So how is Viber helping both consumers and businesses in this respect?
Constandache: We launched business messages about 10 years ago. Since then, businesses have been able to send notification messages in Viber, and in case the notification is not sent, there is a fallback to SMS, so users always receive a notification.
Over the last decade, we have added a lot more features to these messages. Originally, they were only promotional. We then spent a lot of time educating businesses to find the right balance between promotional and what we call transactional. These are notifications about orders, deliveries, credit card statements, and documents that can be sent as attachments to these messages.
We were really pushing the non-promotional angle. After that, as a natural evolution, we opened our APIs and enabled businesses to launch chatbots in Viber, so that they can continue their two-way conversations with users.
Consumers had a very big appetite for it, but businesses were initially very resistant because of how traditionally big businesses are set up and the fact that CRM remains split between different departments. The bigger the organization, the more fragmented the user experience is.
With COVID, we saw a lot of micro-businesses using personal messaging tools for business purposes. All of a sudden, from one day to the next, businesses were closed. For example, in the Philippines, many family-owned and small businesses had to communicate with their consumers, especially in the food industry. These businesses started using group chats to create group messaging with their clients, and this was very widespread. After the pandemic finished, we expected these chats to end because businesses opened physically again. But they continued.
This was actually the first instance of two-way conversations because businesses were responding in these group chats and communities, and talking to users. We realized that communities and group chats are not meant for business use. There are lots of people there, and users can see each other’s phone numbers. There was a lack of privacy, and businesses could message people at all hours. That wasn’t okay, so we said: “Okay, we’re going to give you a tool that is tailored to your needs, similar to what enterprises have.
So, we decided to allow users to create business accounts from where they can invite their customers. As a business account holder, you do not have access to your customers’ phone numbers; you’re just going to know their IDs, and then you can message them on a one-to-one basis, and they can message you.
We first allowed users to message the business, to maintain privacy and security and to allow consumers to really control how they connect with businesses. From there, we recently rolled out a range of “Business Plus” plans aimed at allowing these businesses to purchase promotional packages that give them messages and other features they can use to promote themselves or their products to consumers.
In parallel, we also launched a self-serve ads platform where micro-businesses can now go in by themselves and purchase ad inventory to advertise themselves on Viber. We aim this directly at SMBs. Large businesses and enterprises already benefit from these features, but we manage the process for SMBs. We create the business account for them, everything is verified, it’s vetted, and everything has the verification mark to ensure that businesses are who they truly say they are.
They benefit from advertising campaigns that are run and set up by our teams to ensure that we meet their marketing KPIs.
That’s a very long answer to your question, but we have created tools dedicated to allowing businesses of all sizes to interact with consumers. This is very important for us because we don’t want to create an environment where people are spammed with promotional messages and ads all the time. The user has to have control at all times over the type of promotions that they are shown and engage with.
Can you expand on privacy and data use? It is a huge concern, and besides just phone numbers, I’m sure consumers have other data that they’re sharing with businesses.
Constandache: First of all, this is very important: on a private level, Viber doesn’t collect any data because none of the private conversations are transited through the app on our servers. Whatever you are sending as a message sits on your phone and the phone of the person receiving the message, not on our server. We cannot access any of the private conversations.
When it comes to businesses of all sizes, they can only message people that they already have in their database. If you have not bought from a company or you haven’t signed up to their database, they should never be able to send you a message on Viber.
Ads are obviously different in the sense that we use the public information of the user in the app. “Public” means, for example, you follow a group or a community about fashion or news, so we infer that you are interested in fashion. Therefore, you’re going to see an ad from a fashion brand. But if you have shared with your friends that you want to buy a dress and that you found it in this shop on this street, we simply don’t know that. This is information that we don’t have as it does not exist.
Quite often, we just don’t remember that we signed up for something and we then receive a message we don’t want. Very importantly, if for whatever reason a business is violating our strict policies you as a user have full control over blocking or reporting the business, and making sure you don’t receive messages from the business anymore.
