Strava Beacon: Keeping athletes safe with SMS location updates sent from wearables
90-95%
delivery rate
190+
countries
Challenge
Combine SMS, GPS, wearables and Strava
Strava is so much more than an activity-tracking social app. It’s relied on by athletes the world over to help keep them safe too.
Beacon is a Strava feature that lets athletes send a text message containing location updates while they’re exercising to up to three safety contacts. The message includes a link to a live GPS-tracked map so it’s easy for friends or family to track their progress.
Beacon gives Strava athletes the confidence to take longer rides, runs or walks in remote areas — safe in the knowledge that someone has an eye on them.
For Strava athletes who carry their phone with them on a run or ride, Beacon is easy. Their phone’s native messaging and GPS functions work with the Strava app to send out messages and locations.
But what about the growing number of people who, instead of carrying a phone, use a wearable device like a watch tracker or bike computer linked to Strava? How do you send a text message from a device not designed to send text messages? And just as importantly, how can you guarantee that one of these messages could be sent reliably to and from anywhere in the world?
With over 40% of members using fitness devices like watches or ride computers, Strava knew they had a growing segment of athletes they needed to support. Strava needed to work with an omnichannel innovator with a truly global communications network.
Infobip was the obvious choice.
Solution
Integrating an omnichannel communications API
Strava is a very popular app amongst our team members. When one of our account executives — a keen Strava user — saw Beacon for the first time, he knew we could help them make it even better. There were three challenges to overcome to make Beacon a more complete solution in a new age of fitness tech:
- Connect wearable devices and ride computers on cycles to Strava in such a way that it can effectively send SMS messages.
- Make sure that the SMS can be sent to and from anywhere in the world.
- Make sure that the SMS comes from the same phone number every time (so family members can recognize it as a Beacon SMS and not SMS spam).
Strava’s developers worked with our solutions team to integrate our omnichannel communications API into the app. Once athletes had chosen the three contacts they wanted to keep informed about their route, all they had to do was press start on their fitness device.
Strava had experimented with using different SMS providers for Beacon. But when messages were sent via the wearable device, the message came from a range of different phone numbers. This meant that emergency contacts might receive a message from an unknown number and possibly ignore it.
But thanks to intelligent number pooling built into our omnichannel communications API, each message sent by the user is from the same number every time. Contacts can then save that number into their address book as something like “Sandra’s Strava Beacon”
Result
Safe adventures in more than 190 countries
Strava needed complete global coverage for its Beacon feature. Therefore, by using an omnichannel approach resulted in delivering safe adventures across more than 195 countries worldwide.
Whether an athlete was jogging in New York’s Central Park, cycling the first marathon route in Greece, or hiking by the Great Wall of China, our worldwide SMS coverage meant the updates would always get to their contacts back home. As a result, Strava was able to achieve a 95% delivery rate.
Now fully implemented and sending tens of thousands of messages a day, Strava and Infobip are helping people exercise more safely.
It has been fantastic working with Infobip on this project. Not only has the technology been easy to implement, the people at Infobip use Strava. They understand how important Beacon is to our athletes. That extra connection to us and our product really came through in everything the Infobip team did with us.
Ethan Hollinshead
Senior Product Manager, Strava
Company profile
Strava
Strava is an app and social network used by tens of millions of cyclists, hikers, runners and athletes across the world. Subscribers can track their exercise, plan routes and work out training plans, while connecting and competing with others.
UNICEF: Turning caring people into regular givers with omnichannel customer engagement
7.8%
increase in the number of regular donors
33.3%
decrease in the number of donors that stop giving
4%
conversion rate on donor who abandon registration cart
Challenge
Boost donations for disadvantaged children
Donations are essential to UNICEF’s mission to build a better future for disadvantaged children across the world. But the UN charity was seeing a decrease in donor retention and an increase in the number of first-time donors that don’t become regular givers.
UNICEF needed to act to improve donor engagement, help convert every conversation into a donation, and reduce donor churn. But several factors were making this a challenge:
- Siloed data and channels — UNICEF used SMS, email, telemarketing, and WhatsApp as its key customer communication channels. But each channel was managed through a different platform, making it difficult to deliver a consistent donor experience.
- Lack of performance metrics — With each channel being run through a separate platform, it was difficult to know which channel performed better in which situations.
- An inability to transfer all data into the CRM — UNICEF lacked the tools to consolidate donor insights from multiple sources.
The charity knew it needed to use advanced omnichannel technology to revamp the way it engaged its donor community.
Solution
Omnichannel customer engagement solution to build meaningful connections
This was one of the most exciting and meaningful campaigns Infobip has ever been involved in. We worked with UNICEF to develop a plan that would take donors on a journey of understanding about the challenges children face, and how regular donations could help them. This plan involved:
- Reaching out to donors on the channels they prefer
- Engaging them with personalized content
- Automating communications through simple workflows
- Optimizing the donor journey
- Providing always-on support to donors
The good news was UNICEF already had plenty of customer data about donors’ preferred communication channels. Our data platform, People CDP, helped bring all this data into one central location to build segments, create relevant customer journeys, and optimize campaigns.
UNICEF used the following solutions from the Infobip communication platform:
- Moments: our omnichannel customer engagement hub to help with segmentation, analytics, and event-triggered messaging.
- Answers: our chatbot-building platform to ensure always-on support.
- Conversations: our cloud contact center solution for live agents to assist with real-time information to donors who call their toll-free number. Enquiries can also be dealt with on WhatsApp and SMS.
- A mix of communication channels including: Email, SMS, WhatsApp Business Platform, and Voice from a single platform.
- Email validation: to ensure contact database was clean and up to date
Infobip provided the best value for money and offered the array of solutions we were looking for, as well as a set of tools to implement as our operations expanded. With Infobip, agile service and support are guaranteed.
