Why Businesses Should Embrace Conversational Customer Support

There's a new approach to customer service that's revolutionizing how organizations work. While increasing revenue, conversational support helps organizations engage with their customer at a deeper, more meaningful level. So, what exactly is conversational support?

Answering consumer questions one-on-one with actual individuals is known as conversational support. Conversational support has moved from email and phone calls to quick, simple, and frictionless text communications in recent years.

The foundation of conversational support is text messaging, which enables businesses to quickly and more efficiently reach more customers.

When you compare messaging to other forms of communication, your customers will find it more efficient, quicker, and more convenient. When you combine these facts with the significant transition that businesses have made during the pandemic toward going digital, this is the most logical way forward.

The quality of a customer's buying journey is what matters most to them when choosing which brands to endorse. The two most important elements of customer engagement and satisfaction in messaging are speed and personalization.

However, it takes more than just choosing the appropriate messaging channels to give your own customers conversational support. In addition to conversational channels, businesses also need requisite guidance on how to create exceptional messaging experiences for their customers.

A company's ability to implement, scale, and refine its conversational messaging strategy can be greatly enhanced by having a well-thought-out plan in place.

Why Conversational Support is Important

Prior to the spring of 2020, company reps could have in-person meetings with customers to define their experiences. For instance, salesperson sees a familiar face, they may greet them, inquire about their day, confirm that the previous item they bought is working perfectly, and ask if they need assistance with anything. All that changed after the pandemic struck.

Brick-and-mortar businesses scampered to implement digital channels to provide the in-store, in-person experience online. Adopting new messaging channels like SMS and WhatsApp quickly was a big part of this massive drive toward going digital first.

This widespread move to digital media was more of a sea change than a shift. There was no turning back once customers realized they could connect with the brands they love via the channels of their choice. Customers still demand in-person interactions along with conversational support that is quick and simple, even when physical stores are starting to reopen.

While many firms were able to quickly adopt these new channels after the pandemic, the job doesn't end when you start receiving text communications from customers. To service customers at scale across all of these different channels, you need a robust plan.

Businesses that engaged in customer conversations without a preconceived plan soon discovered that they faced a number of issues. It's possible that their support personnel took longer to reply to customer questions because it was unclear which team member would handle the case. Alternatively, a business may have responded impersonally to a customer's question because they were unable to access the customer's previous conversations in quick time.

These businesses lose out on the flow of a conversation and the intimate details that give customers the impression that they are not conversing with a real human being.

You can make the most out of every customer interaction and never pass up the chance to boost customer loyalty when you have a well-thought-out conversational messaging strategy in place.

Why is Messaging So Effective

Your customers receive messaging where they are and at a pace that is determined by them. Messages have an innate sense of immediacy that isn't found in other forms of communication like phone calls or emails.

Unlike email or phone calls, which typically have 20% open rates, 98% of SMS messages are read by their recipient, and 45% of those recipients reply to the message they receive.

Salesforce reports that the fastest-growing channel is messaging, with a surge in support inquiries via messaging apps. Agents can significantly increase their capacity by using messaging to serve multiple consumers simultaneously. By using the channels that their customers prefer, businesses can reach more customers in less time and reduce contact center expenses.

Whether you're attempting to reach out to customers who haven't been in contact with you in a while or inform all your customers about a new product, your team can collaborate to design tailored messaging campaigns.

Creating a Conversational Customer Support Strategy

To develop a conversational customer support strategy, put together a great team first along with a plan, resources, and expertise before you start working.

You'll find areas where you can improve along the journey. Together with your team, you'll work to refine your initial design.

Leverage your CRM data to reveal deep insights about your customers and compliment it with your unique competitive advantage to help you craft a robust conversational support strategy.

These two assets will serve you well in both identifying the goals of your new strategy and achieving those goals.

These two tools will be very helpful to you in both determining and accomplishing the objectives of your new approach.

These are the four key components of creating a conversational support strategy:

Business goals: Establish key business goals for customer conversations.

Customer needs: Document the expectations that your customers have from your company and the ways in which your conversational approach might meet those needs.

Team capacity: Estimate the support experience your teams can deliver based on team size, experience, and available bandwidth.

