Businesses opt for conversational customer experience when it comes to customer success function. As a result, it's one of the top customer service trends in 2021. Why? Conversational customer relationship management is efficient, quick, and, more importantly, personal, so your clients get the responses they are looking for, when and where they need them. At the same time, using the proper conversational software, your client success team can maximize their resources and concentrate on strategic issues and long-term customer relations.
However, the conversational relationship platform isn't good solely for your support team. By gathering more statistics, you can identify opportunities and trends. By strengthening experience with clients and agents, it can become a real game-changer for each element of your company.
Do you have any ideas on how conversational support can influence every team in your company? Then, keep reading to learn more.
What is a conversational relationship platform?
Firstly, let's speak about the basics. Then, of course, we will focus on what the word ‘conversational' means and the potential for growth here. But let us start with what exactly stands for ‘conversational support.'
Conversational support: definition
What is conversational support? To put it simply, conversational support is the recent means to solve customer issues with the interaction based on digital customer messaging platform. In such a way, the support agents and customers get connected asynchronously or in real-time, and clients can even pause and then restart communication when they need to - without losing any context.
Conversational support is a digital customer communication platform approach to dealing with customer requests. As it allows for any online chat tool or other messaging platform, conversations can take place instantly - providing for quick, efficient, and straightaway answers. Besides, communication can happen asynchronously, meaning that it can be paused and renewed at any point.
This is beneficial not only for customers and agents, allowing them to resolve many tasks at a time instead of making clients wait in long queues. It also means that each chat becomes an element of a long history of interactions with the customers, so your brand can build a strong, context-rich, and personalized approach.
Conversational marketing software incorporates the best of email and phone communication to help you provide something much better than both.
Live chat solutions combine the possibility of real-time responses from support by phone with non-simultaneous communication and written records from support by email. As a result, we have something great.
With the option of adding a customizable chatbot to make your support operations even more productive and efficient, this communication method helps businesses to boost customer support and reach an ideal balance between customer KPIs and team performance.
Besides, as client’s expectations are becoming higher and higher, availing them with scalable, personalized, and smooth support is critical to retaining clients and ensuring business growth.
How does conversational customer engagement deliver value for all the teams?
In April, Forrester Consulting, an independent research agency, studied how communications channel preferences are adapting. They identified that the need for communications based on messages has grown due to the pandemic. Before 2020, such a channel was ranked fifth. Now, it's the second top used instrument. In addition to this, they spotted how conversational customer support can lead to business performance and increased sales for the entire company.
Key benefits of conversational support
So what are the key benefits for your business you can get from implementing any conversational support system such as live chat website examples across all the teams? Here are the most common issues the decision-makers and support leaders reported.
Better customer retention (+60%)
Higher business efficiency (+58%)
Increased customer satisfaction (+58%)
Enhanced customer acquisition (+54%)
Improved ROI (+54%)
What about other advantages? The higher share of the market (42%), improved advantage relative or differentiation from competitors (32%), and enhanced R&D and marketing decisions (29%).
Considering all of this, it's obvious that conversational support is something more than another productivity software. It can transform your company, become a strategic investment at times when the importance of proper communication with customers is higher than ever before.
Top cross-functional advantages of conversational support
1. Good conversational support helps brands to quickly gather essential information about customers upfront.
Teams that do well out of: marketing, sales.
With support chat software, you are free to employ website chat tools and bot questions to smoothly capture and get relevant information about your client's request, even before your customer support reps get involved.
What does it mean, and why is it important? By getting rid of the need to administrate chats manually you are saving the precious time of your support team. Also you can get this context for a better understanding of your clients and to enhance the client experience for them.
Such data also allows your team to create personalized and tailored replies considering unique aspects like the use case plan type and company size.
And these insights mean that you can ensure more relevant and helpful customer support. But also, you can target your customers with more impactful messages to reach wider marketing and sales outreach. Using customer messaging software and the information you captured, you can implement customer onboarding tools to activate customers at every step of their journey.
2. Good conversational support makes it possible to spot trends and implement them for informed business decisions.
Teams that do well out of: R&D, product development, product education, marketing, sales, customer success.
As the conversational support is messenger-based, the right instrument here becomes a searchable and essential database. And with artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can benefit from it quickly as well as identify and deal with issues that your clients have questions or are confused about.
This is how you can get a deep understanding of how often such concerns appear and in what situations. Thanks to artificial intelligence and conversational analytics support, you will also get automatically generated topics to study and proactively improve your customer experience.
In turn, this benefits several teams as follows:
By recognizing trends in possible customer issues and requests, your product development team can decide which bugs to fix first or which options and features to add, according to customer feedback.