Paula Costa
Marketing and Partnerships
With the help of Moments, UNICEF was able to segment its donors based on data, behavior, preferences, analytics, and journey stage. They could also set up communication flows for each stage of the customer journey. For example:
- Welcome messages
- Thank-you messages following donations
- Special occasion greetings
- Donation cart-abandonment reminders
- Transactional notifications
- News and updates
Our omnichannel capabilities ensured messages were delivered on the donor’s channel of choice, with undelivered communications automatically sent to a ‘failover’ channel.
For existing donors, the main channel was email, with WhatsApp as a failover — enabling chatbot assistance or the option for donors to speak to agents if they had more complex queries.
For potential donors, there was a carefully planned customer journey with a mix of email, WhatsApp, and SMS communications. There was also a lead-scoring system to help categorize potential donors and inform the next engagement step.
UNICEF was able to manage all these interactions on a single interface, using data insights to segment and personalize campaigns for each donor profile.
Result
Great donor UX, reduced costs, and more donations for disadvantaged children
Infobip couldn’t be more proud to have helped UNICEF improve the UX for donors and nurture them in a more intelligent and effective way — all while cutting the cost of sending messages. The results speak for themselves:
- 7.8% increase in donors being converted into regular donors — after three months of the campaign.
- 33.3% decrease in donor churn rate compared with the year before.
- 4% conversion rate into donors for whose who abandoned their carts
Throughout the implementation process, Infobip were very proactive and always available. Such care in customer service is something that stands out.
Paula Costa
Marketing and Partnerships
Company Profile
UNICEF
The United Nations Children’s Fund was established in 1946 — in the aftermath of the second world war — to help children and young people whose lives and futures were at risk. Nowadays, UNICEF works across more than 190 countries and territories to help disadvantaged children.
DPD: Improving delivery experiences and cutting costs with Viber and SMS
20%
reduction in delivery and contact center costs
Challenge
Raising delivery rates and reducing contact center strain
DPD is known for its fast and convenient parcel pick-up and delivery options all over Europe. The DPD team in Croatia continually strives to increase its first-delivery success rates while meeting customers’ evolving expectations around service and convenience.
Before Infobip, DPD Croatia would send SMS messages to notify customers about package deliveries. But the team didn’t have an accurate database of phone numbers, so too many messages weren’t arriving. This resulted in missed deliveries, since customers who hadn’t received notifications wouldn’t ensure they were around to accept packages.
This meant substantially increased costs and an increased strain on contact centers handling delivery queries from customers. DPD Croatia was also spending too much time and resources trying to contact customers to receive updated contact information.
Solution
Introducing Viber notifications with SMS failover
There were a number of ways we could help DPD meet customer demand, improve satisfaction, and minimize costs.
Introducing Viber for Business into the communication mix was one of them. Viber is one of the most widely used messaging apps in Croatia and Slovenia. It gave DPD the ability to share customer messages that include images, videos and interactive buttons. And because Viber messages are clearly branded and verified as from DPD, customers could have total trust in them. Importantly, Viber also reduced the cost per message for DPD.
SMS became the ‘failover’ channel. This means that when a Viber message doesn’t reach a customer (perhaps because they don’t have internet access at the time) an SMS is automatically sent instead.
All this could be achieved by adding our communication API to DPD’s internal interface. Suddenly, DPD had the ability to optimize resources based on analytics provided through our web interface.
For the first time, DPD could also see which messages had been delivered, and which had been actually read. This helped DPD take appropriate action when necessary — such as contacting a customer to update the number in the database if messages weren’t getting through.
Infobip partnered with Croatian Telecom — as part of our Partner Connect Program to help boost digital transformation for companies — throughout the DPD project.
Result
Cost savings, successful deliveries, and higher customer satisfaction
After introducing Viber with SMS failover, DPD managed to reduce its delivery and contact center costs by 20%. Additionally, DPD’s customer satisfaction rates increased, and contact center workload decreased as more customers received timely notifications.
DPD Croatia is now in a much better position to provide customers with the right information at the right time — creating a smooth delivery experience for both customers and agents.
In today’s delivery environment, we need to have a reliable communication partner. An increase in customer satisfaction and a 20% reduction in costs are some of the results we achieved using the Viber with SMS failover solution from Infobip in partnership with Croatian Telecom. We look forward to expanding our communication channels portfolio with Infobip in the future.
Tomislav Lažeta
Sales Director, DPD
Company Profile
DPD
DPD has an unrivaled reputation for fast, reliable parcel delivery. It’s part of the Geopost group, one of the world’s leading parcel delivery networks, which operates in more than 50 countries. DPD constantly invests in technology to provide businesses and consumers with the best possible delivery experience.
NIVEA: Celebrating diversity and reaching new customers with innovative engagement
207%
of campaign reach target achieved
250,396
organic reach
With Infobip solutions:
Challenge
NIVEA aims to boost consumer engagement with a positive message celebrating diversity
As a world-leading beauty brand, NIVEA helps people all over the world feel good in their own skin.
To promote their Nourishing Cocoa Body Lotion brand, Nivea wanted to create a campaign that empowered consumers in Nigeria and Kenya to celebrate their unique skin.
The idea was to encourage consumers to send a picture of themselves and receive a stylized version of the image with details of their own personal skin shade. Participants could then share these images on social media — exponentially increasing the reach of the #MyCocoaShade campaign.
As well as promoting the Cocoa Body Lotion, a secondary goal of the campaign was to build up a database of consumers that wanted to engage with the brand.
But first, the NIVEA team had to work out how they would engage as many consumers as possible.
Solution
Using a WhatsApp chatbot to engage with consumers
For the Cocoa Shades campaign, WhatsApp was identified as the key communication channel for the #MyCocoaShade campaign due to its widespread use in Nigeria and Kenya, and its ability to send and receive images.
NIVEA needed an omnichannel technology provider with a unified communication platform that could handle both the automation and personalization of the WhatsApp messaging, while capturing relevant consumer data for market research and future communications.
Infobip, with its Africa-wide network and local knowledge of messaging campaign compliance regulations, was the obvious choice. We developed a solution that enabled automated, personalized conversations between a WhatsApp chatbot and participating consumers.
