Skip to contentHow a Connected App Transforms the Employee Messaging Experience in the Age of AI
Most brands today understand the importance of customer experience. Salesforce’s latest State of the AI Connected Customer report, based on surveys of more than 16,500 consumers and business buyers, confirms that 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. That number has been climbing steadily for years, and in 2026, it’s no longer a differentiator—it’s table stakes.
But here’s what still gets overlooked: customer experience and employee experience are inseparable. The research consistently shows that engaged, well-equipped employees deliver better outcomes for customers. And right now, the employee engagement picture is concerning. Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement has fallen to just 21%, costing the world economy an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity. In the U.S., engagement sits at 31%—a decade low, with 8 million fewer engaged workers than in 2020.
A significant part of this problem is operational: customer-facing employees often lack the tools they need to do their jobs well. This is especially true when it comes to messaging, the channel that consumers increasingly prefer. When employees are forced to manage conversations across fragmented apps without AI assistance, context, or unified workflows, the result is frustration on both sides of the interaction.
Let’s look at where consumer messaging preferences stand today, why existing approaches fall short, and how a connected app—powered by AI—can equip your teams to meet the moment.
Messaging Is Now the Default Customer Channel
The pandemic-era shift to digital engagement has hardened into permanent consumer behavior. McKinsey’s 2025 State of the Consumer report puts it plainly: what once seemed like short-term adaptations have solidified into lasting behavioral change. Consumers now expect to interact with brands through the same channels they use to talk to friends and family—and that means messaging.
The numbers are striking. A 2025 Meta-commissioned study of more than 11,000 consumers across 22 global markets found that 73% prefer messaging when communicating with a business. Separately, 67% of consumers say they prefer messaging over email or phone calls for brand interactions. WhatsApp alone now reaches more than 2.9 billion monthly active users, with 175 million people messaging a business on the platform every day. Messages sent through WhatsApp achieve a 98% open rate—compared to roughly 20% for email.
| 73% of consumers across 22 global markets prefer messaging when communicating with a business.Source: Meta/Kantar Business Messaging Usage Research, 2025 |
And this isn’t limited to customer service. Consumers are using messaging channels throughout the entire purchase journey—from researching products and asking pre-purchase questions to receiving order updates and seeking post-sale support. The Vibes 2026 Mobile Consumer Insights survey found that 78% of consumers have made a direct purchase from a brand’s text message, up from 75% the prior year. Meanwhile, 81% of consumers now prefer RCS messaging over traditional SMS, drawn to richer features like product carousels, high-quality images, and video.
The message is clear: customers want to reach your brand through messaging. The question is whether your employees have the tools to meet them there.
Why Current Approaches Aren’t Working
Many brands still handle messaging the same way they did five years ago: they allow customer-facing teams to download individual messaging apps on personal or company devices and respond to customers one app at a time. Some have layered on basic chatbots. But the core problems remain.
Wasted Time and Cognitive Overload
Toggling between WhatsApp, SMS, Apple Messages for Business, Instagram DMs, and other channels burns time and mental energy. Salesforce’s 2025 research found that 77% of customer service reps say their workload and the complexity of customer issues have increased compared to a year ago. When agents are also juggling multiple disconnected platforms, that complexity compounds. Zendesk data shows that 73% of agents say having all interactions in one place helps them work more effectively.
Disjointed, Impersonal Experiences
When customer-facing teams operate in siloed channels, conversation history and customer context don’t follow. The result: customers have to repeat themselves. Research shows that 74% of consumers find repeating themselves extremely frustrating—they view it as a sign the brand doesn’t value their time. And 70% of customers expect any agent they engage with to have full context of their situation. Siloed messaging tools make that nearly impossible.
Security, Compliance, and Data Gaps
Unmanaged messaging creates real regulatory exposure. Conversations conducted through personal apps may not be retained, archived, or monitored in accordance with industry requirements. In recent years, major financial institutions have faced billions of dollars in combined fines for failing to preserve business communications conducted through personal messaging apps. Beyond compliance, there’s a data problem: when conversations live in individual employees’ personal apps, the organization loses access to customer insights, sentiment data, and interaction history that should be feeding back into CRM systems and AI models.
No AI Leverage
Perhaps the biggest gap in 2026 is the absence of AI. When conversations happen outside a connected platform, there’s no way to deploy AI agents, real-time assist tools, automated routing, sentiment analysis, or intelligent escalation. This matters because AI-assisted agents resolve 15% more issues per hour on average, and companies using AI-assisted support see 29% lower agent turnover. Employees using AI tools report that 80% of the time, AI has improved the quality of their work. Without a connected system, these gains are off the table.
Disengaged Employees Can’t Deliver Great Experiences
The consequences of poor tooling go beyond inefficiency—they erode employee engagement. Salesforce found that 56% of service agents report experiencing burnout, and 69% of customer service decision-makers say agent attrition is a major organizational challenge. When employees lack the tools and context to do their jobs well, frustration sets in, performance drops, and turnover rises.
