Why customers in Ukraine reply on Viber more often than they answer calls

A rep dials a number, hears it ring out, calls back an hour later and gets silence again. Then messages the same person on Viber and has a reply in 4 minutes. Any sales team operating in Ukraine will recognise this. It is not bad luck at one company but a durable shift in customer behaviour, and the research backs it up. Below are the figures, the reasons behind them and the practical conclusion for business owners, marketers and sales leaders — including foreign companies selling into the Ukrainian market.

Key takeaways:

• Viber is installed on 97–98 % of Ukrainian smartphones, and 44 % of the population spends more than 3 hours a day in messengers

• Call answer rates are falling as people routinely ignore unknown numbers because of spam and fraud

• Up to 90 % of recipients open business messages on Viber, against 15–20 % who read email

• Ukrposhta’s campaign showed Viber read rates of 64–73 % and click conversion 5 times higher than email

• Broadcasts and live conversations are different tools. Conversations close deals, and for that Viber has to be connected to a CRM

• E-chat links Viber to a CRM in minutes, allows messaging first and keeps the full history in the customer card

The scale of Viber in Ukraine

The Ukrainian messenger market is structured differently from Western Europe or the United States. There WhatsApp dominates; here the landscape has historically been shaped by Viber and Telegram, with Viber holding the status of the app almost everyone has for over a decade. Telegram has overtaken it on time spent in the app and on news consumption, yet for personal conversations with companies, service notifications and discussions about specific purchases, Ukrainians still overwhelmingly use the purple messenger. The distinction matters: news is scrolled in channels, purchases are discussed in private chats.

How many Ukrainians actually use Viber

According to Rakuten Viber, 98 % of smartphone owners in the country use the app. Surveys by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology put Viber at 73.6 % among all communication tools, ahead of every competitor at the time of measurement. Gradus research on media consumption in 2025 recorded that 44 % of Ukrainians spend more than 3 hours a day in messengers and 91 % consume content on a smartphone. Even accounting for Telegram’s growth, the country’s second most popular messenger retains reach that email and telephony can only envy. What matters for business is not the ranking in news consumption but a simple fact: message a customer on Viber and you almost certainly land in an app they open every day.

Who that audience is and why it matters for sales

The core of the Viber audience is aged 30–55. That is the solvent part of the population making decisions about property, cars, appliances, holidays, medical and educational services. Younger users have indeed moved to Telegram and Instagram, but mid-to-high-ticket spending sits with the Viber audience. Women make up 55 % of users, which matters specifically for e-commerce, beauty, children’s products and family services. Add habit to that: banks, the Nova Poshta delivery network, medical centres and utility providers spent years training Ukrainians to receive important notifications here, so a message from a company on Viber reads as service rather than intrusion.

Why calls stopped working the way they used to

The phone call was king of sales for a long time. That has changed, and the reason is not lazy reps but psychology and environment. A wave of phone fraud and relentless cold calling taught people a simple rule: do not answer unknown numbers. Carriers and smartphones reinforce the habit, automatically flagging calls as likely spam and offering to silence unknown numbers with a single toggle.

An unknown number reads as risk

When an unknown number appears on screen, a person decides in a fraction of a second whether to answer. Experience tells them it is probably a robot, an intrusive advert or a scammer. It is easier to decline and see whether anything meaningful arrives in writing. On Viber the situation reverses: a business account shows the company name, the logo and a verification badge. The recipient immediately sees who is writing and why, and chooses their own moment to reply. Trust in the channel transfers to trust in the sender.

A call demands attention right now

A call forces a choice: drop what you are doing or ignore the caller. The customer may be in a meeting, driving or holding a child. Bad timing turns even a welcome call into an irritation. A message has no such flaw. It waits patiently for a convenient minute, it gets reread, it gets returned to, and the price list link in it gets clicked. Asynchronicity is a strength of the channel, not a weakness. It is precisely why a customer who declined 2 calls will happily answer a text the same evening.

Messaging wins on measurability and control

A phone conversation evaporates the moment the handset goes down. What was promised, what discount was mentioned, what was agreed — all of it exists only as one person’s account. A written exchange is preserved in full. The head of sales sees real conversations, the marketer sees delivery and read statistics, the owner sees the complete history of the relationship with every customer. Disputes are settled in a minute by scrolling the chat. No call offers that level of transparency.

What the response figures say

Impressions are impressions, but decisions should rest on data, and the Ukrainian data is unambiguous. Read rates in messengers exceed every traditional channel by a wide margin, and the gap keeps widening as people answer fewer calls and open less email.