The campaign was powered by:
- our omnichannel customer engagement solution, Moments
- our unified customer data platform People CDP for facilitating actionable insights and better decisions
To achieve maximum engagement, NIVEA promoted the WhatsApp number on social media, posters, through influencers, and via QR codes displayed at store checkout areas.
A WhatsApp chatbot would also ask consumers for consent for NIVEA to use the images on its own media platforms. The marketing team then selected a few to be posted on social media and on out-of-home advertising, including giant digital billboards in busy city-center locations.
Having Infobip as a partner has opened us up to a lot more possibilities — there is now so much more we can do to facilitate one-to-one communication with our consumers.
Temitayo Ige
(former) Brand Manager – Digital (CEWA), Beidersdorf
Result
207% of campaign reach target achieved
The NIVEA team was anticipating fairly modest engagement — in the region of 100 photo submissions. However, within a short time of the campaign launching, more than 500 had been received. The combination of traditional marketing techniques (flyers and billboards) with the digital engagement enabled by Infobip technology was a recipe for success.
The overall campaign results in numbers were:
- 564 entries received via WhatsApp
- 2,772 new consumer profiles added to People CDP
- 207% of reach target and 137% of impressions target
- 250,396 of people organically reached
In addition to quantifiable results, the campaign’s positive message strengthened NIVEA’s brand reputation. Meanwhile, with the help of Infobip’s customer data platform, People CDP, NIVEA is now building a database of consumers who want to stay in touch with NIVEA and be kept informed of news and events.
The collaboration with Infobip was fantastic and we intend to use the campaign as a case study to show how Moments, People CDP and WhatsApp came together to drive engagement, which is something that hasn’t been done in any of our key markets.
Temitayo Ige
(former) Brand Manager – Digital (CEWA), Beidersdorf
See how Infobip helps brands maximize results with WhatsApp chatbots:
Company Profile
Nivea
The NIVEA brand — owned by Beiersdorf AG — has stood for innovative, high-quality skin care products and pioneering skin research for well over a century. What began in 1911 as NIVEA Creme, the first stable oil-and-water-based moisturizer, is today a huge global family of brands with over 500 products.
AXA Partners: Automating roadside assistance with WhatsApp
20%
cases opened through WhatsApp
94%
CSAT scores
Challenge
A need for more digital channels to speed up support
AXA Partners forms part of the global AXA Group, they
provide a comprehensive range of assistance solutions, from auto, home to travel and serve their customers through B2B and B2C channels.
In addition to their other services, AXA Partners also offers roadside assistance. Recognizing the urgent nature for roadside assistance requests, they needed to expand their digital channels to provide real-time support to customers.
Aligning with customers demand for instant messaging services and improving communication during the provision of roadside assistance, AXA Partners decided to pursue digital solutions that could automate simple claims, freeing up capacity for the resolution of complex cases.
Solution
WhatsApp Business Platform to provide real-time automated support and enhanced CX
After considering numerous WhatsApp Business Platform providers, AXA Partners chose to partner with Infobip. They were impressed by our hands-on support for the channel, our chatbots’ configuration capabilities, our platform’s scalability, and seamless integration capabilities with their Customer Management System (CMS).
Our partnership kicked off with a small-scale pilot of a WhatsApp chatbot, and our cloud contact center solution, Conversations, to test the effectiveness of more digital customer engagement and support. The pilot’s success highlighted opportunities for further automation to streamline customer interactions.
As a result, they implemented our chatbot-building platform, Answers, which integrates seamlessly with Conversations. And to make the customer journey even more efficient, AXA Partners integrated their chatbot with their CMS using Answers’ open API.
AXA Partners enhanced customer support by automating simple tasks like opening support tickets for simple cases like flat batteries, and providing real-time updates via WhatsApp. Customers can share their location, enabling faster and continuous assistance, while agents can manage multiple conversations efficiently and deliver quicker service.
All of this builds more confidence in AXA Partners’ customer base as they move towards a more effective omnichannel customer journey.
It was crucial to be able to migrate seamlessly from our previous support solution to Conversations with no interruptions in service for our customers.
This included migrating all existing tickets and agent data, continuing to support all ticketing use cases during the migration, and ensuring complete data security and compliance with all privacy regulations in every region.
Result
Automated support, decrease in time to resolution and enhanced user experience
The WhatsApp chatbot exceeded AXA Partners’ expectations right from the start. They saw a significant increase in overall digital interactions, with approximately 20% of uncomplicated cases now opened through WhatsApp without human intervention.
This shift sped up response times and freed up agents to focus on more complex customer needs. In the pilot phase alone, they saw 6,000 chat interactions in the first six months.
The impact of our solutions wasn’t just reflected in operational metrics; it resonated with customers, too.
- 94% expressed high satisfaction with using WhatsApp for assistance.
- 89% indicated they would use WhatsApp again for new requests, support and follow up.
While customers can still log roadside assistance requests via phone or the AXA Partners web app, they appreciate the speed and convenience of WhatsApp, whether they’re stuck on the side of the or simply seeking updates on their requests. They also prefer WhatsApp when the connection is too weak for a call or there is too much noise to talk on the phone.
Infobip maintained close communication with us throughout the process and
are always available to solve any blockers. Their solutions opened new avenues to reach out to our customers, and we’re getting really good feedback from our agents and customers.
Eloy Castillon
Product Owner at AXA Partners
Discover how other brands are using WhatsApp for automation
Company Profile
About AXA Partners
AXA Partners is one of the global leaders in the Assistance, Credit & Lifestyle Protection, and Travel Insurance. We develop comprehensive integrated solutions within the offerings of our business partners to enhance their customers’ experience, or sell directly to customers under the AXA brand. Combining passion and advanced expertise, our 8,500 employees worldwide stand by the customers in their daily lives as well as during unexpected events, with a mission to protect what matters, when it matters.
