When at least 86% of all generations expect targeted and relevant communications, according to Infobip’s research, retailers need a personalised approach for each generation of shoppers.

Black Friday is the start of the Christmas shopping season. Millions of consumers search for deals online, providing retailers with a growing opportunity to increase sales and strengthen brand presence.

Even a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by more than 25%, according to management consultancy Bain & Company.

However, creating an appropriate omnichannel strategy to communicate with consumers across four generations can be challenging.

Get it wrong and brands may lose sales or even loyal customers. Infobip’s Generational Messaging Trends Report reveals the communication preferences of each generation:

• Baby boomers: are less accepting of repetitive content where, 40% want more varied communications versus 8% of Gen Z, but favor chat apps more than Gen X (68% compared to 57%)
• Generation X: 73% of Gen X prefer to receive product and service updates compared with just 55% of Gen Z
• Millennials: younger generations are more open to new communication channels, where 60% of millennials are happy to make purchases through chatbots
• Generation Z: 83% expect a brand to understand them as individuals, and 65% want a two-way dialogue with the brands they buy from

Ivan Ostojić, chief business officer at Infobip, said: “Our research shows that most shoppers, no matter their age, want brands to engage with them like with a friend through conversational channels and say it will increase their loyalty. However, brands must get customer communications right to enhance loyalty and grow sales. That’s why Infobip has analysed what each generation prefers and published a new report and a playbook to help retailers and ecommerce firms make the most of the shopping season.”

Read the report here.

As pioneers in global omnichannel communications, Infobip is leading the market with innovative solutions.

As consumers look for a deeper connection with the brands they buy from, rich conversational messaging channels such as RCS Business Messaging are growing quickly.  

However, businesses and brands need to be able to offer advanced communications services such as conversational AI and chatbots to deliver personal, relevant, and conversational messaging experiences to their customers.

Now with RCS Google Vertex AI, businesses can create conversational experiences and chatbots for their customers that enhance engagement and drive conversions.

By leveraging AI capabilities within RCS, Infobip empowers businesses to automate processes, provide personalized, instant support, and deliver tailored interactions, ultimately improving ROI, customer satisfaction, and loyalty.

This integration builds on Infobip’s GenAI development where it has launched AI Hub, for AI-driven conversational customer experiences that solve business problems and generate results.

The firm also overhauled its intelligent chatbot building platform Answers with AI and GenAI to automate customer support and reduce costs that support conversational journeys across.

Ivan Ostojić, chief business officer at Infobip, said:

“RCS is one of the key communication channels that businesses and brands are increasingly using to communicate with their customers given its ability to provide a rich experience natively available on customer phones.

As experts in omnichannel messaging and with an unmatched portfolio of telecom partners across the globe, we can ensure that RCS messages, and messages across any other channel, are safely and securely delivered to customers everywhere.

The combination of our RCS expertise and partner network, the power of Google’s Vertex AI, and your own industry knowledge and customer insights guarantee conversational RCS interactions that will help set brands apart from their competition.”

Google Vertex AI is a machine learning (ML) platform developed by Google Cloud. It helps software providers to easily build, train, and manage ML models and AI applications by providing all the tools and services required in a single platform.

Building an RCS chatbot with Vertex AI will enable businesses and brands to create intelligent bots that can deal with a range of queries, transactions, and customer support issues across the entire customer lifecycle.

Rather than building separate chatbots for each use case, all can be serviced in a single messaging thread on RCS Business Messaging.

Potential use cases include making big data accessible by giving a single view of all brand and customer interactions no matter the channel or service, creating powerful and accurate recommendation systems, supporting image and video recognition, and developing personal travel assistants.

The collaboration aims to help businesses deliver more personalized shopping experiences, optimize customer engagement, and drive revenue growth.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, consumers crave conversational experiences with their favourite business or brand on their go-to communications channel.

Businesses and retailers especially need to be able to provide their customers with a personal experience on the channels (communication media of their preference) they use every day.

While partnering with Infobip, Spryker will be able to provide Infobip’s CPaaS and Conversational Experience solutions to their customers across manufacturing, hardware distribution, and automotive industries faster and in a more personalized experience via their digital marketplace.

