Event recap: Rakuten Viber at Digital 2022 in Serbia

Our team has had a very eventful trip to Serbia, acting as both partners and speakers at Digital 2022, organized by Color Media Communications. Digital 2022 created an excellent opportunity to talk about messenger marketing, share best practices, present inspiring case studies, and put a very special Rakuten Viber chatbot to good use.

Q&A the new way

Thanks to the ingenuity of our partner, IT Centar, who designed a dedicated Rakuten Viber chatbot for the event, guests could easily check the event schedule, look up information on the speakers, ask questions, and participate in surveys. The QR code for Digital Rakuten Viber Chatbot was displayed in various easy-to-spot areas around the venue, including the stage, so that the guests could easily scan it to interact with the chatbot (almost half of all the conference attendees subscribed to it).

The bot worked very well for engaging the audience and making the experience more interactive. During presentations and panel discussions, the audience could submit their questions, feedback, and responses to surveys in real time, becoming more connected to the speakers and making the presentations feel more like a dialogue. After all, conversations are Rakuten Viber’s specialty.

Think again: brand communications vs consumer expectations 

Our Senior Sales Director in CEE & CIS, Konstantin Kostadinov, opened the event with outlining the industry landscape and the latest global and local trends. 

The world is becoming increasingly more mobile: people are spending 53% of their Internet time on mobile devices—that’s 3 hours and 43 minutes on average. What are people doing on their phones? Well, 95.6% of Internet users access chat and messaging apps. 

As Internet user behaviors are shifting, so too are consumer expectations from brands: 71% of consumers want to have convenient access to communication with a business, 90% expect fast responses from brands, and 58% believe messaging to be the fastest way to communicate with brands. Moreover, users tend to prefer interacting through the platforms they already know and like, rather than having a dozen different apps for communication with different brands. And since most already use messaging apps for private conversations, their platform of choice for business chats is, more often than not—a messaging app like Rakuten Viber. 

To sum it up, people are expecting their apps, including messengers, to do more for them: 77% of time users spend on their top 3 apps and 50% of that time—in one single app, so each app needs to offer multiple services in one place. This is one of the driving forces behind the trend on SuperApps, which Viber has set as one of its strategic priorities. Some of the most recent steps Rakuten Viber has taken to become a SuperApp include a native payment solution, Rakuten Viber Pay, that will begin the roll-out with Greece and Germany. 

Viber in Serbia

Brands realize these trends and actively move to mobile phones and especially messaging apps. Already more than half try to provide digital engagement, and the number is growing both worldwide and in Serbia, where 46% of businesses use messaging apps and social networks. 

In Serbia, many brands turn to Rakuten Viber—one of the reasons for it: it is incredibly popular with the users, and brands want to be where their audience is. Boasting a 90% MAU smartphone penetration rate, Viber facilitates huge volumes of user communications in Serbia, including:

• 1.5B calls yearly, lasting in total 120M hours
• 30B messages
• 3M Viber Lenses created
• 830M Stickers exchanged

Rakuten Viber for Business Solutions for every stage of your marketing funnel  

Another reason for Rakuten Viber’s popularity is the robust suite of solutions we offer: Viber for Business tools and features work for every stage of the customer journey. 

• To build brand awareness, businesses can use Rakuten Viber Ads (boasting 550M+ monthly impressions in Serbia), branded Rakuten Viber Stickers, and viral Rakuten Viber Lenses.
• To influence customer considerations, brands can nurture leads with Rakuten Viber Chatbots, send promotional Business Messages, and make themselves easy to find with a Commercial Account (a new feature coming soon). When multiple features are used in synergy, and especially in conjunction with a CRM/CDP integration, brands can not only reach prospective customers, but re-engage at multiple stages of their journey and ensure they’re moving along the marketing funnel.
• Driving conversions through conversations makes great use of data-driven insights, leverages personalized communication and Viber’s rich media capabilities, and is seamless, thanks to 24/7 support and user-friendly features.
• To nurture brand loyalty, Rakuten Viber provides Messaging Solutions that allow managing orders and deliveries, offering convenient post-sales support, and collecting customer feedback.

How brands succeed with Rakuten Viber for Business

Then, to illustrate how effective Viber for Business can be, Konstantin presented several success stories featuring companies using Viber business solutions. Among them:

• A Raiffeisen Bank success story, showcasing how Rakuten Viber helped Raiffeisen banka a.d. Beograd increase its digital footprint, build brand awareness, and engage their audience, thanks to a campaign that made use of the synergy between Rakuten Viber branded Stickers and a Chatbot.
• EasyPay, a multifunctional Rakuten Viber Chatbot from Bulgaria that enables users to pay their utility bills directly through the bot, without leaving the comfort of the messaging app. Accompanied by a complex promotional campaign, the bot gained a significant amount of subscribers and great rates of service adoption.
• NLB Banka AD Podgorica leveraged Rakuten Viber Business Messages to evolve their digital presence and provide more services and an accessible channel of communication to their customers. By using business messages, the bank was able to boost sales, bring leads to the call center and meeting requests to consultants. (Note: this success story was achieved in collaboration with our official messaging partner, Infobip)
• D Express, a tech-savvy and forward-thinking express courier service based in Serbia, worked with our trusted partner, Akton, to achieve another success story. The company used personalized Viber business messages (transactional and conversational) to improve their communication with the customers, keep recipients updated on their deliveries, and empower their customers to manage their deliveries directly through Viber.

Watch the video for the highlights of our presentation at Digital 2022.

If you have questions about the presentation or would like to learn more about Rakuten Viber for Business solutions, don’t hesitate to contact us.