Greg Kihlström advises on CX, Marketing Technology, and Digital Transformation at GK5A, and hosts The Agile Brand Podcast.
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Customers reward brands that demonstrate they know and understand their needs. While this includes things like providing relevant messages, offers, products and services, it also includes the way that brands communicate with them. This not only means the way you send them communications, but also the way that your brand allows customers to communicate with you.
Increasingly, we’re seeing customers wanting to use tools like online chat, which enable them to communicate and get answers to their questions in real time or near real time. This greatly speeds up the ability to make purchase decisions and get pointed in the right direction with product questions, and it can have a positive impact on the customer experience, which increases the chances of a sale.
Conversational marketing approaches can take several forms—from automated chatbots that present a predetermined set of choices, to conversational AI that can adapt and respond to more free-form questions posed by customers and prospects, to live chat solutions that have humans answering questions via a chat interface in a similar manner that they might if a customer called via phone.
In this article, I’m going to discuss three important benefits of using conversational marketing approaches with your customers.
Immediacy Builds Loyalty
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As a customer, when you have a question or a challenge that needs solving, when would you like to get help: right now, in a couple of hours or days from now? Obviously, you’d probably like an immediate resolution versus having to wait for one.
Additionally, customers who know they can depend on you to quickly and effectively answer questions, solve their challenges and expedite their purchase of a much-needed product or service will often translate their initial relief into repeat purchases, recommendations to their colleagues and friends, and other indicators of growing customer loyalty.
Real-time conversations with your customers can show your commitment to getting them timely responses, answers to their questions and solutions to their challenges. Building this rapport through responsiveness and the immediacy of your communications helps increase customer satisfaction, which leads to increased loyalty.
If You Don’t Respond, Your Competitors Just Might
If there are two doors that both lead to the same place, yet one is open and the other is locked, which would you rather do: walk through the door that is open or wait for someone to unlock the other one? If they both lead to the same place, and one is available now, why wouldn’t you go through the open one?
When customers are in a hurry, they aren’t likely to be patient for a response when they have a question about a product or service. This means that if they can’t get answers from your brand about your product, they may visit your competition and try to find solutions there. This means a loss of business and potentially the loss of a customer for life.
Your customers are busy people, and they don’t have time to wait days, hours or (sometimes) even minutes to get a pressing question answered or a problem solved. By employing real-time conversational marketing approaches, you can keep your customers’ attention, engage them and potentially make a sale rather than have them go to your competitor and purchase from them instead.
Scale Your Ability To Provide Real-Time Feedback And Answers
Have you ever met a customer who likes to sit and wait on hold for a customer service representative to answer their call, or wait sometimes days for an email response? Neither have I. Tools like chatbots can help with this, and they can reduce the strain on your call center or other customer service resources.
While it would be nice for all of your customers to have completely personalized human interactions when they need help with something, not all customers actually want to interact with humans all the time, and it simply isn’t scalable for any business that is growing beyond a handful of customers.
Using real-time communication tools provides a great alternative to adding staff, training them and having them available 100% of the time. Instead, using tools like chatbots, you can scale up and down as needed, and your customers can get the answers they need when they need them.
As you can see, there are several business benefits to enabling real-time customer conversations, such as the positive customer experience it can help foster. If you are not already using some of these approaches, it is time to consider them as you plan in the months ahead.
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Author: Greg Kihlstrom, Forbes Councils Member