Infobip: 95% SLA achievement rate and significant efficiency gains with our own cloud contact center solution
95%
SLA achievement rate
90%
CSAT scores
Challenge
Improve efficiency and empower 600+ global support agents to provide optimal service
As a global Conversational customer experience platform, it is crucial that we are available to our customers across all time zones, understand their diverse cultural expectations, and deliver a consistently high-quality service regardless of location. Effective customer support ensures that issues are resolved promptly; it builds trust and strengthens relationships, ultimately driving business growth and successful long-term partnerships.
The challenges we faced
With 600 global support agents and numerous products, we wanted to improve agent efficiency and reduce issue resolution time. We knew that standardizing tools, processes, and roles would be essential to address our main pain points:
- Disconnected tools: Created inefficiencies and complicated the resolution process, leading to a fragmented customer experience and increased operational costs.
- The loss of tickets: Lead to unresolved issues, frustrated customers, and a decline in service quality that impacted customer satisfaction and retention.
- Lack of a user-friendly interface: Resulted in increased handling times, higher error rates, and reduced agent productivity, compromising the quality of customer support.
- Non-flexible platform: Hindered the ability to adapt to changing requirements and workflows.
By investing in our support capabilities, we wanted to ensure that our business could exceed customer expectations, leading to increased retention and positive word-of-mouth, and further enhance our reputation for top-tier customer service.
Solution
Implementing Conversations, our cloud contact center solution to standardize global support and improve CX
We needed a unified solution that could improve the efficiency of support agents for all ticketing use cases – including direct customer service, incident and bug reporting, external escalations to third-party vendors, and internal communications.
Thankfully, our own cloud contact center solution, Conversations, ticked all these boxes and more.
Empowering agents to make every interaction personal
Agents use customer context cards powered by data from People, our customer data platform, for additional personalization. Agents have easy access to these cards in Conversations, where they can find contextual information that they might need during customer interactions. Additionally, in cases where tickets get re-assigned or are handled cross-departmentally, agents can see a history of all previous interactions across all touch points in one place.
Intelligent routing for improved efficiency
With the large number of tickets we handle daily, a powerful routing system is critical for ensuring customer support is efficient. Each ticket is tagged based on location, support packages, or other relevant factors, and directed to the appropriate queue for fastest resolution.
Preferred channel communication
With email being used as the main communication channel for our ticketing system, our agents can use the email client interface in Conversations to customize message content, add attachments, and merge conversations.
We also implemented Live Chat as an additional channel for communication, which has native integrations with Conversations’ email, and voice capabilities.
It was a unique challenge to understand our colleagues’ diverse requirements and align them with the capabilities of our internal teams managing the product. However, with much hard work, a segmented approach to each department, planned phases, and mutual respect and understanding throughout, we coordinated and executed a migration of more than 600 day-to-day agents without downtime
Elvis Vusić
Software Operations Manager
Automation for improved efficiency and faster resolution times
To make our contact center performance as efficient as possible, we implemented three smart automation features:
- Macros are used to predefine subjects and templates, fill form fields, change priority, and/or switch queues. With one click, our Agents can do something that would usually take them 3-4 minutes. Additionally, Macros are used for escalation use cases, where a predefined template and a priority are automatically assigned.
- Workflows are easy-to-use automations created with a simple “if-this-then-that” editor. With time-based workflows, we check how long a certain ticket has been pending. If the time frame is longer than expected, an automatic message is sent to an agent. Event-based workflows check the ticket subject for specific data (e.g., country), which can activate specific routing and/or populate forms automatically to save time.
- Service-level Agreements (SLAs) are an automated feature used to track all time-sensitive tickets and ensure that customers’ issues are resolved as quickly as possible.
Tracking contact center performance
Our advanced analytics enables supervisors to use data to track every aspect of contact center performance to continually improve outcomes. This includes:
- Detailed metrics on channel performance, agent utilization, and an overview of total work and the quality of the work handled.
- Reporting that enables us to slice data based on multiple metrics and create custom dashboards.
Security and data privacy
Our data localization method is powered by more than 40 data centers around the world to help with regional/country-specific regulatory measures.
- All data centers have disaster recovery tools in place as backup.
- We have a unique EU region-locked data center which enables us to offer EU-only support where end-users’ data is stored and backed up in the EU and accessed from the EU and countries that the EU commission has determined have an adequate level of data protection to meet their standards.
Seamless migration
It was crucial to be able to migrate seamlessly from our previous support solution to Conversations with no interruptions in service for our customers.
This included migrating all existing tickets and agent data, continuing to support all ticketing use cases during the migration, and ensuring complete data security and compliance with all privacy regulations in every region.
We managed to understand all the details of each department in our company that we were set to migrate. Thanks to our incredible team and open-minded approach, we improved our product and introduced several unique selling points to the market. We solved these problems better than others because we could view them from a high-level perspective.
Tomaš Brilla
Senior Product Manager
Result
Boosting CSAT scores above 90% and achieving a 95% SLA rate
We successfully migrated 11 teams and all data from the previous vendor into Conversations. There are currently eight teams handling external tickets and three teams handling internal tickets, back-office, or analytics
This means we have around 600 agents working daily to provide the first-class customer support we promise to our customers and to support our internal stakeholders.
The enterprise capabilities of Conversations ensure that global teams can collaborate effectively, with clear escalation paths and seamless issue handover. This ensures that the 1 million tickets that our teams handle per year are resolved with minimum delay and no ‘lost’ tickets.
- Registrations team handles outbound (customers) and inbound (sales operators) tickets, with the main goal of registering senders with MNOs.
- Connectivity & Pricing team communicates with suppliers like MNOs, aggregators, and regulatory bodies to set up connections.
- Routing team optimizes routes and handles issues with suppliers (degradation, escalations, etc.).
- Managed Services team primarily proactively reaches out to mGate customers.
- Monetization team has a direct line of communication with operators in case of blocked messages.
- Self-serve team handles global self-serve customers and all their inquiries.
- Startup team communicates with businesses that are a part of our startup program.
After monitoring service levels for three months post deployment, the results were even better than we had hoped for.
- In addition to the significant savings on multiple third-party license fees, consistently high ratings from our customers helped us achieve CSAT scores higher than 90%.
