of mobile connections equivalent to 149% of the total population. Similarly, the number of internet users in Bangladesh grew by 5.8 million (+9.5%) between 2019 and 2020, with the internet penetration reaching 41%. In January 2020, the country was home to 66.44 million internet users 36 million social media users and 163 million mobile connections. The number of mobile connections in Bangladesh up to that point in time was equivalent to 99% of the total population.
The case of Nepal also tells an encouraging growth story. Internet penetration in Nepal stood at 35% in January 2020, the number of internet users surging by 315 thousand (+3.2%) between 2019 and 2020. In January last year, Nepal had 10.21 million internet users, 10.00 million social media users, and 42.85 million mobile connections, the number amounting to 148% of the total population. While the social media penetration in Nepal stood at 35% in January 2020, the percentage is growing. Hence, as we can see, all three of these countries are among the rising digital economies which make each of them a high-potential market for digital services providers such as Infobip.
