With a growing list of ways to connect with customers - from SMS and WhatsApp to voice calls and Viber - knowing which channel fits your audience best is key.
In this Telerivet article, we explore how Viber stacks up, where it shines, and why it might be the smart choice for businesses targeting Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Viber, known in business by its corporate name Rakuten Viber, is a cross-platform messaging and VoIP service.
Founded in 2010 in Tel Aviv, Viber was acquired by Rakuten, the Japanese tech giant, in 2014.
It has users and business operations all around the world.
Viber is particularly popular in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Asia, though it holds market share globally.
Viber is cross-platform, providing both instant messaging and calling services.
One of Viber’s early successful distinctions in the market was its ability to easily provide low-cost international calling.
This made it very popular among international communities, and it built a reputation for high-quality calling internationally.
Viber then capitalized on this with high-engagement messaging interfaces, colorful stickers, and video messages.
Now, Viber has a large market presence and a dedicated business-facing offering, helping companies like yours access customers and leverage its platform for communications.
There are a host of different ways you can use Viber for your business.
Businesses typically use Viber to improve customer service, prevent churn, and boost sales by enabling direct communication with their customers through the platform.
This means having a business account within Viber and being able to interact with customers from their own Viber accounts - in markets where this is their primary mode of communication.
Being able to be contactable through Viber is essential to retaining brand loyalty and trust.
To get started, you need to register through an official messaging partner of Viber and request a Viber Business Profile. This goes through some approval and review steps, and then you're able to start sending messages from your official business account.
Viber claims over a billion users worldwide and is helping service about 10,000 different brands across 190 countries.
Viber boasts of its relationships with large corporations like Coca-Cola, as well as humanitarian efforts such as the World Wildlife Fund.
For Coca-Cola, Viber provided a solution that included both chatbots and sticker packs with promo codes to digitally augment a real-life marketing campaign - where graphics appeared under the caps of their drinks bottles.
This connection of online and offline engagement was aimed specifically at Bulgaria, and it produced:
They saw a 30% conversion rate, which was well above average compared to other campaigns they had run in different markets.
What this shows is that you can use Viber for messaging and chatbots in the typical way you’d expect - but you can also use it for more custom campaigns with creative outcomes.
But let’s maybe start with a Viber chatbot and an open customer service line.
One of the key challenges facing communications professionals - particularly those who work internationally, and within the context of large organizations or corporations - is being able to achieve consistency and unity across all lines of communication.
For example, you want to provide a clear and consistent experience for anyone who contacts you via SMS, WhatsApp, Viber, or perhaps other channels.
This is hard to do. And without using a third-party software solution, it means you'd need to build custom integrations for each of these channels - then maintain those integrations, set up each campaign, test, debug, and adapt based on what you learn.
It’s a long and arduous process, and it’s no surprise that so many professionals turn instead to Telerivet to simplify this.
Telerivet provides what we call connectivity completeness - meaning you can manage all your campaigns across all your channels from one single location.
Simply plug each channel in, and you can operate from a central command system, building your campaigns with no-code interfaces that let you easily create and launch the messages you want to send to consumers.
This means you can reach people not only through WhatsApp, Viber, and SMS - but also via local SMS providers in places like the United States, Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Thailand, or the Philippines.
Typically, trying to integrate with all these different SMS providers would present a huge challenge - a real obstacle to any successful internationalization strategy.
However, with Telerivet, you can set your campaigns up for one channel, and then re-deploy them across every other provider, without spending hours and hours of costly developer time.
Telerivet is a specialist in meeting complex international communications needs, and its connectivity completeness solution is the only provider on the market that solves this problem so simply and easily.
Of course, Viber is not the only game on the market.
You could also contact your customers through WhatsApp or SMS. You could even use phone calls through those platforms, using Telerivet’s Voice API.
There are so many different ways you can reach your customers on their phones - in a way that’s suited to them.
The most universal of these options is SMS, because SMS works with all devices you're trying to contact. Its universality comes with real advantages - open rates for SMS are typically as high as 98%, which is incredibly high compared to other channels, such as email.
One advantage of using Viber over SMS - and this also applies to WhatsApp or RCS - is that these instant messaging platforms and protocols allow for richer, more complex messages to be sent.
Where SMS is limited to plain text characters, these platforms let you include things like emojis, stickers, images, GIFs, videos, or even interactive modules like polls and similar elements.
Making use of these features and functionalities can be a real winner - but you have to assess whether or not it's right for you and your business’s needs, or whether you can achieve just the same goals by sticking to trusty SMS.
That said, if you're trying to grow your audience in Nepal, the Philippines, Eastern Europe or the Balkans, it might be a very wise move to invest in a Viber channel strategy.
If you sign up for Telerivet, you can explore how Telerivet can help you execute this strategy and achieve success.
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