Editorial
The Gist
- Rethink success. Emphasize journey acceleration metrics in conversational marketing.
- Automation scope. Recognize the limitations of automation in conversational tools.
- Customer experience. Balance optimal and possible experiences in conversational marketing.
The buying process isn’t always smooth for customers. Sometimes they have questions that aren’t easily answered, or there are unanticipated snags in the buying process. Other times, they just need a little help to get “unstuck” from a dead end. While phone or email support is usually just a click away, there isn’t always time for those methods, and in other cases, customers just don’t want to have to talk with someone to get a seemingly simple challenge solved. That's where conversational marketing comes in.
Because of all of this and more, there is a huge opportunity to utilize conversational marketing approaches to keep customers focused on their end goal (often a purchase), and help them complete that conversion they have their eyes on. When I use the term “conversational marketing,” I’m referring to a broad set of tools that include automated chatbots, conversational AI, and live chat that is staffed by people.
In this article, I’m going to talk about some of the ways that introducing or augmenting your marketing approach with conversational marketing can cause you to rethink your approach.
What Are Your Measures of Conversational Marketing Success?
Let’s start by making sure that we are revisiting our measures of success when incorporating conversational marketing. While our end goals are not likely to change, our ability to provide potentially quicker responses to customers’ questions and interact with them in a more natural method opens up some new opportunities.
For instance, while you likely always want your customers to complete their current task as quickly as possible, when you introduce conversational marketing into the mix, you may want to introduce metrics that emphasize acceleration of certain aspects of their journey. After all, a chat interface that opens up in the same browser window they are already shopping or completing another transaction on can make it quicker to get questions answered as opposed to calling customer service or opening a separate browser window to search for a solution elsewhere.
While acceleration is just one example, you may be able to think of several others that emphasize some of the benefits of conversational marketing.
Related Article: Top Conversational AI Metrics for CX Professionals
What Can — and Can’t — You Automate?
Just as important as what you can do, you should also keep in mind what simply may not be possible to automate through a chatbot or conversational AI interface.
For instance, if a process is difficult and is better to “walk” someone through step by step, it can sometimes be difficult to do that via chatbot or conversational AI, particularly when there is a lot of variation in the potential outcomes. There may also be things that would simply be too difficult or cumbersome to automate or do through a chat interface, where a different method might be quicker and more straightforward. This can be solved through directing a customer to call a customer service line, or more recently, video services are being explored to solve some of these challenges.
Make sure you are using the right tool for the job. Conversational marketing can be beneficial to customers when used in the right moments, but otherwise can add frustration to an already complex process.
Related Article: What's the Impact of Conversational AI for Contact Centers?
Which Customer Systems Need to Talk?
As you might assume, for conversational marketing to solve a few key challenges, you need critical systems to “talk” with one another, so you can provide your customers with the information they need.
For anything more than a simple chatbot menu-driven scenario, you will likely need to understand what a customer wants to do and match that with your systems that enable those actions. There are many potential actions here, and they vary widely depending on the industry, but any of the following might apply to your organization:
- Past or recent purchase history.
- Nearby locations to book an appointment.
- Scheduling availability to talk with a salesperson.
- Recent customer support requests.
In any of the above scenarios, we are talking about connecting at least 1-2 systems if not more together. When planning implementation of conversational marketing, make sure you run through the potential scenarios your customers might find most valuable so you can ensure you are enabling the right systems to talk with one another.
What Is the Best Customer Experience?
While it would be great to go without saying, any investment in a customer experience improvement like conversational marketing should always consider what’s in the best interest of the customer.Because of this, you can think of it from two different standpoints:
- How does conversational benefit the customer? First, think about how conversational can benefit the customer at key times when picking up the phone, opening a new browser window, or otherwise disrupting their flow would create friction in the process. Conversational marketing can work very well in these instances because it has a minimal footprint and can be accessed in a corner of a website or mobile app if or when needed and minimized when it isn’t needed.
- How does conversational challenge the customer? The second standpoint takes into account what might be possible with conversational marketing but might not be optimal for the customer. This includes times when, even though you might be able to provide some direction, the steps might either be too complex or too specific to the customer that it would actually be better for them to talk with someone, receive an email, or some other types of communication better suited to the ask. While artificial intelligence continues to improve, there are still some times when talking with someone is just the best answer!
Similar to any of your marketing channel implementations, conversational marketing requires a commonsense approach, ensuring that you are optimizing the customer experience at all times, while avoiding using the wrong tool for the job.
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Conclusion on Conversational Marketing
As you can see, conversational marketing approaches offer the opportunity to rethink some of your approaches and refocus on optimizing the customer experience along the way. Consider these factors as you work to implement conversational marketing for your brand.
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