Tech stack: Examine the sources of your information of your customers and how to connect those systems to facilitate conversations.

Business Goals

Establish your business goals for conversational customer support strategy by keeping customers at the core of this process. Look at messaging as an opportunity to make your business more customer-focused.

When establishing your business goals, keep the following questions in mind:

Goals: Why do you want to implement conversational support? Which business goals does it fulfill?

Outcomes: After having text conversations with you, how do you want your customers to feel and what do you want them to do?

Competition: How do you differentiate yourself from the competition and offer a service that none of your rivals can match?

You should have both qualitative and quantitative goals in mind for what those conversations should accomplish for your organization before you put together your team, set up your messaging platform, connect your IT stack, and begin having conversations with customers.

Connect these goals to metrics that you can monitor and assess to find out how well your conversational support strategy is working. Metrics like time to resolution, agent response times, and CSAT can serve as excellent compass points for your approach.

Customer Needs

After establishing your goals, determine why your customers contact you and the results they hope to achieve before developing your conversational support strategy. Leverage your understanding of your customers' needs and the uniqueness of your offerings. When creating content to meet the demands of your clients, bear the following in mind:

Needs: When and why do customers wish to communicate with you via messaging? When people reach out to you, what issue are they attempting to resolve?

Behavior: How many customers do you think will message you each day? When and how do you want them to get in touch with you?

Expectations: How quickly do your customers expect you to respond? What do they expect you to know about them?

Managing variables that are always changing, such as CSAT, message response time, and the number of agents you have on hand to assist customers that day, will be one of your main hurdles in implementing your plan. You're more likely to succeed when you have a plan in place to direct how you respond to and control those circumstances.

Let's imagine that the majority of your customers are Gen Z and Millennials. It is highly likely that they would rather communicate with you via SMS, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger on their smartphones than via email. Because texting is far faster than email, you should take that preference into consideration and make sure you're prepared to respond to their messages right away.

A customer's preferences can very quickly expose holes your business must close before going live with your conversational support. Customers in the Millennial or Gen Z demographic might expect a reply within five to seven minutes of sending you a text. It's possible that you get 1,000 such texts each day from customers. You might receive texts after work hours. How then do you handle that?

You can build your team better and understand what they need to accomplish to deliver an exceptional customer experience if you first map out the needs, behavior, and expectations of your customers.

Team Capacity

A team functions very well as a cohesive entity because every member is aware of their specific responsibilities and has the guidance, resources, and training necessary to carry them out. Managers, customer experience representatives, and support staff should all use the same approach.

Think about these questions prior to putting your team capacity plan into action:

Capacity: What time will your team members be ready to service consumers, and how many of them will be available?

Collaboration: How does your team share the information they need to help customers among themselves?

Training: Are you going to train employees internally or through a third party?

Tracking: Which KPIs will you monitor and report in order to assess your progress?

Each person on your team should have the confidence to perform at their highest level. You may consider hiring an outside training agency to provide your staff with intensive training on essential tools such as Salesforce and a native Salesforce texting app that works well with a conversational strategy. You may also want to conduct the training internally. Either way, your main concern should be ensuring that your team has the resources necessary to satisfy customers at scale.

It is very important to understand how your team will collaborate to address customer issues. Use internal notes tagged to customer conversations to avoid having a customer wait hours for a response while one person looks for background information needed to assist them. Perhaps you could use auto-replies to let customers know when to expect a response from a representative rather than having agents work nonstop.

Tech Stack

Your entire conversational support strategy is powered by your tech stack. It drives the processes and provides the information that enables successful customer interactions.

The number of communication channels your team will utilize, the number of phone numbers your team will require to serve customers, and the secure storage of the information your customers provide you should all be taken into account when creating your tech stack.

You can identify the areas that require improvement before launching by mapping the layers of your tech stack and how they interact with one another. When your team is prepared, your tools are primed, and your plans are in place, you're good to go.

GirikSMS is a 100% native Salesforce SMS App designed to help businesses of all types take customer engagement to a whole new level. To learn more about conversational messaging and what it can do for your business, schedule a demo today.