AWS Travel and Hospitality Competency Partners You Should Know: Sendbird

Tedd Evers, global partner leader for Travel and Hospitality at Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) spoke with Sarang Paramhans, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Sendbird about how important instant communication can be for businesses and their customers.

1) Congratulations on achieving Travel and Hospitality Competency Partner status. Can you describe your company for our blog readers?

Sendbird is a global conversations platform for mobile apps. We make it easy for travel and hospitality (T&H) companies to add persistent notifications, chat, voice, video, streaming, and live support to their apps. Sendbird powers conversations between 300 million monthly active users across the globe with 1,200 businesses, including AirAsia, Traveloka, Reddit, DoorDash, Paytm, and more.

2) Executives are prioritizing investments in technology to help their better engage, serve, and retain their travelers and guests. What are some ways Sendbird can help them?

Every touchpoint along the mobile customer journey is an opportunity to create an engaging, branded experience through conversations. Sendbird helps T&H companies enhance the user experience by bringing conversations and persistent messages into their apps. Our products look and feel like your app and are completely white labeled to facilitate a seamless experience, which is difficult to deliver through Short Message Service (SMS) notifications.

3) Are there other benefits to using in-app conversations instead of SMS notifications?

Yes, there are several benefits. Let’s start with customer engagement. Customers have to receive messages to engage with them, but 1-5% of SMS notifications are lost. Even if the send is successful, you can’t track customer interaction. Sendbird in-app notifications allows businesses to track if messages are read. And, you can also track click-through rates (CTRs).

SMS messaging is also limited to text, images, and links. Sendbird customers can easily send rich media formats and power deeper user engagement with buttons, polls, and bi-directional messaging in-app.

As a result, Sendbird customers who use SMS and in-app messaging see 150-250% higher CTRs on messages sent in-app compared to messages sent through SMS.

Finally, Sendbird in-app notifications cost up to 50% less than SMS notifications.

4) How can T&H companies use Sendbird?

We offer three Sendbird products. Many businesses use all three in a unified inbox user interface (UI), which enables T&H brands to offer their customers notifications, support, and chat, if applicable. Some customers use just notifications and support, if they don’t have a use case for user-to-user chat.

• Sendbird Notifications: Our newest product, Sendbird Notifications, makes it extremely easy for product managers to add a persistent and visually-engaging messaging experience to their app. Prior to Sendbird Notifications it was very difficult to manage in-app business-to-user messaging for marketing messages, transactional updates, and operational prompts. T&H customers can use Sendbird Notifications as a new channel for delivering promotional messages and upselling while also reducing the cost of delivering transactional updates and operational prompts through SMS.
• Sendbird Chat, Live, & Calls: Our rich and scalable conversation platform is ideal for online T&H businesses seeking to engage users globally in private and public settings. Our communication APIs and infrastructure support chat messaging for millions, personal voice and video calls, and large-scale live-streaming events of up to a hundred thousand participants. Sendbird helps businesses and consumers build meaningful relationships that boost customer retention and conversions. Traveloka boasts a 70x increase in app traffic and 5.5x increase in sales while using Sendbird to power live commerce events.
• Sendbird Support: Sendbird Support chat offers mobile-first customer support through an always-on, continuous chat experience for agents and users. In-app support can be a powerful tool for travel and hospitality companies looking to provide personalized, convenient, and real-time assistance to their customers, ultimately boosting customer satisfaction (CSAT) and loyalty. The convenience of in-app chat support can cover a wide range of use cases from booking assistance, flight status updates, local recommendations, and more. Sendbird support chat seamlessly integrates with your existing CRM and ticketing support software so you get the best of both worlds—a mobile-first support experience that is on-brand and a familiar backend experience for support teams to thrive in.

5) Can you tell us more about Traveloka’s success using Sendbird?

Traveloka is Southeast Asia’s leading travel aggregator and offers a range of travel and accommodation services to customers across APAC. The company faced difficulty providing reliable customer service due to issues with their communication channels, which led to prolonged wait times and an unsatisfactory user experience. Traveloka chose Sendbird because we’re flexible and offer strong customer support.

With Sendbird, Traveloka seamlessly handled its initial customer-care chat use case, improved uptime, and increased performance. Using Sendbird’s SDK, they expanded to include one-on-one chat between customers, villa and guesthouse operators, airport pickups, and telehealth consultations. The chat built on Sendbird’s SDK has become the most popular communication channel among all options available to Traveloka users.

Traveloka also launched hotel sale livestreams during the pandemic that resulted in a 450% increase in lodging vouchers sold. With access to conversational data, Traveloka now understands how to provide better, more efficient customer support, recognize and act on travel trends and behaviors, and ultimately increase CSAT.

4) T&H executives say they’re interested in pre-packaged cloud solutions because they feel they will speed up implementation time and reduce costs. What solutions or processes do you have in place to ensure customers meet their timelines and budget goals?

Sendbird products are built with our customer’s time-to-value needs in mind. Our Sendbird Notifications product can be added with a UI kit and go live in a few clicks. Our in-app chat product is designed to be launched within six weeks based on our proven implementation process.

5) How do you see the travel and hospitality experience evolving? 

The travel and hospitality experience increasingly relies on mobile phones and apps to connect with customers. To increase revenue and loyalty, T&H brands will continue to invest in their mobile apps to add more value to their customers. We believe that in-app conversations, both user-to-user, and business-to-user, will be key in the mobile experience.

6) How will technology and your solution empower this future?

Sendbird is a flexible and customizable API with services and solutions built on top of it—making it easy to bring business-to-user conversations and user-to-user chat to any mobile app. We empower product leaders to create customized conversational experiences that make sense for their app and audience.

SMS fatigue continues to grow with users being overwhelmed by push notification that display and disappear, as well as third-party chat apps with branded promotional messages. It is even more important now that conversations are at the heart of the app experience.

From providing chats with delivery drivers to creating strong loyalty with users to per-visit spend, there are many ways that Sendbird can help restaurants, hotels, airlines, and other T&H companies. We can’t wait to continue to explore and create this future with T&H AWS customers.

7) How do you expect your customers will benefit from your partnership with AWS?

Sendbird is powered by AWS. Our shared customers benefit from knowing that their data is secure with AWS and Sendbird, and that the service is reliable and high-performing as our products run on AWS. Together, we offer a proven enterprise-grade conversations platform that powers notifications, chat, and support, for over 1,200 businesses and 300 million people every month.

AWS understands how communicating in the right way through mobile apps is key for certain businesses and customers. This is why collaborating with the right competency partner can make all the difference.

Learn more about how Sendbird, an AWS Travel and Hospitality Competency Partner, can help you improve customer communications. Or, contact us to speak to AWS about how to provide a modern customer service experience.