- For customers with support packages, the SLA achievement rate was greater than 95%.
Another significant benefit of using our own support solution is that we now have the perfect ‘feedback loop’ from internal agents to development teams. In addition to instant access to real-world test data and scenarios, it means that new features can be trialed and perfected internally before being released to our customers.
Feedback is essential for developing and enhancing our product. The responsiveness of our internal team has been invaluable in understanding key needs and goals, allowing us to validate, ideate, and select the best solutions and user experience together. Teamwork makes the dream work, and we are just starting.
Marinela Kutić
Products Director
This project was a breakthrough moment for Conversations, as migrating and handling such a huge (internal) customer is a challenging job. It is very beneficial for us as a company to immediately test novelties on our Conversations instance and work directly with our product teams on our feedback and feature requests – many of which are used for our customers as well.
Srećko Sušac
Director of Global Customer Support
Discover how we are helping other brands to transform their support operations
Company Profile
About Infobip
Infobip is the leading platform for conversational customer experiences. We use our expertise to partner with businesses to push the possibilities of communication.
Floward: Scaling customer service and boosting team efficiency with a unified contact center solution
1 min
average response time
14%
cost reduction
95%
SLA achievement rate
Challenge
Serving a growing customer base while providing high-quality service
Floward, the go-to online flowers and gifts delivery destination in MENA and UK, is on a mission to bring joy, convenience, and thoughtfulness to gifting. The company’s vision is to be the world’s most innovative and reliable destination for all gifting.
Floward’s innovative eCommerce platform quickly became the first-choice destination, enabling customers to effortlessly browse stunning floral arrangements and a variety of gifts and send them to their loved ones with just a few clicks.
The global flower delivery services market is projected to reach $10.1 billion by 2031, underscoring the power of Floward’s vision and the industry’s immense potential.
However, this success came with its challenges.
Long wait times, generic responses, and the inability to cater to individual preferences challenged their customers, especially during peak seasons such as Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. It was clear that a new approach was needed to keep up with the company’s rapid growth while preserving the warmth and intimacy that made Floward special.
Additionally, Floward found itself navigating a constantly evolving landscape. The ever-changing demands of consumers, intense competition, and rapid technological advancements require constant adaptation and innovation. While Floward’s platform offered convenience, the company recognized the need for a more personalized and efficient customer support system to cater to its growing and loyal customer base.
Solution
Leveraging data-driven insights, chatbots, and omnichannel conversational support to foster customer loyalty
Floward decided to embrace technology to enhance, rather than replace, the human touch. They partnered with Infobip to integrate omnichannel capabilities into their platform and create personalized customer journeys over channels of their customers’ choice.
WhatsApp Business Platform, Instagram, and Messenger were strategically chosen as their primary channels because of their immense popularity in the MENA region, as evidenced by a 146% increase in mobile app messaging and a 51% increase in WhatsApp usage on our platform in 2023.
Using our chatbot building platform, Answers, Floward built smart chatbots that seamlessly integrate into WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. If customers need to track the delivery or want to add a personalized note, the chatbot can handle it effortlessly and in a conversational way. This frees human agents to focus on more complex issues, ensuring customers receive personalized attention.
If a customer’s question was too complex for the chatbot, they could easily connect with a live agent, all within the same chat window, thanks to our cloud contact center, Conversations. This seamless transition ensured that customers never feel abandoned and that their queries are always addressed promptly and efficiently.
With the increased number of orders, agent workload becomes a lot higher. Advanced features such as Macros, Workflows, and SLAs help our agents become more productive and effective.
Lujain Mallosh
Customer Service Manager, Floward
Using our customer data platform, People CDP, Floward can collect and import data from any source to gain important insights about customer behavior and preferences.
And it wasn’t just customers who benefited. They could track agent statistics to identify performance trends and optimize training.
Take this example: Mother’s Day, a day when the demand for floral arrangements surges—in the past, such peak seasons had put immense strain on Floward’s customer service. Customers, anxious about ensuring their gifts arrived on time, often flooded the support lines with repeated queries. But now, the narrative has changed. Customers who eagerly await their same-day deliveries can easily track their orders in real time, receiving instant updates on their bouquets’ journey. Any questions or concerns are swiftly addressed through their preferred channels, providing immediate reassurance and maintaining the excitement of the occasion.
Similarly, for Valentine’s Day, Floward’s diverse range of gifts, including cakes, chocolates, and perfumes, makes it a one-stop shop for surprises. Imagine finding a stunning bouquet and a chocolate box you know your partner will adore. Even if you don’t have your partner’s office address, Floward has you covered. With the option to send gifts using just a phone number, they coordinate the delivery seamlessly to ensure the surprise remains intact. Throughout the day, you receive real-time updates on the status of your delivery, from preparation to dispatch and, finally, delivery, ensuring a seamless and joyful Valentine’s Day experience.
During peak seasons, like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, Infobip has been a lifesaver. With their easy-to-use platform, we were able to handle a massive surge in customer interactions without compromising the quality of our service. The chatbot has also been a valuable asset, reducing agent workload and providing instant customer responses.
Lujain Mallosh
Customer Service Manager, Floward
Result
Improved agent productivity, delivering exceptional service, and reducing costs
The impact was felt all across their customer support operations. Agents found themselves empowered with tools that streamlined their workflow, and customers experienced quicker, more efficient resolutions to their issues.
1 minute – average response time
SLA 95% achievement rate
The company gained valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points with the data they now collect. This information was used to identify areas for improvement, optimize customer support strategies, and ultimately deliver a more personalized and seamless experience.
Additionally, the chatbot, in particular, proved to be a valuable asset. They smoothly guide new customers through the process, while existing customers’ orders are automatically retrieved based on their phone numbers. If customers need additional support, they can easily connect with an agent. Chatbots were crucial in reducing agent workload by handling general inquiries and responding instantly to customers.
However, the actual test came during peak seasons, such as Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. On Valentine’s Day 2024, they received 54,000 conversations in a single day, compared to 4,000-5,000 conversations on a typical day.
