How to Improve Customer Engagement with Conversational Customer Service? Best Tips in 2024

According to a study by Gallup on conversational customer service, high customer engagement levels tend to outperform their competitors by 23% in terms of revenue, engaged customers not only make repeat purchases, but they also promote brands through word-of-mouth, becoming invaluable advocates. In the realm of business, connecting with your customers isn't just a transactional experience anymore – it's a conversation.

If you're looking to revolutionize the way you interact with your customers, you're in the right place. This blog is your guide to unlocking the power of conversational customer service. Get ready to delve into strategies, tips, and insights that will not only enhance your customer engagement but also foster loyalty like never before.

What Is Conversational Customer Service?

Conversational customer experience represents a distinctive form of conversational customer support that extends beyond mere troubleshooting. Its primary goal is cultivating enduring customer relationships that culminate in heightened loyalty, an enhanced brand reputation, and ultimately, augmented revenue. This approach leverages contextual cues and ongoing dialogues, empowering both support agents and customers to seamlessly pick up where they last left off.

Moreover, it offers marketers the opportunity to engage with customers in a manner that feels familiar and trustworthy, fostering a sense of connection.

Conversational customer service involves the utilization of technology, such as conversational support software, to establish an encounter that mimics a genuine conversation, rather than a collection of disconnected interactions. The integration of conversations into the conversational customer support journey is pivotal for refining the overall experience, subsequently fostering increased brand allegiance and extending the lifetime value of customers.

To grasp the essence of  conversational customer service, it's imperative to adopt the customer's perspective. From their viewpoint, an issue marks the commencement of a conversation – a journey spanning from the initial contact through resolution and even beyond. This perspective contrasts with the organizational viewpoint, where problem-solving resources might be dispersed across departments or the company as a whole.

What Makes Conversational Customer Support Important?

Conversational customer support holds significant importance within the realm of customer relationship management due to its profound impact on the quality of interactions. The nature of these conversations profoundly shapes a customer's overall experience, thus exerting a direct influence on both customer retention and loyalty.

Consider the emotions that arise when conversing with a friend who consistently fails to recall the particulars of past discussions. This situation imparts a sense that your words have not been truly heard, doesn't it? According to findings from HubSpot, a notable 33% of customers express their aversion to reiterating information they have already shared.

In the context of customer service, the necessity to repetitively articulate concerns creates a perception of inadequate acknowledgment on the part of the service provider. Additionally, it conveys the notion that the organization lacks effective organization and has failed to allocate resources to equip its agents adequately for delivering an enhanced experience.

A successful customer service dialogue encompasses elements like attentive listening, the ability to recollect details, demonstrating empathy, and empowering agents to efficiently pool resources for swift issue resolution.

While technology cannot supplant well-trained agents proficient in interpersonal skills, even the most refined soft skills prove ineffective if agents lack the necessary tools to seamlessly facilitate coherent conversational customer support with confidence.

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10 Best Tips to Improve Customer Engagement with Conversational Customer Service in 2024

1. Map Your Customer Journey

Imagine watching a movie from its middle, clueless about the plot's context. Not only do you take a while to catch up, but you also frustrate your partner who's been following the story from the start. The same dilemma can arise when implementing conversational customer service without considering your customer's journey. This journey comprises their cumulative experiences with your company, especially in the context of the current service issue.

Customer journey maps have been used since the late 1990s by some companies. These maps visually represent various touchpoints in the customer journey, illuminating potential pathways a customer might take when interacting with the company. Similar to a real map guiding travelers, this tool enables companies to optimize positive interactions. Moreover, a customer journey map can curtail attrition by retaining customers before they seek alternatives.

Understanding the customer journey provides marketers and management the opportunity to evaluate the customer experience through the customers' lens, rather than just from the company's perspective. At the agent level, comprehending the customer journey aids service agents in contextualizing service calls. If you're interested in learning more about mapping the customer journey as a foundational step to enhance agents'  conversational customer service, explore this comprehensive blog article on the subject.

2. Provide an Omnichannel Experience

In the modern landscape, people converse through various mediums – face-to-face, phone calls, text messaging, emails, and social media, often switching devices during the same conversation. Your customers hold similar expectations when discussing service issues. Research by Forbes indicates that 71% of customers desire a consistent experience across communication channels. When customers engage with a brand, they're not contemplating the channel they're using; they're initiating a conversation to seek help or support.

As technology evolves across channels, the role of AI-enhanced chatbots has also improved significantly. Unlike their earlier iterations that struggled with meaningful customer conversations, today's chatbots offer more satisfactory interactions. Managing omnichannel complexity necessitates a coherent strategy paired with suitable tools.

3. Use Context to Deliver Personalized Customer Interactions

Context comprehension plays a pivotal role in delivering personalized customer interactions. Personalization significantly influences customer retention and attrition. A staggering 71% of customers express dissatisfaction with impersonal shopping experiences, and 66% of consumers anticipate brands to understand their individual needs.