These top organizations can now access the marketplace via conversational touchpoints, such as push notifications and chatbots.

Coinciding with their partnership, Spryker and Infobip have revealed six trends for retailers to boost revenues using Composable Commerce, Conversational Experiences and Artificial Intelligence (AI):

1. The Conversational era has arrived:

Everything is becoming conversational. Customers expect conversations with retailers across the entire journey on one device and channel. As a result, retailers need to offer large-scale escalation of two-way conversations throughout the customer journey, with app-like experiences in chat apps.

2. Personalization with Composable Commerce:

Retailers can use permissible customer data like browsing history and preferences to offer personalized recommendations and promotions, enhancing the shopper’s experience. This leads to higher conversion rates and ROI alongside improved customer loyalty.

3. Intelligent strategies for efficiency:

AI and analytics are paving the way for hyper-personalized customer experiences throughout the entire journey of customers for retailers.

These technologies offer anything from handling basic queries and predicting customer behaviours to enabling real-time responses.

By integrating AI and analytics throughout the customer journey, retailers can further enhance loyalty and brand recognition.

4. Omnichannel Integration:

Composable Commerce combined with conversational experience solutions allow retailers to seamlessly merge online and offline channels, offering a consistent shopping experience across e-commerce sites, mobile apps, social media, chat apps and physical stores.

Features like buy online, pick up in-store, endless aisle, and real-time inventory visibility especially when exposed in common chat apps can attract customers, drive sales, and increase profitability.

5. Agile and Scalable Technology:

Composable Commerce offers retailers an adaptable and scalable tech infrastructure. Businesses can quickly adapt to market shifts and customer needs by integrating top-tier software through APIs.

This flexibility lets retailers innovate, efficiently scale, and improve revenue. Cloud-based solutions have superior performance and cost-effectiveness.

6. Hyper-Automation through AI-powered chatbots:

The adoption and scaling of automated chatbots is revolutionizing the customer experience for retailers. Improvements in text, voice, and video chatbots, like integrations with ChatGPT, provide retailers with automation, speed, and availability.

Retailers are increasingly adopting intelligent virtual assistants to streamline customer service, enable up-and-cross-selling, marketing and sales automation leading to enhanced ROI.

“We are thrilled to partner with Infobip, a leading omnichannel communication solutions provider. This collaboration amplifies our commitment to empowering digital businesses to reach their goals more efficiently through composable commerce.

Manishi Singh, SVP of App Composition Platform at Spryker, said.

“By leveraging Infobip’s capabilities, we will enable businesses to deliver more personalized shopping experiences, optimize customer engagement, and drive new and increased revenue growth. Together, with Spryker’s composable platform designed specifically for sophisticated transactions, our customers will be able to adapt, grow and differentiate in a challenging and ever-changing market.” 

Ivan Ostojic, Chief Business Officer at Infobip, said:

“With the growing trend for consumers wanting to interact with a business or brand through conversational chat channels, it is becoming even more important for firms to offer such experiences. Our partnership with Spryker enables businesses to access our innovative conversational solutions such as our AI-powered conversational Experiences platform that helps turbocharge digital transformation and deliver more personal experiences. This collaboration further demonstrates why we are the market-leading communications platform for every platform.”

Manishi Singh concluded: 

“By embracing personalization, omnichannel integration, and an agile technology infrastructure through composable commerce, businesses can enhance their revenue results for upcoming shopping seasons. These practices empower businesses to provide exceptional customer experiences, optimize their sales channels, and quickly adapt to market dynamics, ultimately driving growth and profitability.”

According to global market research firm Forrester better customer experience leads to higher revenue growth. So, as the world enters a more challenging economic climate, Infobip advises businesses to focus on the following five trends to delight customers and maintain a competitive advantage this year:

1. Composable tech platforms will drive speed and scale

In an increasingly cost-conscious environment, businesses and brands will look for composable technology platforms to reduce implementation time and deliver transformation more quickly.

In the past two years, 50 percent of companies have had to transform at great speed, according to an Accenture survey of 4,053 c-suite executives.