Floward efficiently handled this significantly high number of customer interactions, with a 14% cost reduction.
Customers felt heard, understood, and valued, strengthening their loyalty to the brand. What’s more, Floward’s customer support team felt empowered and motivated to deliver exceptional service.
By embracing technology and data-driven insights, Floward not only overcame its customer support challenges but also set a new benchmark for the industry. The company’s commitment to innovation and personalized experiences continues to blossom, ensuring that every customer feels like a valued individual, no matter how large the company grows.
Infobip not only streamlined our operations but also empowered our agents to deliver exceptional service. The chat history tracking, smart automation, and tagging features have significantly improved our efficiency and helped us better understand our customers. But what truly sets Infobip apart is their commitment to their customer success. Their support team has been incredibly responsive and supportive, always going above and beyond to ensure our needs are met. They’ve been true partners in our journey to elevate customer support and achieve our business goals.
Lujain Mallosh
Customer Service Manager, Floward
Discover how other brands are optimizing their user journeys with Infobip
Company Profile
About Floward
Established in 2017, Floward is a full-fledged e-commerce solution that offers prime fresh-cut flowers sourced from the best growers and farmers around the world and arranged locally by a team of florists and designers. Floward also offers cakes, chocolate and perfumes curated by the region’s most exciting designers bundled with its flower arrangements and manages last-mile same-day delivery to ensure the best customer experience.
Vai de Bus: Revolutionizing public transportation ticketing with conversational commerce via Payments on WhatsApp
98%
of passengers opt-in to payment method
85%
conversion rate for Payment on WhatsApp purchases
17%
growth in recurring purchases
Challenge
Simplifying public transportation ticketing in Brazil
Every day, 33 million Brazilians rely on public transportation to navigate their cities. However, their daily commute is often marred by long queues at ticket counters with limited-service hours. In some cases, these counters only accept cash, adding another layer of inconvenience.
Vai de Bus, an innovative startup in the urban and road transportation sector, is passionate about transforming the daily experience of millions of Brazilians who rely on public transportation.
They envisioned a future where buying tickets wouldn’t involve frustrating queues, limited hours, or the need for physical cash. By making it easy, secure, and accessible – all through a channel everyone already uses: WhatsApp.
Vai de Bus already used WhatsApp Business Platform to enable passengers to reserve tickets and recharge their travel cards. This eliminated the need for additional app downloads or registrations, perfectly aligning with their goal of providing a seamless journey.
Today 99% of Brazilian phones have WhatsApp installed. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to create a new app to buy tickets and recharge transportation cards. We joke that we use a super app in our solution – and one that is already installed on your phone. You don’t need to download it, you don’t need to register, you don’t need to do anything else and even so you are already enabled to use Vai de Bus anywhere in Brazil.”
Fernando Souza
Founder and CTO, Vai de Bus
However, the payment step presented a significant hurdle.
Here’s why:
- Security concerns: Brazilians are still getting used to registering their credit / debit cards in WhatsApp and keeping sensitive data on the channel.
- Friction with PIX codes: PIX is Brazil’s popular instant payment method. However, sending PIX codes via text messages often results in broken links or user confusion when copying the complex payment information. This created friction and ultimately lost sales.
The copy and paste of PIX was always a problem – you end up losing 3 to 4 sales before the user can make the transaction.”
Fernando Souza
Founder and CTO, Vai de Bus
What is PIX?
PIX is an instant payment system created by Brazil’s Central Bank. It allows people and businesses to send and receive money electronically in Brazilian Reals (BRL) in just seconds, 24/7. It doesn’t require full bank account details to be shared.
Fernando continues, “We knew PIX was the preferred payment method. We envisioned a solution that seamlessly integrated PIX transactions within Payments on WhatsApp, offering a simple and familiar experience.”
This passenger-centric approach drove their search for a communications partner that could complete the entire conversational experience loop and would enable payments in a convenient and secure manner over WhatsApp.
The need was clear: find a conversational customer experience platform that would co-create with them to offer a secure and user-friendly payment option that leveraged the power of PIX within the familiar environment of WhatsApp. Enter Infobip.
Solution
Co-creating a passenger-centric conversational commerce experience
At Infobip, we understood that a pre-built solution wouldn’t suffice. Vai de Bus’ vision for a frictionless passenger experience demanded a more innovative approach. This is where our technological prowess and their vision came together to co-create a solution.
We joined forces with Vai de Bus and Meta, forming a development team focused on a single goal: integrating PIX payments within WhatsApp Payments.
How was this done?
Leveraging our WhatsApp APIs: Vai de Bus appointed us as their official Meta solutions provider, gaining access to our entire suite of WhatsApp features, including buttons, lists, templates, Flows, and crucially – Payments.
Going beyond pre-built solutions: Together, we embarked on a three-month co-creation journey with Meta to develop a custom API integration. This integration replaced the clunky text message with PIX codes within a native WhatsApp payment message.
Building a user-friendly flow: Here’s how the improved passenger journey unfolds on WhatsApp:
- Choose your top-up amount: The passenger interacts with a WhatsApp list, selecting their desired top-up amount for the transportation card.
- Secure payment options: A clear and familiar payment screen appears, offering both credit/debit card and PIX payment options.
- Effortless PIX payment: Selecting PIX brings up a secure payment message within WhatsApp. The user can review all transaction details and simply click a button to copy the entire PIX code – no more broken links or typos.
- Confirmation made easy: The integration also includes an API call that ensures the user receives confirmation upon successful PIX payment completion.
This co-created solution addressed both security concerns and passenger experience challenges. As Fernando Souza, Vai de Bus’ Founder and CTO, emphasizes, “Our customers rely on a smooth and efficient service. The strong partnership with Infobip has ensured a seamless user experience and a reliable foundation for our future growth.”
By working together, we made the vision of conversational commerce for Vai de Bus into a reality.