Gallup’s research makes the business case clear: 70% of team engagement depends on the manager, and engaged teams produce measurably better business outcomes across productivity, profitability, and customer satisfaction. Meanwhile, Gallup estimates that if every organization reached the engagement levels of today’s best-practice companies, the global economy could grow by $9.6 trillion.
On the other hand, when employees have modern, AI-powered tools, the picture changes. Salesforce found that 65% of AI-enabled agents say AI gives them more time to build real relationships with customers. AI doesn’t replace the human element; it frees employees to focus on the work that matters most—problem-solving, relationship-building, and delivering the kind of personalized, empathetic experiences that earn customer loyalty.
What Customer-Facing Teams Actually Need: A Connected App with AI
Consumers expect personalized, connected experiences regardless of channel. They want the small-town feel of being known and valued, even from large brands. Research shows that 90% of shoppers want more personalized communications, and 81% of consumers are willing to spend more with brands that offer smooth, helpful interactions.
Meeting these expectations requires equipping customer-facing teams with a connected app that unifies all messaging channels into a single interface—and augments employee capabilities with AI. Here’s what that looks like across three key teams.
A Connected App for In-Store Associates
Your in-store associates are product experts with deep knowledge of your catalog and customer needs. A connected app extends their expertise beyond the physical store, enabling them to engage with online shoppers via messaging—with full access to customer history, inventory data, and AI-powered recommendations.
Consider a customer shopping for living room furniture online. She’s interested but reluctant to purchase without seeing the product in person. Through the brand’s website, she connects with an in-store associate via messaging. The associate can pull up her browsing history, see what she’s been considering, and ask targeted questions about her space and style preferences. They can initiate a video chat so the associate can see the customer’s room directly. AI suggests complementary items based on her selections and the associate’s product expertise. The result: a personalized recommendation that feels like talking to a trusted friend—not navigating a website.
The associate never leaves the app. The customer gets the in-store experience from home. And the brand captures the entire interaction as structured data that improves future recommendations.
A Connected App for Field Service Teams
Field service employees operate outside the office—installing solar panels, repairing fitness equipment, servicing HVAC systems. They’re often the only in-person interaction a customer has with your brand, making that touchpoint disproportionately important.
A connected app with messaging lets field techs engage with customers before, during, and after appointments through WhatsApp, SMS, or other preferred channels—all within the same interface where they access job details, equipment history, and scheduling. A customer can share a gate code, ask for an ETA, or describe the issue with a photo, and the tech can respond instantly without switching apps.
AI adds another layer: automated appointment reminders reduce no-shows, AI-powered diagnostics help techs prepare before arriving on-site, and post-visit follow-ups are triggered automatically to confirm the issue was resolved. The tech spends less time on logistics and more time delivering a great in-person experience.
A Connected App for Customer Care Teams
Customer care has undergone the most visible transformation. A growing share of customers now prefer messaging over phone calls for service inquiries, and they expect fast, informed responses. But only 25% of contact centers have successfully integrated AI automation into their daily operations, meaning 75% are still running messaging programs without the tools to handle volume and complexity effectively.
A connected app changes this equation. Care reps can manage all service channels—messaging, email, phone, social—from a single workspace. AI handles routine inquiries (order tracking, account questions, basic troubleshooting) autonomously, freeing agents to focus on complex cases that require empathy and judgment. Real-time AI assist surfaces relevant knowledge base articles, suggests responses, and summarizes conversation history so agents never start cold.
The impact is measurable. Organizations using AI-assisted support report that agents handle 35–40% more interactions per shift without increased errors or reduced satisfaction. Gartner projects that connected-rep technology will improve contact center efficiency by up to 30% by 2026. And early adopters of agentic AI in customer service are already seeing 27% revenue increases, 21% cost reductions, and 35% improvements in customer satisfaction.
The Bottom Line: Tools Drive Engagement, Engagement Drives Results
Products and services still matter. But in 2026, experience is the competitive battlefield—and messaging is where a growing share of that experience happens.
Brands that equip their customer-facing teams with a connected app—one that unifies messaging channels, provides customer context, and leverages AI to handle routine work and surface insights—will see the benefits on both sides. Employees are less frustrated, more focused, and better positioned to deliver the kind of interactions that build trust. Customers get faster, more personalized, more connected experiences across the channels they actually prefer.
The research is unambiguous: 80% of employees say AI has improved the quality of their work. Consumers are 72% more likely to buy from brands that offer messaging. And companies that invest in both employee experience and AI-powered tools are pulling ahead.
The question isn’t whether your customer-facing teams need a connected app with AI-powered messaging. It’s whether you can afford to wait any longer to give them one.