By noticing popular issues that interrupt your sales process, the relevant team can boost extra sales promo to meet your customers’ needs and incorporate what they need even before they ask.
By focusing on stumbling blocks that hinder the adoption of your product, you can develop extra content to make more people aware of your goods. This can be used by your customer success department, product education department, and product marketing team.
3. Good conversational support helps teams to develop a more smooth and efficient conversation flow.
Teams that do well out of: customer success, marketing, sales.
Responding to customer requestі is often much more complicated than simply going from one point to another. Sometimes you will need to break out into several teams like billing or product one to make sure that your clients get the correct answers. But, at other times, you should just transfer the request to the sales team for clarification.
However, it doesn't make any sense to customers which team is dealing with their request. They don't want to be forwarded from one department to another. They want only a quick reply to their Message. So, don't waste the time of your clients switching them between various teams, various apps, tools, and tabs.
Conversational support funnel is aimed to help you do this job quickly and, what is also important, behind the scenes. With such instruments, you can make specific requests to specific teams automatically right from the beginning. Or reassign them with a few clicks if another team can deal with them.
With live chat platforms and client onboarding tools, you can check both support and sales conversations and notes for a better understanding of customers' journeys. This, as a result, leads to more personalized and faster solutions.
Client onboarding best practices prove that such techniques allow for greater alignment and collaboration as well as provide enhanced efficiency. It's really helpful that different teams have access to the same conversational history and can deal with customer requests comprehensively.
Conversational support is a decent way to get people across several teams aware of and involved in what customers are up to and request. Thanks to such tools, you can tag your colleagues in conversations with customers to make them aware of important problems or issues as well as ensure that the right people are dealing with the customers' questions.
4. Good conversational support provides increased customer retention satisfaction.
Teams that do well out of: sales, marketing, billing, customer success.
According to the Forrester study, one of the crucial benefits of the best live chat examples is that conversational support software can directly impact customer satisfaction, acquisition, and retention.
In fact, this is beneficial not only for marketing and sales but also for the revenue and billing operations department. So, basically, every team gets to profit from customer service improvements.
So what are their immediate examples of how live chat programs or product onboarding tools helped businesses to become industry leaders or reach high customer satisfaction scores?
Smartly.io, a popular social ad solution, has developed dramatically over the recent years. They say that the user onboarding tools and live chat systems helped them to get a top-notch 97% rate of customer satisfaction, thus, making the platform the number one option in the industry of social advertising and winning the big-name clients.
Guru, a great collaborative knowledge operations tool, employed conversational support to deal with a 179% growth in inbound communication while still performing with the customer satisfaction rate at 95%.
The tadoº team is another impressive example of how adopting conversational support benefits the brand. Since then, their overall CSAT indicator grew by 8%, keeping the satisfaction rate of chats at 90% and above even when their conversation amount climbed two times.
5. Good conversational support strengthens customer reps team happiness and engagement.
Teams that do well out of: HR, people operations.
The thing is, high-level customer support is an emotionally challenging and technically demanding task. And for any customer agent, doing the same tasks like renewing logins or responding to requests about pricing makes their job feel rather like Groundhog Day than a great career ladder they hoped for. Replying to the same questions and performing the same job every day is a sure recipe for your customer support team's dissatisfaction and turnover, as a result.
And this hurts not only your business ethics but also your profits at their core - customer support agents turnover results in higher costs in recruiting and educating your new staff. Recent research shows that it costs companies approximately 33% of an employee's annual salary to replace a member of the customer success team structure that leaves. This is only the direct loss. There are also side-effects aligned with hiring, onboarding, and teaching new employees before they are capable of performing at the necessary level.
Conversational support ensures deeper reps experience by removing the above-mentioned repetitive work and freeing up people for more developing and fulfilling tasks. Companies can achieve efficiency and avoid burning out the entire team with a proper combination of automated support and a human approach,
Using the live chat best practices in your customer engagement strategy template, you can employ automation and bots to deal with simple issues, allowing the people to focus on crucial areas: to solve tricky issues, analyse customer feedback, ensure customer success organization, reach customer support KPIs, and build long-term strategic relations.
Conversational support is a competitive advantage for your company
Forrester's report proved that 71% of leaders in client support claim that enhancing conversational tools will help their company stay competitive in the market or become a leader in the industry. Little wonder that live chatting software and customer service messaging are no longer an option – it's a life-or-death.
However, while providing exceptional support is an important goal for your business itself, go-ahead conversational support will help you reach much more.
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