At the beginning of September, Infobip, a leading Cloud Communications as a Service (CPaaS) platform, and the MoneyGram Haas Formula One (F1) team announced that they were going to launch a WhatsApp-based conversational assistant at the F1 race that took place at Monza, in Italy, on September 7th.

The conversational assistant, available via a Click-To-WhatsApp ad integration from Facebook and Instagram, was designed to enable the team to develop deeper connections with fans worldwide by giving them the chance to win signed race memorabilia via interactive quizzes.

I recently saw Ivan Ostojić, Chief Business Officer at Infobip, demo what they have been building for the Moneygram Haas F1 team, while attending Infobip’s recent Shift conference. However, rather than demonstrating the interactive quizzes, Ostojić demoed a conversation that he had with a digital twin of Ollie Bearman, one of Haas’ F1 drivers.

Now, all of this took place on WhatsApp, but it could easily be replicated on other channels like RCS (Rich Communication Services), the next generation of smartphone communication, which offers richer, more interactive and secure messaging compared to SMS.

The demo was impressive, but while I was watching, I couldn’t help but think about all of the possibilities that this type of innovation offers both marketing and support teams.

Imagine, for example, if a customer could call your brand and speak to a digital twin of your CEO or the digital twin of the celebrity or sports star that features in your latest marketing campaign, and they could ask them about not only the latest campaign but also any support questions related to that campaign.

Intrigued by these possibilities, while at the event, Ervin Jagatic, Product Director, and his colleague, Robin Čalić, an AI Consultant at Infobip, were gracious enough to give me a tour of their platform and its capabilities.

However, over and above the availability of all sorts of AI-powered agents, their conversational Customer Data Platform (CDP), the modular nature of their platform and their newly announced Conversational Experience Orchestration Platform (CXOP), an orchestration layer which uses intelligent AI agents to knit together personalized customer journeys across channels, the thing that stood out for me was the fact that they have taken the decision to converge their marketing and support modules.

This I found really interesting, and as a result, I sought out Ostojić to learn more about the thinking behind this development.

According to Ostojić, there were three main reasons behind this move:

Firstly, customers don’t think in channels or functions. They think in conversations.

Ostojić explains, “If you get a text from a business, or a message in WhatsApp, say, or an email in your inbox, then you, as a customer, don’t care if that message is coming from marketing or from support. While internally, this might be seen as completely different journeys and systems, the customer sees a single interface. So, we thought, why are we forcing people into silos that reflect more the internal workings of the company, rather than how customers want to interact, especially when we sit on top of the channel and are the integration layer? As a result, we are helping companies bring those silos together.”

Secondly, the convergence of the marketing and support modules is helping optimize spend and increase precision.

Here, Ostojić explained that they had “noticed that companies were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to talk more to a customer in one department, marketing, say, while at the same time they were also spending hundreds of millions of dollars to talk less to a customer in another department, like support. So, we thought, “Why not bring this together, and then we can actually have much more precision. For example, maybe a customer is calling your customer service agents to complain about something, but there is actually a hidden intent to do something else. Now, we can catch that and respond appropriately, like sending a promotional offer, for example.”

Thirdly, one source of insightful and actionable truth.

Ostojić explained that the conversations that customers are having with brands in the various messaging channels “are generating a lot of first-party data, and it is a shame that this data often sits in different silos. One set of conversations goes to a marketing cloud, while other service-related conversations tend to go to a service cloud.” He believes that this is a huge, and often missed, opportunity and that they have the ability with their conversational CDP to bring all of that data together as one source of insightful and actionable truth.

All of this makes complete sense.

Breaking down siloes and being able to deliver connected experiences across channels and conversations has long been the desire of brands, and the capabilities that Infobip is building offer exciting possibilities.

Moreover, when you consider, as previously stated, that customers often have multiple intents when they get in touch with a brand, then breaking down those siloes and operating from one conversational source of truth could drive huge value for both customers and the brands that they engage with.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Credit: Image by Maurygraf from Pixabay