Viber eyes more services for PH
Filipino entrepreneurs and brands have gotten accustomed to reaching out to their customers via Viber, which has been expanding its suite of services apart from messaging in the age of super apps.
Rakuten Viber senior director for sales and partnerships Noa Bar Shay, in an event in Taguig last week, said the customer engagement in the app had been gaining traction, allowing enterprises to market their products and services.
In the past year, Viber saw a 14-percent growth in business accounts opened by enterprises in the Philippines.
READ: BIZ BUZZ: Finding love … in Viber?
About 53 percent more business messages were delivered to the customers in the same period. Most of these were related to transactions while some 34 percent were promotional offerings.
The message exchanges between the brands and customers via the platform nearly doubled last year.
Brands also generated an average monthly ad impression of 862 million for the period.
More solutions
Apart from communication, Viber also allows businesses to manage bookings, orders and deliveries; provide after-sales support; and collect feedback, among others.
“We actually see that a lot of users appreciate those solutions. They are engaging with customers,” the Viber official said.
This year, the popular messaging platform is set to introduce more solutions for enterprise clients, including full-screen ads and video ads.
Meanwhile, Rakuten Viber CEO Ofir Eyal said they were also working on securing the required licenses to operate Viber Pay soon.
Apart from peer-to-peer transactions, Eyal said that Viber Pay would also allow customer-to-business payment transactions, in addition to launching of debit and credit cards.
Eyal said it planned to offer cross-border remittance services in the long run, targeting the overseas Filipino workers who regularly send money home.
Viber is introducing its e-wallet service to the customers who have already been accustomed to making digital payments via digital wallets and mobile banking apps.
Monthly active Viber users in the Philippines rose by 21 percent last year.
