Messaging has changed the way we communicate. Relationships big and small — from the personal to the political to the commercial – can be mapped out across conversations in the messaging apps almost everybody uses every day. In our annual conversational business report, State of Messaging 2020, we look at the biggest messaging stories from the past year, along with research, reporting, and predictions on how the future of messaging between brands and customers will play out.

The emergence of bots, AI, and interactivity in messaging has transformed channels like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and iMessage from places we chat to platforms where we do business. Conversational business is only going in one direction—Gartner estimates that “by 2022, 70% of all customer interactions will involve emerging tools like chatbots, machine learning, and mobile messaging, up from 15% in 2018.”

In the past 3 years, the AI space has become so noisy that even seasoned executives struggle to cut through the jargon, making it challenging to deliver against an AI strategy. Support leaders face a series of roadblocks. The AI space overall isn’t accessible to the business stakeholders who want to leverage it for improved customer experience.

Every time the Help Desk phone rings, it costs your organization, money. One of the best methods for businesses to save money is to automate time-consuming tasks, which, of course, takes the cake when it comes to delivering support. It is important to invest in quality support for your employees, especially as it helps them be more productive. Let’s look at some of the cost metrics that workplace support incurs.

Identifying the attributes that constitute a qualified lead can be a complicated process, especially if your product caters to a wide variety of customers. Your sales reps need a clear and structured strategy to ensure their lead qualification process is both consistent and reliable. A lead qualification checklist establishes the criteria and step-by-step framework your team needs to ensure the leads they work have the highest probability of becoming future customers.

Freshbooks is a cloud-based software that provides accounting services to its users. The application is geared towards small businesses and self-employed professionals, enabling them to track their financials by logging on to their accounts. At its core, Freshbooks is a straightforward application that eliminates paperwork by automating tasks like invoicing, organizing expenses and client follow-ups.

Lots of companies say they’re customer focused. But are they really? The fact is, most companies think more about profits than how they treat their customers. That makes sense on the surface–after all, any business needs to be profitable to stay afloat. But in the long run, it’s much healthier for the bottom line to put customer needs in focus. A single angry customer can create a social media firestorm with a complaint.

Mortgage like other financial services involves meticulous bookkeeping and outreach. Mortgage CRM tools and Automated Mortgage Marketing and Management tools are disrupting the mortgage market. The accelerated rise in automation and digitization in the mortgage process has already become the norm for the progressive real estate and loan professionals operating in the mortgage market.

Why is it essential to meet the demands of Gen Z employees who are the latest entrants in the workplace? By 2020, an estimated 50 percent of the world’s workforce will be millennials, which means that by now, most organizations are already seeing an influx of Gen Z workers. The new generation of office-goers co-exist with several generations of co-workers, but the difference between older and new generations are in their priorities, complexities, and challenges.