In the weird carefree days before COVID, enterprises were urged to give their customers a wide range of communications options. SMS? Rich chat? Social? Voice? Do them all!

Well, some did. Others were in less of a hurry. Their shops and call centres were still open, after all. Obviously, the pandemic changed all that. It left the stragglers with no choice but to go ‘omnichannel’.

Message specialists like Syniverse saw this change happening up close. They observed the challenges of moving quickly to a new mobile-first strategy – and also the opportunities this switch opened up.

In the MEF’s Future of Messaging Guide, published in September, we interviewed Syniverse’s Jeff Bak about this topic. And in late October, we followed up with a special one-to-one webinar Q&A.

We asked him:

• The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital comms and customer care. But speaking personally, what changes have you seen in your client base?
• What are the main channel options available to enterprises? What are the pros and cons of each?
• How do the most popular comms channels vary in adoption from region to region?
• Syniverse uses what you call ‘orchestration’ to help companies deliver the right message at the right time on the right channel. What is orchestration?
• Most enterprises now use cloud products like Salesforce and Adobe to manage their CRM, marketing and more. How can they integrate messaging into these products.
• Conversational messaging is the goal for many enterprises. How widespread is it?
• Conversational messaging brings with it new business models beyond ‘per message’. What are the options?

Check out all of Jeff’s insights here.