What is Customer Messaging?

Customer Messaging is a form of digital customer communication that enables an ongoing, two-way, and typically asynchronous conversation between a customer and a brand over time. These conversations take place on platforms like SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple Messages for Business, or a brand’s own native in-app messaging client.

The key to understanding customer messaging is to see how it differs from other primary communication channels:

• vs. Live Chat: Live chat is synchronous (real-time) and session-based. Both the agent and the customer must be present at the same time. When the chat window is closed, the session and the conversation are typically over.
• vs. Email: Email is asynchronous (not in real-time) and formal. Each email is a discrete, separate message, and the conversation can feel disjointed and slow.
• Customer Messaging: Customer messaging is uniquely asynchronous yet persistent. It is a single, ongoing conversation thread that both the customer and the brand can pick up and put down at their convenience.

The Core Platforms of the Customer Messaging Ecosystem

Customer messaging takes place across a variety of platforms, which can be grouped into three main categories.

1. SMS/MMS

This is the original, ubiquitous messaging channel. SMS (Short Message Service) for text and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) for images are native to nearly every mobile phone on the planet. This makes them ideal for short, universal communications like appointment reminders, shipping notifications, and two-factor authentication codes.

2. Over-the-Top (OTT) Messaging Apps

OTT messaging apps are applications that use internet data to send and receive messages, bypassing traditional cellular networks. This is the dominant and fastest-growing category for customer messaging.

• Examples:
  • WhatsApp: The most popular messaging app globally, offering a rich platform for businesses to engage with customers.
  • Facebook Messenger: Allows brands to connect with customers directly through their Facebook page.
  • Apple Messages for Business: Enables customers to initiate conversations with businesses directly from Maps, Safari, and Search on Apple devices.
  • Google’s Business Messages: Allows customers to start a message conversation from a Google search result or Google Maps.

3. Native In-App and In-Website Messaging

This refers to messaging functionality that a company builds directly into its own mobile app or website. This creates a secure and persistent conversation thread within the brand’s owned digital property, allowing for deep integration with the customer’s account and history.

The Strategic Shift: Why Businesses are Embracing Customer Messaging

The rapid adoption of customer messaging is driven by powerful benefits for both the customer and the business.

Meeting Customers Where They Are

Modern customers, particularly younger demographics, live in messaging apps. For many, it is their primary and preferred mode of communication. A customer messaging strategy allows a brand to engage with its customers on the platforms they already use and love, rather than forcing them to switch to a different channel like a phone call or email.

The Unmatched Convenience of Asynchronous Communication

For the customer, the asynchronous nature of messaging is incredibly convenient. They can send a support query while waiting in line for coffee, put their phone down, and then read and respond to the agent’s reply later in the day when they have a free moment. They are not “tethered” to a live chat window or stuck on hold on the phone.

Driving Operational Efficiency in the Contact Center

For the business, the asynchronous model is a game-changer for efficiency.

• Agent Concurrency: A single human agent can manage multiple (often 3-5 or more) messaging conversations simultaneously. As they wait for a customer to reply in one conversation, they can be actively working on another. This is impossible with voice calls, and it dramatically improves agent productivity and reduces the cost-per-interaction.

The Power of a Persistent, Rich Conversation

The entire history of the customer’s conversation with the brand is stored in a single, continuous thread. This provides rich, ongoing context for both the customer and any agent who handles the interaction. The customer never has to repeat themselves, and the agent can instantly see the entire history of the issue.

The Role of BPO in Delivering Professional Messaging Services

Delivering seamless, high-quality customer messaging at scale is no longer just a convenience, it’s a strategic advantage. Managing thousands of real-time conversations across multiple platforms requires far more than just a capable chat system; it demands a deeply specialized operational ecosystem that unites technology, talent, and process discipline. This is where companies like Callzilla truly excel. With a robust CCaaS infrastructure capable of consolidating every messaging channel into a single intelligent queue, Callzilla ensures that customer inquiries are prioritized, routed, and resolved with precision and empathy. The company’s investment in specialized training has cultivated a team of professional agents who are fluent in the art of written communication, clear, concise, and brand-aligned, while maintaining the agility to juggle multiple concurrent conversations without sacrificing tone or quality.

At the heart of this performance lies Callzilla’s “universal agent” model, a hallmark of its nearshore delivery excellence from Bogotá, Colombia. These agents aren’t just contact center representatives, they are multilingual digital communicators trained to seamlessly navigate between voice, chat, email, and social messaging while mirroring the client’s brand personality in every interaction. The cultural and linguistic alignment with North American consumers enables them to write naturally, think contextually, and respond in real time, creating a sense of authentic connection that offshore solutions often struggle to achieve. Combined with time-zone proximity and shared collaboration windows, Callzilla’s nearshore model allows businesses to scale messaging operations intelligently, delivering not only responsiveness and accuracy, but also the warmth, nuance, and brand fidelity that today’s customers expect from every digital conversation.

Best Practices for an Effective Customer Messaging Strategy

1. Set Clear Expectations for Response Times: Since the channel is asynchronous, it is crucial to manage customer expectations. An automated initial reply should clearly state the expected response time (e.g., “Thanks for your message! Our team typically replies within 15 minutes.”).
2. Integrate AI Chatbots as the First Responder: An AI chatbot is the perfect tool to act as the first line of defense in a messaging channel. The bot can provide instant answers to the most common questions and handle the initial information gathering, with a seamless handoff to a human agent for more complex issues.
3. Develop a Specific “Messaging Voice”: The brand’s tone in a messaging conversation should be different from a formal email. It is typically more concise, can be slightly more casual, and can make appropriate use of tools like emojis to convey a friendly and helpful tone.
4. Unify Messaging with the CRM: To achieve a true 360-degree view of the customer, the entire messaging conversation transcript must be automatically logged in the company’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.

The Future of Customer Messaging: The Intelligent, Proactive Conversation

The role of customer messaging will continue to expand and become even more intelligent.

Proactive and Rich Messaging

The future is not just about reacting to inbound customer messages. Businesses will increasingly use messaging for proactive outreach, using rich media formats. For example, an airline will send a passenger their boarding pass with a scannable QR code directly via WhatsApp, or a retailer will send a shipping notification with an image of the product and an interactive map.

AI-Powered “Agentic” Conversations

The next generation of AI, known as agentic AI, will be able to handle an entire complex customer journey within a messaging app. A customer could message, “My product arrived broken, I need a replacement,” and the agentic AI could autonomously verify the order, process the return, ship a new item, and send the customer the new tracking number, all within the same conversation thread.