To meet this speed of change, businesses will need to adopt plug-and-play composable tech platforms. Such interoperable solutions enable organizations to quickly integrate new capabilities through easy integration, increasing time to impact while reducing infrastructure costs and implementation timelines.

Data from Accenture shows that companies with high interoperability unlocked up to five additional percentage points of revenue growth than companies with low or no interoperability.

Composable tech platforms will drive innovation, augment customer experience and deliver faster and more extensive digital transformation.

For instance, our integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud enables firms to engage with their customers via SMS and WhatsApp, ensuring global reach and high delivery rates. 

2. Hyper automation and intelligent bots will deliver efficiencies

Automation can come in many forms, but the breakthrough in customer experience will be in the adoption and scaling of automated bots.

“As ChatGPT shows, chatbots continue to advance by leaps and bounds. We expect to see scaling text bots alongside progress with voice and video bots. As a result, businesses and brands will create and deploy bots that bring a new level of automation, speed, and availability. Such intelligent virtual assistants will help scale customer service, drive efficiencies and enable businesses to up and cross-sell. More advanced bots will also enable brands to enhance marketing and sales automation. Such bots will answer product or pricing questions, schedule deliveries and take payments – all within a customer’s favorite channel”.

3. Hyper personalized end-to-end CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE JOURNEYS enabled by artificial intelligence and analytics

Businesses will look for more intelligent ways to operate to drive efficiencies. Hyper personalized end-to-end customer experiences enabled by artificial intelligence and analytics will become a critical part of the customer journey, providing better experiences for customers and agents. AI and analytics can already respond to basic queries. Next year, Infobip expects organizations to use AI and analytics to predict customer behavior and drive real-time responses. For instance, companies will provide hyper-personalized messaging that instantly adapts to each individual and their preferences and ways of communication.

Businesses will look to apply such tools to all parts of the customer journey to create hyper-personalized experiences to increase loyalty and drive sales.  

This trend will be accelerated by the increasing shift to first-party data and automation in writing AI code.

4. Immersive hybrid ‘phygital’ experiences will bridge the real and online worlds

In 2023, Infobip expects a world where the physical and digital meet to create immersive experiences that customers want, where and when they want them. Such experiences help enhance customer engagement while providing greater convenience around ordering, paying and delivery. Retailers will continue to integrate technology into their stores, using data to personalize what customers hear, smell and see. For instance, geofencing, a location-based marketing tool, enables retailers to send automatic alerts, such as coupons or promotions, when a customer enters the area around the store.

Meanwhile, eCommerce platforms will use virtual and augmented reality to create a 21st-century digital store.

Brands are enabling customers to ‘try on’ clothes through virtual dressing rooms. Customers can see how they look in the clothes they might want to buy, all from the palm of their hand. Infobip expects the first launch of a digital replica of a product using AR or VR.

Some companies such as Amazon and Alibaba are combining the retail and eCommerce experiences. Hema, Alibaba’s fresh food-focused ‘New Retail Store’, allows customers to shop in-store or through its app. It provides customers with augmented reality integrations in-store, where they can scan products to reveal their origins, deliver items and pay with facial-recognition technology.

Amazon is harmonizing the physical and digital to deliver highly personalized customer experiences. It uses customer data from many sources – from online browsing activity to how customers navigate stores – to tailor store experiences to everyone.

5. Conversational user experiences

Everything will become conversational next year. Customers now have access to more channels and devices than ever before. Whether for marketing, support or sales, they increasingly want conversations with a business or brand on their preferred chat channels. By creating a richer and more proactive experience, Infobip expects to see two-way conversations scale hugely across the customer journey.

This year, we will see greater app-like experiences in chat apps. For instance, Infobip has developed an AI-powered chatbot for Uber that enables its customers to order a ride through WhatsApp, creating a seamless booking experience.

Many the major tech companies including WhatsApp, Google and Apple will launch new features this year that enhance their conversational capabilities.

There is also speculation that others like Microsoft will enter the conversational market with a new ‘super app’. Moreover, Infobip expects to see such user experiences expand across sectors from ride sharing to healthcare and even the public sector as it adapts to conversational everything.