Viber open rates versus email and call connection rates

Delivery of business messages on Viber reaches 97 %, and open rates on active lists reach 90 %. By comparison, average email open rates in commercial sectors sit in the 15–20 % range. Research by the Reckless agency found that 75 % of users open brand messages in messengers, 45 times more often than promotional emails. Call connection is more modest: on cold lists, reps reach 30–40 % of contacts on the first attempt, and every subsequent attempt costs time, money and patience. The arithmetic points clearly to where first contact should move.

Cases from Ukrainian companies

Ukrposhta used Viber messages to invite people to its E-Export School webinars. The result was a 64.11 % read rate against 17.79 % for email, and click conversion of 12.36 %, 5 times higher than the email equivalent. Individual personalised campaigns reached 73.37 % open rates. More interesting still is what happened after business folders appeared in the app: open rates on bulk sends fell by 25 %, while units sold rose by 200 %. That pair of numbers is worth remembering — the channel sheds incidental opens and starts working on a warm, engaged audience that actually buys.

Broadcasts are half the job. Deals close in conversations through a CRM

Most articles about Viber for business reduce the subject to broadcasts. The logic is understandable, since bulk sending services write them. But a broadcast is a monologue. The customer receives the message, becomes interested, replies — and this is where things break for many companies. The reply lands on a rep’s phone, gets lost among personal chats and goes unanswered over the weekend. A deal paid for out of the advertising budget dies quietly among unread messages. The fix is to move the conversation to where deals live, which is the CRM.

Expert note. “We have watched business-to-customer messaging for 6 years and we see the same pattern every time. Companies that reply in a messenger within 10 minutes close 2 to 3 times more deals than companies that call back the next day. Our platform carries more than 400,000 messages a day, and Viber’s share in the Ukrainian segment is consistently the highest. The customer has already chosen where they want to talk. The job of the business is simply to show up there with a properly built process,” says the E-chat team.

How a Viber CRM integration differs from a bulk sending service

A bulk sending service delivers messages to a list and returns statistics. The E-chat integration solves a different problem: it turns Viber into a full working channel for the sales team. Reps write and reply directly from the customer card in the CRM, the whole history is saved automatically, and files, photos, voice notes and video travel both ways. There is the ability to message first even if the customer has never written to you, which matters for sales specifically, because a lead from a website or an ad leaves a phone number rather than starting a conversation. Managers see every employee’s conversations, response speed and pipeline bottlenecks. A rep leaving no longer means losing their conversations and their customer base.

How it works in E-chat

The platform connects Viber, Telegram and WhatsApp numbers to more than 20 CRM systems, including the ones most widely used in Ukraine, and through the API and connector services to virtually any system. Inbound and outbound messages are unlimited, as is the number of users. Synchronisation works on the same principle as a familiar desktop version of the messenger, so the number stays entirely under the company’s control. Connecting 1 Viber number costs $29.99 per month, and paying for 3, 6 or 12 months while connecting several numbers brings the discount to 40 %. The first 7 days are free, so the hypothesis that your customers respond more readily on Viber can be tested against your own figures at no cost.

Where to start today

Start with a small experiment. Register with E-chat, activate a working number and connect it to your CRM using the step-by-step guide — the whole process takes under an hour. Then take 50 fresh leads and, instead of a second call to the ones who did not pick up, send a short Viber message using the customer’s name and the substance of their enquiry. Measure the reply rate and compare it with your call connection statistics for the same period. Among our users, the first week of that test usually settles the question. After that it is a matter of scaling: automated order status notifications, reply templates and a response time standard.

FAQ:

Question: Customers complain about spam on Viber. Will a message from our company annoy them?

Answer: What annoys people is irrelevance, not the channel. A message about a customer’s own enquiry, addressed by name and sent from a verified sender, reads as service. Send what the person is expecting and there will be no negative reaction.

Question: Viber restricts messaging new contacts. How do we write first without getting blocked?

Answer: The restrictions target bulk sending to unknown numbers from personal accounts. Working through E-chat, you hold ordinary 1-to-1 conversations about real customer enquiries within the platform’s reasonable limits — a standard scenario rather than a workaround.

Question: We already have a Viber chatbot. Why add a CRM integration?

Answer: A bot handles routine questions, but complex deals need a person. The integration complements the bot: when a conversation goes beyond the script, a human picks it up straight from the CRM and the whole history stays in the customer card.

Question: What happens to conversations if a rep leaves or the number changes?

Answer: Nothing is lost. Conversations are stored in customer cards inside your CRM rather than on an employee’s phone. When a number is changed in E-chat the history is preserved and the next rep continues from the same point.

Question: Part of our audience uses Telegram and WhatsApp. Is Viber alone enough?

Answer: It is better to give customers a choice. E-chat brings all 3 messengers into a single CRM window, and paying for several numbers earns an additional discount. Start with Viber as the broadest channel and add the others as demand grows.