Beyond offering an omnichannel experience, achieving personalization requires:

• A tool allowing agents to visualize the customer journey in one interface.
• Facilitating customer self-help through user-friendly resources.
• Monitoring customer satisfaction to identify successful strategies and potential concerns.

Context empowers service agents to establish valuable support conversations that treat customers as individuals, not mere support tickets.

4. Help Customers with Frictionless and Effortless Conversations

Friction refers to any point in the customer's journey that results in dissatisfaction. Ensuring frictionless customer service involves tracking the customer journey and enhancing their overall experience. Companies that approach customer service as a coherent conversation, rather than a series of disjointed inquiries, reduce friction, leading to happier customers and service agents.

Frictionless experiences also prove pivotal for customer retention and lifetime value. According to Gartner, customers experiencing high friction with a company are more likely to become disloyal, decrease future purchases, and spread negative sentiments discouraging others from engaging with the company.

5. Research the Customer Journey

Creating a comprehensive customer journey map through data analysis and behavioral research unveils how customers become acquainted with and engage with your business. This perspective offers insights into their needs, enhancing the efficiency of your customer service.

Customer journey management leverages customer data, analytics, behavior, and engagement to support robust customer relationships. Understanding where customers have been and where they're headed streamlines the process of offering tailored assistance.

6. Collect Context for Personalization

Customer context, drawn from account history and journey insights, serves as a vital resource for addressing customers' needs in every interaction. Previous service tickets, recurring issues, and recent orders provide clues to resolve immediate needs and predict future requests. Employing omnichannel experiences allows customers to engage through various mediums, permitting them to customize their interactions.

For instance, French supermarket chain Intermarché improved engagement through personalized recipe recommendations, reflecting a trend where customers increasingly prefer personalized messages.

7. Invest in Omnichannel Services

Omnichannel services align with customers' preferred communication methods, be it Instagram direct messages, phone calls, or texts. They enhance accessibility for individuals with diverse communication preferences. Nissan's rich SMS messages generated a remarkable 4.7 times engagement, showcasing the potential of personalized campaigns.

Integrating various communication channels under a unified support service ensures consistent top-tier support regardless of the chosen channel.

8. Track Conversation KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) gauge the success and efficacy of your customer service interactions. Metrics like response time, interaction length, customer satisfaction score, and others help identify opportunities and obstacles in the customer journey. Effective support services automatically track these KPIs, offering valuable insights for streamlined operations.

9. Connect Casually

A welcoming and casual demeanor builds trust with customers, fostering exceptional customer service experiences. Well-designed AI in customer service and competent representatives enhance customer interactions. Whether interacting with a bot or a live agent, maintaining a conversational tone and transparency is paramount.

The option for live agent support should be available for customers who prefer it. Agents should tailor the experience using customer data and interaction history for an individualized conversation.

10. Automate with Chatbots

Chatbots offer quick and efficient service by automating troubleshooting tasks. AI-based chatbots can even handle complex requests like appointment rescheduling. By pre-qualifying customer needs, they support live agents in delivering more meaningful conversations to enhance loyalty and lifetime value.

5 Essential Elements of an Excellent Conversational Customer Experience

1. Omnichannel Availability and Coverage

The landscape of communication is in a constant state of flux, with new channels and social media platforms frequently emerging and disrupting the strategies marketers have carefully crafted. Staying connected with customers has evolved into a full-fledged endeavor, as deciding which channels to incorporate into your tech stack can be perplexing, time-intensive, and occasionally exasperating. The most recent Microsoft Global State of Customer Service survey unveiled that a majority of customers continue to utilize 3-5 channels to resolve their issues. This reality has prompted many businesses to embrace an omnichannel approach in recent years.

The fundamental objective of implementing an omnichannel communication strategy is to seamlessly integrate all the communication channels you employ to engage with customers. This integration enables the continuity of conversations across various channels. With the right solution, your customers gain the ability to interact with your brand from any location and at any time, while your agents and marketers retain access to historical conversations and contextual information. To truly comprehend the efficacy of omnichannel communication, let's delve into a potential customer journey:

2. Full Overview of the Customer

A comprehensive understanding of customers is pivotal in delivering a seamless conversational customer experience. Remarkably, 75% of customers desire agents to possess knowledge of their identity and history. Regrettably, the same study indicates that only 31% of instances included this information. Employing a customer data platform enables the amalgamation of insights from both online and offline sources, encompassing your website, app, contact center, CRM, ERP, loyalty cards, payment system, and more. This collation of data facilitates the creation of 360° customer profiles, which in turn empowers marketers to devise targeted campaigns and assists agents in delivering rapid, personalized support.

