The Business Cost of Inaction

By the numbers

What customers expect, what businesses report

81.8%

of surveyed online adults say they are more likely to message with a business when they have confidence that it is legitimate.¹

75.8%

of surveyed online adults want to communicate with businesses in the same way they do with friends and family through messaging.¹

58.7

percentage points higher open rates than email, as reported by clients using WhatsApp, and 6.0 points higher than SMS.²

Are customer engagement challenges costing your enterprise teams?

Four people in an office setting, with three women and one man gathered around a laptop on a table.

No organization sets out to fragment or erode their digital customer engagement. Both can happen one reasonable decision at a time.

Disconnected systems, weakened trust, technical debt, lost context. These engagement challenges often increase quietly. But the impact of taking action can be loud.

One retail giant reported three times its app’s conversion rate after moving checkout into one conversation.* An automaker reported record conversion within four weeks of ending repeat conversations.* A financial institution saw customers respond up to ten times faster after moving alerts off SMS.*

Because when a business acts, its customers can too. The Business Cost of Inaction report maps a practical path to connected, verifiable engagement and shows what your teams stand to reclaim.

Download now

Inside the report

A four-part framework for pricing the impact of architectural, trust, memory, and timing costs on business value

What 507 organizations across 17 countries reported changing, and what it returned in ROI ²

Enterprise results from real-world success stories who switched to persistent, verifiable engagement channels

A cost audit model you can run against your own tech stack and digital customer engagement strategy

Three strategic questions to guide you on where to start

*Results are self-reported and not identifiably repeatable. Generally expected individual results will differ.

A man and woman standing in an office hallway, looking at a tablet.

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Help reclaim value across your organization with your digital customer engagement strategy. Download the report to put a price on customer engagement challenges and uncover the four hidden costs that may be taxing your teams. Backed by analyst research, first-party insights, and real-world case studies.

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The cost of inaction: Frequently asked questions

How is digital customer engagement strategy affected by the business cost of inaction?

The business cost of inaction is what an enterprise pays while fragmented, unverified customer engagement persists, and it can quietly shape digital customer engagement strategy. It may include time spent maintaining outdated systems, agent minutes spent rebuilding context, unopened customer messages, and incomplete transactions. Enterprises can measure many of these costs against their own data to define what they may be able to recover.

What hidden customer engagement challenges do enterprises face?

Four hidden customer engagement challenges often add to this cost: architecture, memory, trust and timing.

Architecture: maintenance spend on disconnected systems that can compete with the product roadmap.
Memory: the cost of potentially gathering the same customer context more than once.
Trust: the engagement an unverified sender loses before a message open.
Timing: how the first three costs can compound each quarter they go unaddressed.

What customer engagement strategy can help reduce the cost of inaction?

Customer engagement strategies that may help address these challenges start with using channels customers are already familiar with. They also include carrying context from one interaction to the next across these channels. Another strategy is messaging from a verified business identity. These approaches help cut common costs, like unopened messages, repeated questions, and abandoned transactions.

What customer engagement solutions can work alongside existing systems

The right customer engagement solutions can work with existing infrastructure, which can help enterprises adopt new strategies without a full rebuild. Business messaging platforms with verified sender identity and shared conversation history are one example. Enterprises featured in this research that adopted business messaging reported fewer failed orders and higher conversion compared with prior channels. The report suggests where to start.

Sources:

Kantar, Business Messaging Usage Research (commissioned by Meta Platforms, Inc.). Online study of 11,016 adults across 22 global markets (US, FR, DE, UK, ES, IN, MX, BR, ID, TH, VN, MY, PH, CA, AR, CO, TR, SG, KSA, UAE, NZ, AU), conducted April 2026.
Forrester Research, “The Total Economic Impact™ Of WhatsApp For Business,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of Meta, July 2025..