Greece as a priority market for Viber’s new features was mentioned by Rakuten Viber’s senior management team, including CEO Ofir Eyal, on his first visit to Greece since taking office, and Chief Revenue Officer, Cristina Constandache, at an event she organized yesterday in Athens, emphasizing the role of our country in its evolution as an over-application.

“Greece is one of Europe’s biggest stars, as it brilliantly blends its culture with technology and progress.

To see Greeks respecting and preserving their rich history, while at the same time embracing innovation, truly inspires us,” said Ofir Eyal, CEO of Rakuten Viber. “We are proud to be part of your digital transformation journey, helping Greek businesses change, grow and innovate.”

The Minister of Digital Governance, Dimitris Papastergiou, in his greeting underlined the importance of strengthening the digital transformation in order to make Greece even more outgoing, brighter, more digital.

In addition, he made a special mention of the digital assistant mAIgov, the first Artificial Intelligence application for the Greek Government, which makes the daily life of citizens and businesses even easier, simplifying and speeding up their interaction with the state.

Looking at the latest digital trends and future predictions for the market, Cristina Constandache, Chief Revenue Office of Rakuten Viber, highlighted the main factors that businesses need to pay attention to today for their future success. Characteristic trends are direct marketing directly to the consumer, the two-way interaction between business and customer, as well as the reduction in the number of MarTech tools used by companies.

He also said that companies will soon be looking for a single platform to meet their needs, and hyper-apps are expected to continue to rise in Europe, following their significant success in Asia, with examples such as WeChat, Line and Grab.

Noa Bar Shay, Sr. Director, Partnerships & Sales, and Konstantin Kostadinov, Sr. Sales Director CEE & CIS of Rakuten Viber, explained how companies can use Viber for Business solutions within a hyper-app ecosystem for their various business needs: strengthening brand recognition, increasing sales, increasing ROI, improving experience of the customer and more. They noted that today the top 5 industries using Viber for Business in Greece include: retail and e-commerce (43%), financial and insurance (14%), health and wellness (11%), FMCG (10%), IT and telecommunications (7%), followed closely by the hospitality industry.

The Rakuten Viber team offered an insight into the upcoming features that Greek businesses can expect from the app in the future. These include the ability for users to call companies for free, a click-to-message ad that allows conversion in just a few steps, a new solution for one-time codes, and enhanced security for interactions between companies and users.

“All these updates are part of our strategy as an over-app, which includes building an ecosystem of solutions for businesses of all sizes, addressing their various needs,” said Cristina Constandache. “Our purpose is clear. To empower Greek businesses to innovate and to serve them as a super application of global scope that also serves the local needs of each market”.