By discerning customer preferences, analyzing purchase histories, and noting interaction patterns with your brand, you can effectively sustain customer engagement. A few illustrative examples include offering product recommendations based on past purchases, extending special offers aligned with loyalty status, and referencing prior conversations with chatbots or agents to avoid redundant queries.

3. Agent Empowerment and Support

Challenges in customer support are not limited to customers alone; agents grapple with a diverse array of obstacles on a daily basis. One effective and budget-friendly strategy to aid your clients' agents is by introducing chatbots. Speedy responses are highly sought after by customers, and chatbots provide constant support, mitigating lengthy wait times. Beyond benefiting customers, this approach liberates agents to concentrate on addressing more intricate requests. Depending on the type of chatbot implemented, it can:

• Automate responses to frequently asked questions
• Recognize customer intent for in-depth assistance
• Guide customers using links and multimedia (images, videos, documents, etc.)
• Connect your chatbot to a cloud contact center to enable smooth agent takeover when necessary.

4. Flexible Co-Creation

A pivotal aspect of the conversational customer experience is extending an invitation to customers to play a role in shaping your brand. Listening to customers' input is equally, if not more, significant than offering them promotions or resolving their problems. Microsoft reports that 77% of consumers hold a more favorable view of brands that proactively seek customer feedback. Employing unique and rich features on messaging apps is an effective approach to solicit customer input.

Consider these examples:

• Utilize WhatsApp or Messenger chatbot surveys to gather ratings on products/services
• Allow customers to submit videos or images of their ideas via MMS or RCS
• Employ geo-targeted push notifications around your store locations to engage nearby customers
• Employing a single solution for all forms of customer communication maintains a cohesive customer journey, equipping your employees with the insights needed to yield enhanced business outcomes.

5. Data Analytics and Reports

Numbers provide an indisputable basis for decision-making, making data analytics reports a crucial tool for leaders. A remarkable 90% of business leaders have reported improvements in their customer experience through data analytics. Monitoring how customers engage with your brand is vital in pinpointing areas for enhancement. Metrics encompassing message volume, delivery rates, campaign engagement, survey participation, and more can offer insights into customer interactions and internal processes.

Utilize a solution equipped with automated data tracking and report generation to ensure consistent monitoring of metrics without burdening your employees with additional tasks.

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4 Benefits of Conversational Customer Experience

1. Simplified Customer Journey

Integrating the potency of  conversational customer service and AI technology can significantly streamline your customer journey. By employing live chat platforms that incorporate elements like emojis, photos, videos, documents, and automation in customer communications, you can expedite tasks such as onboarding, account setup, verifications, addressing incorrect orders, and other time-intensive and laborious procedures.

Being present on channels that your customers are already accustomed to obviates the necessity for them to download a new application, seek out a specific website, or initiate a fresh email thread. Instead, they can conveniently use the communication apps they already have to engage with their friends and family, thereby initiating interactions with your brand effortlessly. With added functionalities like product catalogs, time selectors, quick-reply buttons, and payment integrations, any conversation can seamlessly transition from a mere information exchange to a complete purchase, all within the confines of a single chat.

2. Growth in Customer Loyalty

Granting customers not just their anticipated desires, but occasionally fulfilling even their unanticipated needs, serves to establish trust and forge enduring relationships. When customers perceive that you genuinely comprehend their preferences – whether it's through personalized promotional messages based on their prior purchases or support interactions that circumvent the need for repetitive explanations – their loyalty to your brand becomes more steadfast. Why? Because engaging in conversations that enable you to truly understand your customers provides them with an authentic, human-like interaction with your business.

The days of dispensing isolated offers or transferring customers from one agent to another are now behind us. Conversational customer experiences are built upon profound insights derived from behavioral analysis, purchase history, demographics, and more. Demonstrating to customers that your brand is committed to fostering relationships can yield benefits like repeat transactions, heightened contentment, and amplified loyalty.

3. Expanded Communication Scope

Nothing vexes customers more than the obligation to repeatedly convey the same information. This irritation is often followed by experiencing a disjointed encounter on each distinct channel used for engaging with a brand. Employing multiple channels is essential (further elaboration below), as these channels cater to different types of interactions. Yet, harmonizing these channels to work cohesively can bring about positive transformations.

It's imperative to possess a  conversational customer service that facilitates the seamless migration of conversations across various channels. Additionally, integrating channels that empower customers to establish multiple touchpoints with your brand in a unified space can significantly enhance your return on investment. Leveraging advanced features on platforms such as WhatsApp, Messenger, RCS, and Viber can facilitate the expansion of communication, enabling marketing messages, support discussions, as well as timely notifications and alerts, all within a single chat environment.

4. Unified Internal Operations

Fostering conversational customer service isn't only advantageous for your customers; your workforce stands to gain as well. Unifying all touchpoints and communication channels under a single platform equips marketers, agents, and AI-driven chatbots to collaborate harmoniously, ultimately delivering a cohesive customer experience.

