Zendesk Releases Annual Global State of Messaging 2020 Report

Zendesk, Inc. has released State of Messaging 2020, the third annual report featuring expert commentary and in-depth analysis of the biggest trends in conversational business and the rapidly evolving messaging industry. The report combines interviews with more than two dozen customer experience product, sales, and marketing leaders from companies like Google, Twitter, Hootsuite, Birchbox, and more, with original Zendesk research and third-party data to provide insights into how messaging is changing the face of business.

Over the past decade, messaging has fundamentally changed the way people interact with friends, family, colleagues, and companies. According to Business Insider, messaging apps have surpassed social media in global monthly active users. Since 2018, nearly every major messaging channel, including WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Google’s RCS, and Apple’s iMessage, has extended beyond the consumer to businesses. At the same time, businesses of all sizes in every industry have embedded modern messaging experiences into their own apps and websites.

“This year will be the year of connecting conversations in the enterprise,” says Warren Levitan, vice president of conversational business at Zendesk.  “We are seeing businesses embrace messaging as a shared platform for customer engagement, allowing them to truly unify sales, marketing and service interactions for the first time. This is a massive step toward putting customers at the center of our businesses.”

State of Messaging 2020 examines key aspects of evolving and emerging conversational business trends and tracks the top stories to watch in 2020, including:

* The companies dominating the messaging landscape and the vast differences between countries and continents when it comes to who is winning the messaging race
* How smart speakers, voice assistants, and messaging converge
* How chatbots became part of the fabric of digital commerce
* Will in-chat payments be the key to unlocking conversational commerce at scale?
* Why the "chatbot vs. human" debate is a false dichotomy
* How data from conversations can optimize the customer experience and help different business departments better communicate
* Helping brands navigate their new role as gatekeepers and community builders