If you want to survive the post-crisis period and grow your business, you need to adopt conversational customer experience. It is all about one-to-one interactions; customers stay loyal to brands they have an established, ongoing conversation with, writes Anastasia Tatsenko, head of sales and customer success, NetHunt CRM.
Businesses used to heavily rely on the quality of their products to provide them with a robust competitive advantage.
Today, with technology advancing at a dizzying pace, it is no longer enough to be the best of the best on the market in terms of offering high-class goods and services. Instead, to grow your market share, you have to focus on accumulating added value.
Customer support can either make or break the business. Hopefully, many enterprises have realized this, taking the appropriate steps towards it.
This is the era of a new, humanized, and customer-centric approach to customer relations. The ongoing crisis has only stimulated thisOpens a new window . In the face of a global economic crisis peeking around every corner, even the most generous customers are tightening their belts. They have become pickier about what to spend their money on, and want to be sure they get the most out of their purchase before writing a cheque.
As a result, businesses must match the situation. In today’s tech-centered world, brands need to stop treating their customers as just another record in their CRM; they should switch from customer experience to conversational one.
Learn More: Not Every Marketer Is Going To Be a Steve Jobs
What Is Conversational Customer Experience?
Conversational customer experience is one that offers continuous support and guidance to customers, through means of one-to-one communication with a brand.
Up until recently, chatbots were enough to accommodate conversational customer experience. However, conversational marketing is evolving rapidly; the bar is constantly being raised for businesses.
The modern approach to conversational marketing specifies that conversational support, service, and experience are all methods of helping customers. They focus on building a long-term relationship rather than resolving a series of issues. They use context and conversations to make it easy for customers to get help while allowing agents to provide more personalized support at scale.
It is less about singling out requests and treating them as separate issues; and more about aggregating different instances of interaction with customers from various channels. You are seeking a cohesive and continuous map of communication.
Two crucial attributes define modern conversational marketing:
- Communication is a two-way street. The purpose of adopting conversational customer experience is to speed up the process of ensuring customer success. Therefore, you must focus on providing timely, relevant, and helpful information upon request. The only way to do that is by having enough context to react promptly.
- Communication allows the growth of relationships between the parties. Continuity is the cornerstone of customer relationships, so you need to become a friend to your customer before they become your brand advocates.
It should be clear that conversational marketing is mostly about listening to your customers when they are in need, using what you learn about them to further cater to their needs and improve their experience with your brand.
Why Do You Need To Become a Conversational Customer Experience Adept?
More and more companies realize the importance of adopting a conversational customer experience because of the numerous benefits it provides, the main advantages being business growth and increased revenue by streamlining the conversion funnel. Let us break it down!
1. It helps to provide more accurate responses to customer queries
When people are desperate to get help, they are not going to waste their time trying to figure out how your website works. Regardless of how well-organized a platform is, it can still be frustrating to wrap your head around it, especially when you are upset about something. Is it convenient to go to the knowledgebase and try to find related issues by relevant keywords? Doubtful.
Your customers would rather contact you through a chat application, in real-time, with a real-life problem.
2. It decreases the average response time
Emails are great, but they are too much effort. If your customers need a prompt reply, they do not want to bother writing out a long formal letter, waiting even longer for a structured response. They want to shoot their question straight away and receive a reply within a couple of minutes, if not seconds. Conversational customer experience via chatbots, both Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence-powered ones, as well as live-chats, enables this.
3. It fosters customer loyalty and stimulates sales
Well-executed conversational customer experience implies better personalization of communication because of the ongoing conversation between a customer and a business. If you know the history between you and your customers, you can offer them better solutions, quicker!
“52% Opens a new window of consumers are more likely to make repeat purchases if the company offers support via live chat.â€
Moreover, 79% of companies say that live chat has had positive sales and revenue results, with 47% of consumers being open to making a purchase completely from a chatbot.
4. It gives you more control
Omnichannel conversational customer experience allows you to deal with your customers in real-time and negotiate a solution in a more effective manner. You are in charge of the situation and can offer more alternatives to your customers to ensure they remain satisfied with your brand. This, unfortunately, cannot be said about emails.
Overall, this approach is both automated and intelligent. Use technology to store all the interactions with customers and employ that knowledge to answer future requests in a smarter way.
Learn More: Using AI To Improve Customer Experience: 5 Takeaways from SpiceWorld Virtual 2020
How To Implement Conversational Customer Experience?
One of the easiest ways to implement conversational customer experience is by employing chatbots. Depending on how intelligent they are, we can delineate three different types of chatbots.
“72% of people who have used chatbots find them to be helpful and informative.â€
Chatbots are, indeed, an excellent way to start implementing conversational customer experience into your business strategy, but they are not the only way to do it. In fact, evidence suggests that dissatisfaction with low-grade chatbots exists, and it is real.
Satisfactory bot experiences can result in 80-90% response rates. However, if the chatbots are not high-flyers, the response rate is only 30%.
Here are some tips on making sure that you move in the right direction with the conversational experience:
Omni-channel support. Make it easy for customers to contact you. You need to be exactly where your users may ask for help. Employ social listening as you can get feedback (and often negative one) on social media platforms. If you have a live chat on your website, it is time to think about AI-powered chatbots. No! This is the time to implement AI-powered chatbots. On top of that, you should also place a chat option within the product itself – your customers will have questions they need to resolve when they are working with the product and not when they are browsing your website. Be where they need you the most!
Integrated apps. Use a centralized hub, like a CRM system, to manage the many connections that take place across various communication channels. It is important to choose a system that integrates with all the channels and apps that you utilize. You need to store every interaction to deliver personalized content for higher customer lifetime value and retention.
Personalized troubleshooting. Do not treat your customers as ticket numbers but rather appeal to their problems as a part of a continuous conversation. For the best results, get your customer success managers to analyze the reports and review user accounts to have a better idea of what the customers are struggling with. This will help to craft personal sessions with clients in the future to educate them about the product and suggest more effective usage ways.
Conversational customer experience is still in the early stages of its development, so do not miss out on the opportunity of getting a first-mover’s advantage in your industry!