Speaking in reference to the top five trends, Ivan Ostojić, Chief Business Officer at Infobip, said: “Customer experience can make or break a business. So, against a more difficult economic climate, we expect brands to focus on delighting their customers to remain competitive. But organizations may struggle to meet customer demands and provide the experiences their customers have come to expect without scalable and easy-to-use omnichannel communications. That is why Infobip continues to innovate and co-create with our clients and partners to ensure we are the one communication platform for every platform that helps businesses connect with people that are best for them.”

Infobip

Infobip is a global cloud communications platform that enables businesses to build connected experiences across all stages of the customer journey.

Accessed through a single platform, Infobip’s omnichannel engagement, identity, user authentication and contact centre solutions help businesses and partners overcome the complexity of consumer communications to grow business and increase loyalty.

With over a decade of industry experience, Infobip has expanded to 70+ offices globally. It offers natively built technology with the capacity to reach over seven billion mobile devices and ‘things’ in 6 continents connected directly to over 700 telecom networks. Infobip was established in 2006 and is led by its co-founders, CEO Silvio Kutić, Roberto Kutić and Izabel Jelenić.

Infobip, a global cloud communications platform and leader in omnichannel engagement , has strengthened its management with the introduction of a new strategic position to take it into the next phase of exponential growth and global expansion.

Ivan Ostojić has joined Infobip as Chief Business Officer after 10 years at leading global consulting company, McKinsey & Company, where as a Partner he co-founded and co-led McKinsey´s Global Technology Council and McKinsey´s Innovation & New Business building (Leap) practices.

“Infobip’s journey is to redefine and create authentic and safe digital interactions between humans and the world around us.

Technological development is constantly accelerating, which brings Infobip many new business opportunities but also offers us the chance to create new value experiences for companies and their customers.

Ivan’s extensive industrial and consulting experience will help us step into unchartered technological waters that drive business growth and help us achieve even stronger global expansion.

More importantly it means we can bring wonderful, exciting and immersive experiences to connect people around the world with the organisations they love and rely on to live their lives. Our new member of the management board will implement strategic initiatives even faster, especially new go-to-market and business models based on innovation and technology”, said Silvio Kutić

, Chief Executive Officer of Infobip.

One of Ivan Ostojić ‘s main goals will be to further strengthen Infobip’s critical future & market-shaping functions, such as strategy & strategic project office, marketing, Go-to-Market & business model innovation, partnership & alliances, and strategic M&A.

“I am very enthusiastic about leading a team that aims to set long-term Infobip strategy, and accelerate delivery of Infobip`s innovation into hands of our customers. Now that we are entering a new phase of exponential growth there is a huge space in front of Infobip where we can make world-transforming, disruptive new solutions to enable more personalized, faster and more robust communication”, said Ivan Ostojic.

“Today, as a company, we have one of the world’s best technology platforms, and the goal is to make it a key platform for all global companies looking to digitally transform and innovate. In this we see great potential for even stronger growth. Today, advances in technology are happening faster and more often, in combination with increasingly popular tech directions such as Metaverse and artificial intelligence, which Infobip will also explore.“

Ivan Ostojić will be based out of Zurich, Switzerland, where he lives. He holds a doctorate in natural sciences from the University of Basel and a master’s degree in management, technology and economics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Ostojic is a new name in a series of prominent appointments to  Infobip’s management in the last year, which is in line with the company’s strategy of strengthening expertise and bringing rich experience for the coming period during which the company will continue to apply an exponential approach to business.

More about Infobip

Infobip is a global cloud communications platform that enables businesses to build connected experiences across all stages of the customer journey.

Accessed through a single platform, Infobip’s omnichannel engagement, identity, user authentication and contact centre solutions help businesses and partners overcome the complexity of consumer communications to grow business and increase loyalty.

With over a decade of industry experience, Infobip has expanded to 65+ offices across six continents.

It offers natively built technology with the capacity to reach over seven billion mobile devices and ‘things’ in 190+ countries connected directly to over 700 telecom networks. Infobip was established in 2006 and is led by its co-founders, CEO Silvio Kutić, Roberto Kutić and Izabel Jelenić.