The future of messaging starts here

On October 19, Rakuten Viber’s executive team met regional brands, members of the press, and Infobip’s executive team in Zagreb, to discuss how Rakuten Viber and Infobip help brands take customer experience to the next level. Rakuten Viber’s Senior Partnerships Account Director Noa Bar Shay and Partnership Account Director Limor Bailey, Infobip’s Country Manager for Adriatics Ivica Prlić, Senior Product Partnership Manager Silvija Renusa, and Country Manager for South East Europe Nedeljko Milosevic gathered at the Infobip’s Alpha Centauri Campus and presented the latest brand-customer communication trends, Viber for Business solutions, and brands’ success stories achieved with Rakuten Viber & Infobip. 

Global and local trends in brand-user communication

Using free messaging apps to connect with your family, friends, and colleagues has become commonplace: more than 71.2% of Croatians are avid social media and app users, and they spend almost 5 hours a day on mobile devices. Consumers have grown to expect the same convenience when dealing with brands, often preferring to communicate through their favorite messaging apps. 

As Limor Bailey, Rakuten Viber’s Partnership Account Director, also stressed, recent surveys show that 58% of consumers consider messaging to be the fastest way of communicating with brands, and 50% of Croatian brands already use messaging apps and social networks to provide better customer experience.

Why do brands choose Rakuten Viber?

A global leader in messaging communication, Rakuten Viber has an active, payable audience around the world and in Croatia. It offers all business solutions a brand needs for each step of the customer journey: branded Stickers and Lenses, Ads, Business Messages, and Chatbots—everything to help brands build awareness, influence consideration, drive conversion, and nurture loyalty. 

Next-level customer experience: effective for brands and convenient for users

As Noa Bar Shay, Senior Partnerships Account Director at Rakuten Viber, emphasized in her presentation, 89% of businesses today compete primarily on the basis of customer experience. Viber designs its Messaging solutions with the goal to make these experiences better for its users and the brands’ customers. 

Businesses can send personalized offers through Rakuten Viber's promotional business messages to encourage purchases, increase sales, nurture brand loyalty, and cut costs because Viber business messages are cheaper than SMS or any other messaging app. In turn, customers get relevant offers, timely suggestions, useful information, and easy-to-redeem discounts. 

Brands can also keep their clients updated about the status of their order, new bank transactions, or delivery schedules—all thanks to transactional business messages, delivered conveniently through the customers’ favorite app. And tapping into the trend on real conversations, brands can establish a dialogue with their audience. Conversational messages help increase conversions, provide around-sales customer support, build loyalty, get customer feedback, and much more.

With Rakuten Viber Chatbots, brands can now provide their customers with efficient customer service that’s available 24/7, offer opportunities to shop and pay for items right within the app, and provide immediate responses to customer queries—which is a perk that 82% of consumers expect today. 

Based on the data collected from January to September 2022 versus the same period in 2021, Viber noted tremendous growth in Croatia: a 168% increase in its conversational business messages, 131% in transactional messages, and 40%—in promotional, all of which clearly shows the growing popularity of business messages. 

Rakuten Viber and Infobip: a long-term partnership

As Rakuten Viber was the first messaging app to offer business messages to brands (originally called “service messages”), Infobip became one of its first official and trusted partners on a mission to elevate brand-user communication. 

“We are really happy to be working with Rakuten Viber for the seventh year. Rakuten Viber is one of our key channels within Infobip's cloud communication platform. Together, we are creating a technological and communicational ecosystem that integrates with numerous digitally native platforms: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Microsoft Bot Framework, and Oracle Eloque, as well as some of the world's largest brands," said Ivica Prlić, Infobip's Country Manager for the Adriatics region.

Nedjeljko Milošević, Country Manager for South East Europe at Infobip, presented case  studies from brands that had achieved success with Rakuten Viber and Infobip. One of these includes Croatia osiguranje, which provides customer service through Viber by using Infobip’s cloud solution for contact centers. Another successful example is DPD—a delivery service, which transformed the delivery experience by implementing Rakuten Viber Business Messages through Infobip’s platform, thus reducing costs by 20% and at the same time increasing customer satisfaction.

The possibilities for brands and users are limitless, especially with Rakuten Viber’s long-term vision to become a superapp: a single gateway to multiple services.

"People no longer want to use multiple apps for different needs. On average, app users spend 77% of their time on their top 3 apps, and almost half of their time in one single app. People nowadays seek a single gateway to many options: one place to get things done,” says Noa Bar Shay, Senior Partnership Account Director at Rakuten Viber. “Our long-term goals for consumers and for brands form a single all-encompassing strategy of being a superapp: to maximize utility of the app, so that consumers could solve as many tasks as possible without leaving the comfort of the app, and brands—could reach their audience at each stage of the customer journey."