Triggering Message Suggest

When your customers tap on any of your registered business phone numbers, a phone sheet appears allowing your customers to choose between voice and messaging. The Message Suggest feature allows your customers to contact you through Apple Messages for Business in the Messages app.

Brands can reduce phone call volume by offering Message Suggest instead. Given that messaging offers a better agent to customer concurrency ratio compared with either voice or live chat, brands can potentially reduce their contact center operational costs by launching Message Suggest.

You can trigger Message Suggest from search, Apple Maps, and a website.

Benefits & Getting Started

By enabling Message Suggest, you can:

• Deflect calls before they reach your IVR queue
• Reduce voice support costs by shifting call volume to messaging
• Increase customer satisfaction by reducing wait times and getting cut-off in mid-conversation on phone lines
• Better customer experience with built-in features, such as Apple Pay, list pickers, time pickers, and augmented reality

Get Started Today!

Send an email to the Messages for Business team with the following Message Suggest form and Apple can set up the numbers for you using the to aid you in developing the appropriate response and tracking for customers going through this channel.

• Provide your business phone contact hours.
• Provide all of your primary and high call volume phone numbers.
• Provide your current call volume for these phone numbers.
• Provide the intent and body parameters to associate with each phone number. Intent, group, and body values define a customer's intent so you can quickly direct them to the appropriate group within your support organization. For more information, see About Intent, Group, and Body Values.
• Provide how many agents you have to support customers over Messages for Business.

The following screenshots are of an an iPhone with no Message Suggest and with Message Suggest (right).

Measuring Message Suggest Volume

The effectiveness of the Messages for Business channel is assessed by measuring the conversion from voice to chat, by tracking overall reduction in call volume, increased customer satisfaction and NPS scores, and reduction in operational costs.

To accurately measure the conversion from voice to messaging from Message Suggest, you can calculate the conversion rate by measuring the phone call volume before and after enabling Message Suggest. For example, the call volume on a phone number prior to Message Suggest was 350 per day. After Message Suggest, the message volume from Message Suggest is 70 per day and the call volume decreased by same amount. Based on this information you can calculate that 20% of calls convert to messaging.

For a detailed approach, track Message Suggest performance on brand properties as described in the best practices below.

Capture taps on all pages where the registered phone number appears. Measure the number of taps on the registered phone number on the page from where the tap originated on your website and iOS app, if applicable.

Measure taps from iOS 13 and later. Make sure you are capturing the taps on the registered phone number by iOS 13+ users only. Message Suggest is enabled for iOS 13 and later.

Measure Message Suggest volume. Track the intent ID for all incoming messages to measure the volume of messages from Message Suggest. When a customer chooses the Messages for Business option on the Message Suggest UI, the message delivers the intent ID value in the header.

Model your call volume. Customers tend to rely on search engines to quickly find a phone number. Message Suggest volume from search engine results should also be considered in calculating the conversions. Plan to apply the conversion rate from web analytics to overall call to messaging volume.

Determine your conversion rate. You can find the conversation rate by taking the total number of taps on a phone number and divide it by the number of Message Suggest messages received from that same phone number.

The following conditions may affect your conversion rate:

Additional iOS entry points to Messages for Business. Track other brand-enabled entry points, such as Apple Maps, Siri, or business card, separately for measuring conversion rates.

Other Message Suggest entry points. Consider incoming volume from other sources, such as phone taps on search engine results and other social media sites, when calculating the conversion rate.

Messages button on the website. If brands place the Messages button on the website or app, it contributes to an increase in overall volume of Messages for Business messages. However, this may decrease the conversation rate, if the Message Suggest registered phone number is also on the same page.

Maximizing Message Suggest

To reduce phone support costs, you should try to maximize message volume by deflecting voice calls. Based on the observations Apple has made since launching the Message Suggest feature, we recommend the following best practices to maximize volume from Message Suggest.

Register all primary numbers. For higher deflection to messaging, register phone numbers with high call volume for Message Suggest.

Make sure the registered phone numbers are easily tappable on your web sites and apps. Use the E.164 format for registered phone numbers to trigger the Message Suggest UI in iOS. Images or text-formatted phone numbers are not tappable. For more information on how to create tappable telephone links, see Phone Links.

Ensure high visibility to maximize volume. Verify that Message Suggest enabled numbers are easily
visbile across your mobile website, search results and apps. Availability ensures that all brand iOS customers have access to the feature which results in higher deflection and reduced call volume.

Setup automated message for off hours. Because Messages for Business is asynchronous, customers can message brands at any time including off hours when live agents aren’t available. For brands not leveraging automation to assist customers during off hours, Apple recommends that you provide an automated response to inform customers that live agents can address their inquiry when they return.

Appropriate call-to-action message set by Apple to meet capacity. Assuming customers always have access to a live agent, Apple sets your call-to-action messages so that customers understand that they can get help quickly from a live agent. You have the option to change it to meet your business needs. Contact the Messages for Business Team to update your call-to-action text.