It’s crazy

For decades now the go-to communication channel most teams have used with customers has been email. Along with SMS, snail mail, and social media, email has provided a reliable delivery method for one-way loosely personalised messaging

But very few companies we speak to at Atomic have a reliable messaging channel that any internal team — from marketing to comms; regulatory to fraud; sales to service; product to risk — can use to easily communicate with customers in the authenticated digital channels they own: their apps.

We think that’s crazy.

When we talk to consumers, their preferred channel for hearing from companies is within the apps they have and trust on their phone or web portal that they can log into. And interestingly, when we talk to leaders in organisation who are responsible for customer communication journeys, their preference is also always to primarily use their own app first.

So given they would both be preferring to communicate in mobile and web apps, why are they persisting with email, SMS, snail mail, and social? There are two main factors at play.

It’s how we’ve always done it

Firstly, there often exists a view of “this is the way we’ve always done it”. Unfortunately internal teams have operated for so long communicating exclusively in channels they don’t own that they are not demanding access to their authenticated channels. For example, we’ve met many highly competent and productive marketing and communications people who have spent a career trying to get open rates on their email campaigns over 20%, all the while not being able to access customers within the digital channels their company owns where much higher percentages of those same customers are logging in regularly.

Also, before apps, there simply weren’t “owned” digital channels that could reach the customer where they were at any time. A side effect of this is that, when digital channel teams emerged, they were placed in a different part of the org chart, out of reach to customer and marketing teams. For many organisations the gap between teams who build digital channels and teams who are responsible for engaging and communicating with customers is still wide.

We don’t have a repeatable or affordable way to engage in-app

Secondly, because their lack of in-app messaging capability, leveraging their apps for customer communications expensive and slow. This is because each individual message,  use case, or change requires lobbying digital product owners and gatekeepers, and then getting on the backlog, making your way to the top of the backlog, having developers make the change, and then the associated testing and release process. For many of our customers, before Atomic, this way of using their apps to communicate with customers meant many months of effort and tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of dollars. It’s inevitable given the high cost to operate this way that these teams become gatekeepers of everything in their digital app, simply because they are the ones required to make changes, balance priorities and juggle constrained resources, not because they are necessarily best placed to decide on each and every customer journey!

By creating a channel within your apps that does not require such costly and complex manual work, teams who are responsible for communication with and engaging customers can bypass these reluctant gatekeepers and open up a world of effective, scalable and respectful customer engagement.

Along came Atomic.io

To provide a solution to this craziness, about five years ago Atomic set about building a solution to this antiquated, slow, and expensive process many organisations are still operating under. We wanted to create an in-app messaging solution that empowers teams to easily send messages to their customers in their web and mobile apps, giving them a better user experience by easily letting them get things done through self-service.

But it’s more than just bypassing the reluctant gatekeepers of digital products.

We wanted to elevate in-app messaging above intrusive in-app ads, to useful, actionable interactive experiences that easily extend and plug into existing back-end systems so in-app messaging could drive deep, impactful experiences. We also wanted to meet businesses where they were at, not requiring the latest and best data integrations and extensive automation, because let’s face it, most organisations need to be able to get started and operate with the underlying data and systems they have, not wait until their dream-state back-end and data landscape is in place. And we wanted it to create an experiment engine, where teams can easily test and iterate messaging and journeys, learn in the real world and have guardrails as they accelerate and expand their in-app messaging programme.

I can now proudly say that we have achieved this goal. In fact, if you’re living in New Zealand then chances are you’ve already interacted with an Atomic message, as we provide an in-app messaging channel to four of the five major New Zealand banks, as well as some of the biggest and best superannuation and managed funds companies, and government departments.

Unshackle your gatekeepers

Start owning your communication channels and customer journeys, and meet your customers where they already are: inside your apps.

Book a demo and find out more