Result
98% of passengers opt-in to this transformative conversational commerce option
Within a single month, over 60,000 PIX transactions streamed through the platform, a clear indicator of user adoption. And just seven months later, Vai de Bus reached the milestone of 1 million transactions streamed through the platform! PIX transactions soared to a staggering 98% of all ticket purchases on Vai de Bus.
- Frictionless transactions: The new integration slashed transaction times by 12-15%, a significant improvement for busy commuters.
- Recurring purchases: A 17% growth in recurring passenger highlights the convenience and positive experience they were having.
- Sales surge: Sales jumped by 8%, demonstrating the direct correlation between a smooth passenger journey and increased business growth.
- Loyalty boost: An impressive 85% conversion rate for repurchases using Payments on WhatsApp speaks volumes about the loyalty fostered by this innovative solution.
The partnership between Meta, Vai de Bus and Infobip has already transformed more than 1 million transactions into a simpler, safer and more intuitive experience for over 200,000 passengers across Brazil. And that number is destined to grow in the future. We empowered them with a faster, more secure, and undeniably convenient way to purchase tickets – all within the familiar environment of WhatsApp.
Our customer buys a ticket because they need to work, go to the doctor or for some appointment. In other words, our operation is very sensitive and that’s why I have to have a very well-structured relationship with my providers. And today I have a very good relationship with Infobip, which flows very well. We haven’t had any problems since we started working with them and this partnership has everything to last.”
Fernando Souza
Founder and CTO, Vai de Bus
Discover how other businesses achieve results with Infobip
Company Profile
About Vai de Bus
Vai de Bus is a startup looking to change the way people connect. With a fluid journey, the Vai de Bus team seeks to deliver the best experience for buying public transportation tickets in several cities in Brazil – always with security, integration and innovation.
nextbike: Innovating transactional use cases with a secure and engaging rich messaging approach
90%
secure delivery rate
Challenge
The need for secure and timely transactional messages
nextbike, a pioneering bike-sharing platform and European market leader strives to make cycling an integral part of urban mobility.
- 90 million kms cycled in 2023
- 20.7 million kg of CO2 saved
With over 45 million rides per year, they needed to ensure the integrity of its rapidly growing user base.
As customer numbers soared, so did the need to keep them informed at every step of the journey with transactional messages such as secure OTPs (one-time password), journey alerts, password reset alerts, reminders, and payment confirmations.
nextbike required a communications partner that could:
- deliver these messages reliably, still
- protect against fraud,
- and enhance the overall customer experience.
As the demand for bike sharing solutions has grown further, ensuring secure and reliable message delivery became a top priority for nextbike. We needed a solution that could handle our scale, securely.”
Tonio Bierhoff
Head of Marketing, nextbike
Importance of timely transactional messages delivery: Timely delivery of messages like OTPs and service-related ones were essential for an uninterrupted user experience. Delays can frustrate customers and lead to abandoned rides or negative consumer experiences.
Need for a verified sender ID and a trusted channel: These transactional messages needed to be delivered from a trusted source to maintain consumer confidence. Verified business profiles, as offered by RCS Business Messaging (RBM), provide an added layer of security and authenticity. Customers were more likely to trust a message from a verified sender, reducing the risk of phishing attacks and fraudulent activity.
However, to do this they need a single communications platform that could reliably send transactional messages over SMS and RBM via secure routes and at the same time ensure there was no artificial inflation of traffic.
Customer trust is paramount to nextbike. Because our bike sharing solutions have to leave a reliable impression to both B2C and B2G (business-to-government) customers. We wanted a communications partner that not only delivered messages safely but also verified our business identity to prevent fraud and build trust.”
Tonio Bierhoff
Head of Marketing, nextbike
Solution
SMS and RBM: A powerful combination for reliable and engaging messages
To overcome these challenges, nextbike partnered with Infobip, due to our leading CPaaS capabilities that provided securely routed SMS and RBM transactional messages in a cost-effective manner.
SMS powered by our platform provided nextbike with a high-performance channel for delivering time-sensitive messages such as OTPs during account creation and password resets, service related notifications, alerts etc. Our extensive network coverage and proven track record of delivering messages at scale meant nextbike could confidently rely on the timely delivery of messages.
In pursuit of an even more engaging customer experience, nextbike adopted RCS Business Messaging. This conversational channel allowed nextbike to send visually rich and interactive transactional messages, strengthening brand identity and enhancing security. To ensure uninterrupted service, SMS remained a reliable fallback option.
SMS provided the reliability and reach we needed, while RBM added a new level of modern engagement and security to our OTP delivery.”
Tonio Bierhoff
Head of Marketing, nextbike
Innovating OTP verifications with RCS Business Messaging
As an early adopter, nextbike quickly saw the potential of RBM. Our strong partnership with major German telcos (Telefonica, Vodafone, and Deutsche Telekom) and Google helped nextbike reach most Android customers in the region.
In addition, their proactivity in adopting RBM early on ensures they are ready for when Apple will roll out the channel on iOS devices, securing them a reach of 98% of phones in the region.
While SMS continues to stay as a fallback channel, RBM adds an additional layer of branding with:
- Verified sender: nextbike customers can trust that their messages are genuinely from nextbike, reducing the chance of falling for scams and making interactions more secure and reliable.
- Branded messages: Messages now include nextbike’s logo, name, and tagline, making it easy for customers to recognize the brand and boosting overall trust and familiarity.
- Previewing URLs: Any linked content shows a preview of the landing page, making the messages more attractive and helps users know what they’re clicking on, leading to better click-through rates.
- Enhanced accessibility: nextbike can make their business email, phone number, and website details clickable. This “tap-and-go” approach ensures customers can easily access support and information.
- Innovative format: The mix of reliability and rich media added a refreshing modernness to the way transactional messages were sent by nextbike, positioning them as innovators.
Using the combination of the two channels with RBM as the main one is more cost effective than sending SMS messages via direct and secure routes.
Result
Enhanced security, increased branding, and improved user experience
Partnering with our platform yielded exceptional results for nextbike. With a 90% secure SMS delivery rate between 2020 and 2023, the company experienced a significant reduction in support inquiries related to not receiving important messages.
