Over the years, the way customers want to communicate with business has changed. Customers are ditching phone and email to contact your brand via social, WhatsApp and messaging apps. And don’t just take our words for it. A recent survey of consumers found that over 78% preferred messaging businesses they buy from over contacting them via phone or email.
Messaging as a channel is more time efficient (for both you and the customer) and therefore cheaper than phone and email.
In other words, the more messaging the better (excuse the bias 
).
And that’s why we created the Messaging Engaged Contacts index (MECs), a new perspective on customer communication & experience.
It’s how we categories customers that get this kind of experience →
In a nutshell, MECs are people that have had meaningful conversations with your business, either with a human or chatbot, via a real-time, one-to-one messaging channel.
Why should you care about MECs?
In a world where buyers expect to be able to connect with businesses instantly, webforms, phone lines with painfully long IVRs and email addresses with 24 hour response times won’t cut it anymore.
With MECs, put conversations back at the heart of your business.
And instead of forcing customers down channels they don’t want to use, you can engage your customers on the platforms they use in their everyday lives and deliver exceptional experiences.
7 out of 10 customers would rather chat with your business on WhatsApp (or any messaging app) than make a voice call.
How to measure and grow MECs with ChatShipper
How do you calculate this?
Well that’s going to be different for every business of course.
If you’re a healthcare provider then it’d be the number of patients treated in a given time frame.
For car dealerships it’d be the total number of service appointments + the total number of sales leads
For an ecommerce store it’d be the total number of purchases.
And so on. You get the picture.
The number you arrive at is your MEC potential.
Compare that with the number of people you currently engage via your messaging channels and you can quickly see how your current customer communication experience stacks up against what customers actually want.
Customer experience is the new battleground in your industry
And with most products and services gradually becoming a commodity, delivering a superior customer experience is how you’ll set yourself apart.
According to our friends at Bain, 80% of companies believe they deliver “super experiences” but only 26% of businesses have a well developed plan in place for improving customer experience.
Delivering conversational experiences and growing your business’ MECs is the competitive advantage that’ll keep you ahead of the game and have your customers loving your brand.