New age marketing puts consumers at the center of practically all business operations. It’s all about how to make sure the consumer is satisfied and engaged in the correct manner through every step of the buying process. Conversational marketing is an essential tool to ensure consumers have a more seamless experience with your business.
The fundamental principles of conversational marketing and sales are customer-centric and ensure that the business is following the customer’s timeline and wishes. Customers crave personalized experiences to fit their needs. Nowadays with so much business being done online, a great way to incorporate conversational marketing and give personalized experiences is through chatbots.
Conversational Marketing and Chatbots
Chatbots are a great way to engage potential and returning customers right when they get onto your site. The purpose of chatbots is to engage, understand, and recommend, according to Drift, a web developing company that spearheads the conversational marketing topic. There are multiple types of chatbots, but artificial intelligence chatbots and automated chatbots are the two most popular. AI chatbots are much smarter and can practically operate on their own; the more conversations that an AI chatbot has, the smarter it gets.
When engaging a customer through a chatbot, it’s important to focus on the greeting, responses, and value of the conversation. Drift lays out two simple ways to ensure success at this step: ask and acknowledge. Ask the customer a question to start the conversation- this is to hook your site visitor and show them how you can help. The second step, acknowledge, shows that you’re paying attention; this step is all for return visitors, targeted visitors, and traffic coming from ads or campaigns. In the opening line of the conversation, acknowledge where the visitor came from, whether they’ve visited before, or the specific page of your site they’re on.
Better Understand the Customer
To understand the customer, you must ask the right kind of questions. The questions you ask will help you to qualify the customer and determine if they should be sent on to speak to a representative of your sales team. It’s important to analyze what the qualifiers and disqualifiers are for your company- this ensures that you will only speak to people who are right for you. Another important aspect of understanding the customer is routing a representative at the right time. Knowing when to route can make all the difference. Set some guidelines for your company that reflects when you think it’s appropriate for a rep to be sent into a conversation as well as what kind of rep should join different conversations.
Routing the Customer Based on the Conversation
Finally, recommending steps the customer can take next is a spectacular way to wrap up the conversation and show them you care. There are a few paths you can lead them down: sales, marketing, or support. When routing a customer to the sales path, you can give them the option to chat with a rep, meet right then, or schedule a meeting with a rep. All of these options show the customer that your business takes them seriously and is willing to do whatever is most comfortable for them. Consequently, a customer typically gets routed down the marketing path when they aren’t quite ready to talk to a rep. This is okay! You can see what kind of resources they may be interested in instead- suggest some readings that coincide with their concerns and ask for an email address to add them to a newsletter that keeps them engaged. Lastly, if a customer is seeking support, route them to your customer support specialists or give them a ticket so that your team can get back to them. It’s essential to be timely with customers seeking support so you don’t lose their business.
A More Personalized Experience
When routing a customer, you must take into account the type of chatbot you’re using. An AI chatbot can give a customer a more personalized experience with unique responses, but could possibly go off script, deliver inappropriate responses, or show bias that stems from the algorithm. The advantages of an AI chatbot lie in their ability to problem solve without needing intervention from a rep. AI bots can comb through data in seconds and understand a situation on a behavioral level that humans might not be able to since it takes us much longer to analyze data and previous conversations. In short, the aforementioned routing options are primarily for automated chatbots as AI ones will rarely need human intervention.
Conversational marketing is becoming increasingly popular. Customers value instant reactions, so utilizing a system that allows you to communicate with them immediately and lead them to a solution is a key to success for modern businesses. Check out our chatbot in the lower right corner powered by Drift. Ready to start the conversation? Contact us today!
