FACEBOOK Philippines on Friday said its Messenger platform alone has recorded a monthly message exchange of 10 billion worldwide, both for business and personal purposes.
“Messaging is growing at a global scale and transforming expectations of businesses of any size to be more responsive, and build more meaningful connections with their customers,” said John Rubio, country director for Facebook Philippines, in a press briefing held in its Bonifacio Global City (BGC) office.
“We see more and more people seeking store hours, product details and gift ideas. People are booking dinner reservations and plane tickets, receiving boarding passes, sharing feedback and more, all through messaging apps,” Rubio added.
Rubio said the Philippines is one of the global indicators of mobile communications, citing that messaging has tremendously improved with the enhancement of mobile technology.
“Even small to medium businesses [SMBs] in the Philippines have realized the importance of using Facebook Messenger in their business transactions,” he said.
In a study, Filipinos rank second for the longest amount of time spent on the Internet daily while spending an average of four hours and eight minutes online on their mobile phones, Moreover, 87 percent of Filipino Internet users are on social media.
Across eight markets surveyed globally, Rubio said 80 percent of adults message daily, with 67 percent of respondents saying they saw an increase in their use of messaging apps in the past two years. About 51 percent of respondents admitted that messaging has come to replace other forms of communication in their daily lives.
Rubio said messaging emerged as the preferred mode of communication over making a call or sending an e-mail for 64 percent of respondents in a Facebook-commissioned Nielsen study.
The majority of people surveyed who said they message businesses do so throughout their consumer journey. Over 81 percent of people messaged businesses to ask about a product or service and over 74 percent messaged to make a purchase. When it came to customer service concerns, over 76 percent used messaging to ask for product or service support, while more than 79 percent messaged to give feedback on a product or service.
Rubio said people are more confident in using Facebook Messenger over more traditional customer-service channels, stressing that over 58 percent of people surveyed feel more confident messaging a business than calling them on the phone. Over 58 percent feel more confident messaging than filling out a form on a web site, and over 55 percent feel more confident messaging than e-mailing a business.
For businesses in the Philippines, being able to ride this shift in communication style can mean the difference between failure and success. Though nearly 7 out of 10 businesses surveyed felt they are able to communicate effectively with consumers, only 2 in 10 surveyed customers agree.
“With messaging, we see an opportunity to connect more meaningfully with things that people are passionate about. What we’ve seen is that messaging shortens the distance between people and what they want—whether it is for businesses or communities that want to drive conversations, make transactions, or simply take better care of their customers,” Rubio added.
The top 3 online activities of Filipinos are chatting/messaging (81 percent), browsing/posting on social media (77 percent) and watching videos (49 percent).