The combination of RBM and SMS created a robust and secure verification process that instilled confidence in customers.
Adopting an omnichannel approach by using RBM as the main channel, with SMS as the failover helped in:
- Reducing costs
- Increasing brand visibility
- Providing an engaging verification experience
By using an innovative channel like RBM, nextbike solidified its position as a leader in the bike-sharing industry. The company’s commitment to customer security and innovation, coupled with our powerful communication solutions, has driven substantial growth and strengthened customer loyalty.
Infobip has been an invaluable partner in our journey in providing innovative customer experiences over RBM and SMS. Their expertise in communication solutions, easy integration and omnichannel capabilities has enabled us to deliver secure experiences for OTP delivery and verification for our users. With an omnichannel approach, and using RCS Business Messaging, we have been able to increase trust with our customers while being able to enrich brand perception.”
Tonio Bierhoff
Head of Marketing, nextbike
Discover how other on-demand businesses achieve results with Infobip
Company Profile
About nextbike
nextbike are pioneers of the mobility revolution. For over two decades, they have been developing innovative bike-sharing solutions for urban and rural areas. Since then, they’ve established bike sharing as an elemental component of public transport in more than 300 locations worldwide.
Metrobank: Enhanced marketing communications and significant cost efficiencies with Viber for Business
30 – 50%
cost reduction for rich marketing messages
Challenge
Deliver rich marketing messages on a cost-effective digital channel
As one of the top three banks in the Philippines, Metrobank is a household name in the financial sector with a broad range of products, including retail banking, loans, credit cards, and insurance.
As part of its digital transformation journey the bank recognized the benefits of adopting a new digital messaging channel for marketing communications that was popular with their customers and offered advantages in terms of rich messaging functionality and cost savings.
Viber was identified as an important channel in the Philippine market due to its high penetration rate amongst urban professionals, and the range of features that it provides to enhance the customer experience.
Key benefits of adopting Viber for Business for Metrobank
- Increased effectiveness of marketing messages with rich media, including images and buttons
- Simple message personalization with data from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- A trusted messaging app ideal for important information broadcasts that help to keep customers safe from fraud.
- A character limit of up to 1,000 when compared with the 160 limit of SMS
For any highly regulated financial institution the increased character limit is an important consideration. Crafting an effective promotional message that clearly describes the proposition and includes both an effective call to action and all the required statutory information is extremely difficult with a 160-character limit, but easily achievable with Viber.
Operating In a strictly regulated industry and with multiple product-specific legacy systems within the organization, the challenge for Metrobank was to introduce Viber for Business without disrupting existing processes and with minimum additional work. To achieve this would require partnering with a technology vendor who could provide an automated and reliable integration with their existing Salesforce CRM system for the sending of messages.
Solution
Integrating Viber for Business with Salesforce for a seamless messaging experience
The team at Metrobank evaluated several vendors that claimed to facilitate messaging through Viber for Business, both directly and via a Salesforce integration. We stood out as the only vendor that could provide both, via the Infobip portal and a simple to implement Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration that could be solely managed by the marketing team at the bank.
Infobip were able to demonstrate the integration in real-time and through its due-diligence procedures, Metrobank’s IT and security experts were able to confirm that it was as simple and reliable as it appeared, with no impact on existing business processes or data integrity.
This solution provided several key advantages for Metrobank:
- Simple and quick plugin deployment that didn’t require technical resources from other departments
- Ability to send Viber messages from the existing CRM tool that staff were familiar with
- The flexibility to send Viber deployments as part of a Journey in Salesforce Marketing Cloud or via Infobip ensured 100% availability
The process of sending a message deployment via Salesforce using Infobip’s plugin can be summarized in five simple steps.
Sending a Viber deployment using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- From the Salesforce Marketing Cloud staff create a new Journey in Journey Builder.
- They then select Infobip Message Custom Activity and select Viber as the communication channel.
- They then add the message text and optionally include an image or a button to be displayed in the message.
- Select the audience that will receive the message via the data extension.
- Deploy the Journey as usual
The marketing team spent just two days setting up the implementation from a one-page set of instructions provided by Infobip. Our local staff were on hand via video call while they completed the steps, but no intervention was required due to the simplicity of the process.
After just a week of in-house testing the team were confident enough with the solution to start sending live messages over Viber for Business.
Result
Up to 50% cost reduction for rich marketing messages
Metrobank staff were extremely satisfied with the ease and speed of setting up and managing the Viber implementation and how seamlessly it blended into existing processes. For all steps in the project, the time and resources required to achieve results were less than forecast.
After monitoring the new Viber channel for several months, the team recorded average cost savings of between 30% and 50% when compared to the same types of messages delivered by SMS. The higher figure was for more detailed and informative messages that would have required multiple SMS messages to convey, with a direct impact on cost.
The savings have enabled the team to achieve more with their communications budget and deliver tangible value for the bank.
Metrobank are now exploring how Viber’s two-way messaging capability could be used to drive further efficiencies and improve the customer experience. For example, by enabling front-line staff to use Viber for both customer support and relationship management use cases.
Infobip provided a solution that enabled us to quickly start benefitting from using Viber for Business for sending marketing messages, using both a portal and an integration with our CRM system. The integration with Salesforce was extremely easy to set up with no disruption to our businesses processes, and no requirement to involve technical resources from other departments. We have been very satisfied with the entire process and appreciate the ease of working with a partner with a local office in the Philippines.
Ramon Martin Rodriguez
Performance Marketing Head
Learn how other brands are using Viber Business Messages to drive sales and improve customer satisfaction
Company profile:
About Metrobank
Established in 1962, the Metropolitan Bank & Trust Company is among the foremost financial institutions in the Philippines. With a history spanning more than 60 years, it aims to deliver meaningful banking to Filipinos everywhere. It boasts a diverse product portfolio including investment banking, thrift banking, leasing and financing, insurance, and credit cards.
It offers a full range of services to large local and multinational corporations, middle-market and SMEs, high net-worth individuals and retail segment.