Optimize Your Customer’s Apple Messages for Business Experience

After launching Apple Messages for Business, growing the channel through intelligent optimization is necessary to leverage the platform’s full potential for your business.

Although Apple doesn't provide any metrics, if you don't have metrics or analytics to gather, you can work with your Messaging Service Provider (MSP) to obtain the metrics you need.

First 30 Days

The first 30 days should be spent monitoring the agent team to make sure they can resolve all customer issues within the messaging channel, and to create a prioritized list of ways to improve agent training.

By the end of the first 30 days, the brand and MSP should appoint an optimization team with representatives from both the brand and the MSP.

Areas of improvement

At the end of the first 30 day period, the optimization team should review the operational metrics, focusing on the intents that have the greatest frequency, the worst CSAT, or highest agent time-to-resolve. The optimization team should select a few of the worst intents to improve:

  1. Intents with the highest frequency are candidates for automation.
  2. Intents with the lowest CSAT can usually be improved by connecting the customer more quickly to a live agent.
  3. Intents with the highest time-to-resolve can usually be improved through agent training, improving self-serve content, refining agent productivity tools like the agent desktop or Natural Language Processing (NLP) or bot system, or by improving customer productivity through apps or ABC built-in features.

The brand and MSP optimization team should create a regular process to review the worst intents and implement fixes, tracking how their improvements are reflected in driving higher customer satisfaction or lower agent time-to-resolve.

Automating intents

The optimization team should continue automating the most frequent and repetitive intents to increase live agent team capacity. Typically, a large enterprise can reach a level where at least 70% of customers are fully assisted by an automated agent without connecting to a live agent.

Increasing Traffic

The optimization team should increase messaging traffic in the following order, managing volume where necessary so that customers are connected with live agents within 3 minutes:

  1. Register the brand’s primary numbers for Message Suggest and follow Message Suggest best practices.
  2. Register all of the brand’s store phone numbers for Message Suggest, if there are physical locations and stores.
  3. Shift all web chat traffic to Apple Messages for Business for customers on all supported Apple devices.
  4. Add Apple Messages buttons to the brand’s website and app, in priority to phone numbers, with strong call-to-action messages, and displayed to every customer on a supported Apple device.
  5. Add Apple Messages buttons to email broadcasts, retail packages, and within the brand’s stores.

Quarterly Presentations

After a few optimization cycles, the MSP should work with the brand team to create a presentation for brand executives, highlighting:

  1. Monthly operational metrics since launch.
  2. How the experience of messaging in Apple Messages for Business compares to phone and other messaging channels in terms of customer satisfaction and time-to-resolve.
  3. A breakdown of optimization activities, showing the intents selected for improvement, the results of optimization in terms of increased CSAT and lower agent time-to-resolve, and how the optimizations translate into annualized cost savings for the business; and
  4. A plan to increase messaging volumes, a professional services budget to optimize the experience, and an estimated ROI from shifting customer traffic to ABC and continuing optimizations.

Next Steps

The outcome of the executive review should be a green light to increase customer traffic in Apple Messages for Business, and provide a budget for professional services to use for optimization.

After the green light from brand executives, the optimization team should create a plan for shifting agents from other channels to Apple Messages for Business. It’s best to create a regular cadence to train and transfer a group of agents over to Apple Messages for Business, along with adding customer traffic.

The optimization team should continue quarterly updates to brand executives to build confidence in the program. The team should report on how optimizing intents and shifting traffic from other channels to Apple Messages for Business is improving overall customer satisfaction and generating an ongoing annual ROI for the business.