Given that conversational customer service is rooted in insights, the customer data you amass over time can be harnessed for various purposes. Marketers can utilize this data to design precisely targeted campaigns based on customer behavior, while AI chatbots can engage in automated yet human-like conversations. Meanwhile, agents can provide swift and tailored support, all supported by the information gleaned from these conversations.

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Top 4 Conversational Customer Experience Use Cases

1. Onboarding: Create a Pleasant Onboarding Experience

Streamline the process of setting up accounts and welcoming new members. Enhance their onboarding journey by sharing video tutorials or informative documents upon their entry. Subsequently, employ a chatbot to address common inquiries that may arise during their initial interactions.

2. First Purchase: Facilitate a Smooth First Purchase Experience

Extend limited-time promotions to novel customers for your most appealing products or services. Afterward, employ captivating message formats, such as a WhatsApp product catalog or an RCS carousel, to follow up. Ensure that the completion of their inaugural purchase is effortless, thereby leaving them with a favorable initial impression.

3. Delivery: Implement Failover Measures for Timely Updates

To guarantee that time-sensitive notifications reach customers promptly, establish backup options. For instance, if customer communication occurs on WhatsApp or Viber, transmit order tracking or delivery status updates through both the chat app and SMS. This way, even in situations where data connection is lost or the app experiences disruptions, customers still receive crucial updates.

4. Retention: Foster Long-Term Customer Engagement

Leverage past customer behavior, encompassing previous purchases, favored communication channels, and interaction history, to orchestrate proactive customer support and precisely targeted marketing initiatives. Distribute relevant content that complements their recent acquisitions, thus lessening their necessity to reach out to your support team. Furthermore, present future product or service recommendations that align with their prior purchases, thereby augmenting the likelihood of recurrent transactions.

3 Examples of Good Conversational Customer Support

1. Lemonade’s Claims Processing (Insurance)

Lemonade, an insurance technology firm, enables clients to easily file claims from their phones. Customers only need to touch the "claim" button on the Lemonade app, explain what occurred, and dozens of anti-fraud algorithms will review the claim.

The company's industry-changing claims processing procedure sets new standards. Customers consider this to be a significant point of differentiation because it has processed many issues in under a minute. 

2. Bolt

Secured a 40% boost in conversion rates after optimizing its driver registration journey with conversational channels and automation. 

3. Sephora’s Shopping Assistant (Retail)

Conversational technology plays a critical role in how Sephora delivers personalized digital experiences. When shopping with a brand feels like shopping with a friend (a friend who knows your tastes and preferences), brands unlock a whole new level of personalization. 

The brand's omnichannel strategy is unmatched. Triggered notifications, like back in stock and abandoned cart messages assist customers at every stage of the customer journey. Again, all of this happens through natural conversational customer service. 

Conclusion

In today's dynamic business landscape, harnessing the power of Conversational Customer Service has emerged as a transformative strategy for enhancing customer engagement. Throughout this exploration, you've delved into the core concepts of Conversational Customer Service, understanding its significance in fostering deeper connections with your audience. By blending convenience, personalization, and real-time interactions, this approach has proven to be pivotal in driving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

As highlighted, the journey to improved customer engagement through Conversational Customer Service involves a strategic alignment of technology and human touch. By prioritizing the five essential elements of a remarkable conversational customer experience, you're well-equipped to deliver interactions that resonate. This holistic approach doesn't just stop at better customer interactions; it extends to unlocking the manifold benefits of this approach, from increased customer satisfaction and loyalty to streamlined workflows that optimize your team's efficiency.

In your pursuit of excellence, consider harnessing the power of App0's AI-powered messaging solution. App0 is a next-gen communication platform powered by machine learning (ML) & large language models (LLM), that allows you to embed communication features directly into your product, with simple no-code integrations that don’t require additional developer bandwidth. For E-commerce stores, App0 offers seamless integration along with personalized, text-based shopping experience. It handles queries, supports reordering via Text-to-Shop, and streamlines processes, boosting customer retention.

With App0, you can guide your customers to order their favourite products anytime, hassle-free, with just a simple text—no downloads, accounts, or logins required! Moreover, it also has a chat-driven Seamless Checkout feature which facilitates checkout for customers without having them exit the conversation thread. Delivering exemplary service 24/7, App0 enhances and improves customer communication and satisfaction, setting your business apart. Boost your conversion rate with App0 for elevated customer engagement and revenue.

Furthermore, it empowers you to take customer engagement to new heights. Through personalized interactions, streamlined workflows, and meaningful connections, App0 ensures that your SaaS customer support, fintech customer service transcends expectations.  To know more about our solution and how we're working to deliver conversational customer support, request a demo.

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