Elloe AI Partners With Google Business Messages

Elloe AI has just announced its partnership with Google’s Business Messages. Elloe, the first African company within the Business Messages ecosystem, sets the stage for an exciting relationship.

“Google’s Business Messages is built to create quick, meaningful, and effective connections with customers,” said Gerishon Mwaniki, Partnerships Manager at Elloe. “We’re pleased to bring the benefits of Google’s Business Messages to global brands by making it easy to manage customer inquiries in one platform.”

As consumers’ preferences continue to evolve, the opportunity to differentiate by meeting your customers on their preferred channels grows. Especially as there is an increasing expectation that private messaging channels can be used for both customer support and commerce conversations with a brand.

More than half of consumers listed at least one method of asynchronous messaging, such as text or messaging applications, in their top three preferred ways of communicating with businesses. This partnership enables businesses to engage directly with consumers in one of the top places they go to look for information, Google Search and Maps.

With the Elloe conversational commerce, businesses can build custom customer care and commerce use cases across channels and add additional channels — like Google’s Business Messages — as they become available on the Elloe Conversational Commerce Platform.

Meeting consumers where they are

In their moments of need, customers look to Google first to know, go, buy, or do something with a business. As a result, this is not a new channel that consumers would need to adopt — they are already there. And it’s where they want to engage with your business. Google Search entry points led to 2 billion direct connections per month in Africa in 2021 in the form of phone calls, requests for directions, messages, bookings, and reviews.

From Google Search and Google Maps consumers can click to chat directly with a business. Through that interaction, you can also get access to first-party data to better understand and communicate with customers.

“Google Search is one of the largest entry points in the world for customer care. People go there looking to contact a business, and they often only find phone numbers. As a result, call volumes are skyrocketing, customer support costs are high, and customer experiences are suffering,” said Owen Sakawa, CEO & Founder.

Consumer-initiated support and commerce
Purchases become clearer when you can answer a customer’s question right from a search result. Google’s Business Messages has features with that in mind, creating a visual and engaging shopping experience. This in turn allows customers to see product catalogues through photo cards and carousels and respond to messages with a tap using quick reply to buttons.

53 per cent of customers say they are more likely to shop with businesses they can message, and Google’s Business Messages allows you to interact with them where they are looking for information when they are ready to buy, enabling your business to drive sales.

When customers have a product question or issue, they often turn to Google to understand how to address their issue or contact your business support team. With Google’s Business Messages, you can respond to their questions right from their search result and take the value of live chat on your website and extend it through Google, decreasing the number of clicks it takes a consumer to engage with your team.

You can have a few live agents handling incoming customer questions and eventually scale to add in automation or handle more complex inquiries. With 67 per cent of consumers saying they would rather message a business than speak to a person, helping consumers resolve product issues over their preferred channel will help grow customer satisfaction.

 “Elloe’s integration with Google’s Business Messages solves these challenges by enabling brands to deflect high call volumes, and use Elloe’s AI to respond more efficiently. With inquiries from social media and messaging all in one place, brands can easily listen to and engage customers on the channels they use most,” concluded Sakawa.