Meta, the technology conglomerate which owns Facebook, is eyeing improved business transactions and overall experience within its messaging platforms.
Meta, together with the Boston Consulting Group, conducted a survey to determine the impact of business messaging, with about 6,500 respondents across countries in the Asia-Pacific region including Australia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
Meta country director for Philippines John Rubio and Boston Consulting Group managing director and senior partner in the Philippines Anthony Oudjian disclosed the results of the survey in a briefing on Tuesday.
The findings indicated the prevalence of business messaging across all age groups, particularly millennials and Gen Z users.
“If something really changed [throughout] the pandemic, it’s that there [has] been some sort of initially forced adoption of digital platforms for some, I would say, late bloomers, but now there is a very high adoption and a very good familiarity with the tool,” Oudjian said.
Oudjian said 60 percent of Filipinos interact with businesses through chat “at least once every two to three weeks.”
“There are many dimensions behind that [business messaging]. There is convenience of doing it quietly. There is a consumer-to-consumer communication that is expanding to consumer-to-business channels. There is also the fact that it’s kind of ‘always on’, thanks to the bots and various mechanisms [of messaging apps],” Boston Consulting Group managing director and senior partner in the Philippines Anthony Oudjian said.
The study revealed that business messaging is also gaining traction among large enterprises as they now see the platform as critical to their success going forward.
“There is this groundswell of movement towards messaging particularly in our region and specifically for the Philippines. We started seeing this a lot for small businesses, but we’re seeing this for larger and larger businesses as well,” Rubio said.
Results of the survey showed that about 97 percent of businesses in the Philippines preferred Meta technologies over other platforms because Filipinos tend to discover new brands or products through the likes of Facebook, which is the same platform they use in their everyday lives.
The study said over a billion people message businesses each week across Meta’s products Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct and WhatsApp.
Various small and big businesses have ventured into social media platforms over the past two years as they deal with mobility restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The fact that Facebook is so active in the country, that people have access to Facebook for free, so a lot of the conversations have been channeled through these platforms as an extension of their peer-to-peer conversation but then increasingly as a way to buy [and] engage,” Oudjian said.
Rubio said companies utilizing Meta technologies for customer transactions are seeing gains in marketing and sales, particularly customer satisfaction, because of its automated features that can instantly respond to the consumers’ basic queries and recurring notifications.
“What it does is that it frees up the agents to handle more complex questions, which drives better results at scale for businesses and we’re seeing all these across the world especially in the Philippines,” Rubio said.
A Statista report published in January 2022 showed that the Philippines is among the top ten countries with most Facebook users at about 83 million. “We’re the leading country globally on Messenger. More and more people are starting to share stories, do reels on Instagram. As a platform, we have pretty much every Filipino spending time with us,” Rubio said.