Editor's Note: This post was updated with additional content on March 30th, 2023.
Customer conversations are the lifeblood of any successful business. The ability to communicate effectively with customers is critical to building relationships and growing your business. With the latest technology, businesses can now enhance their customer conversations in ways that were once unimaginable. From chatbots and artificial intelligence to personalized marketing and social media, the latest technology offers new ways to engage with customers and create a more personalized customer experience.
As the world’s largest network of digital marketing agencies, we have seen first-hand how COVID-19 has affected the businesses we work with. To help overcome these challenges and as a way of giving back to our valued clients, a few months ago, we created this webinar series called “Ahead of the Curve”. Here is a recap of our webinar on how to reimagine your customer conversations using the latest technology by Eric Cook from Michigan, USA.
Conversational Marketing - The Landscape Today
Even if you take technology out of the equation, the best way to boost your sales is to have conversations with your prospects and customers to get to know them, to learn more about them, their pain points, and their needs.
Instead of creating content to be distributed to your base (asynchronous communication), the use of AI and chatbots offers synchronous communication with your audience. Because the likes of Siri and Alexa have become such a part of everyday life, it follows naturally that 90% of consumers now prefer to use messaging for communicating with businesses. The arrival of COVID-19 has likely increased that figure even more.
Types of Chatbots and How to Get Started
There are three main types of chatbots:
- Informational. This simple version of the chatbot uses the data that you have mined from FAQs and your frontline personnel to answer queries in a conversational way.
- Transactional. More interactive, transactional chatbots walk customers through the process of buying with authentication for payment, tracking notifications, et cetera. This can even bypass a website and occur directly from a link within your social media marketing.
- Advisory. The most sophisticated type learns over time.
Get started, with the help of your WSI consultant, via the search functionality on your website. Together with Google Analytics, you can discover what visitors to your site are looking for. Speak to your call center and sales reps, too, then map out the desired conversation flow – including instructions on how to connect to a human being.
Benefits of Chatbots
The top three benefits of using chatbots as part of your digital marketing strategy are:
- Improve engagement and qualification
- Enhanced conversion rates
- Reduce costs
- Improve customer engagement
- Provides conversational marketing
- Proactive customer service
What Not To Do
Avoid the “uncanny valley” where you try to pass off a bot as a real person. This does more harm than good.
Far better to rather make it clear that you are using chatbot technology but that there is always human support as needed. Never ignore the personable human element!
WSI is here to help in any way we can to keep your business moving forward
For more details on all of the above, watch the recording from our webinar, “Conversational Marketing: How to Reimagine Your Customer Conversations Using the Latest Technology” (posted below).
