Interacting with customers through good service and pleasant communication creates a positive customer experience, which is an essential customer engagement strategy. This strategy helps to increase customer satisfaction by inducing more positive interactions with brands and businesses and helps with customer retention.
In today’s massive digital era, one customer engagement strategy that can be applied in order to know and understand customers is by creating personalized conversations with customers. This gives customers the opportunity to talk to the business and have it respond to the customer.
Salesforce found that as many as 66% of customers expect companies and brands to understand their needs and expectations. Brands can initiate this effort by implementing customer engagement strategies that create personalized conversations with customers. Seeing the importance of customer engagement in contributing to business growth, Qiscus is here to assist businesses in creating personalized conversations with customers as part of their customer engagement strategy.
The combination of human agent and chatbots helps create personalized conversations
Currently, chatbots are one of the ways that businesses can improve their services’ rates of response. In fact, Salesforce also found that 64% of customer service agents who use chatbots feel that the chatbot system eases their loads and allows them to spend more time time solving complex issues reported by the customer.
The Chat Templates feature in the chatbot system in Qiscus Multichannel Chat help customer service agents by storing ready-to-use answers that can be used for recurring questions such as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). This allows customer service agents to use their time more efficiently in managing a large number of customer messages. However, it is still crucial for businesses to still provide human agents to create more personalized conversations with customers. Most customers prefer direct conversations with human agents for various reasons, especially since it feels more real and makes it easier to communicate.
Opinium Research and IDC conducted a global study and found that 79% of customers prefer humans over bots to remain part of customer service. This is because humans are able to display empathy and have the cognitive abilities that bots will never surpass. Human agents also are better able to provide emotional support to customers with critical problems, and will be able to understand critical situations and circumstances to act with urgency. Also, it just feels more comfortable knowing that you are talking to a real person on the other side.
With their respective advantages, it is impossible to determine which is better between chatbots or human agents. Chatbots are indeed very helpful in increasing response rates but human agents provide more personalized conversations and better service in certain situations. Therefore, chatbots and human agents need to work hand in ahand to provide the best customer service and create conversations that provide positive customer experience.
This is where Qiscus Robolabs, a chatbot integration tool provided by Qiscus, can harness the power of collaboration between human agents and bots to help businesses create more intimate and helpful conversations to drive customer engagement due to increased responsiveness from brands.
Take advantage of personalized customer notifications
Apart from personalized conversations through human agents, one more strategy to engage customers is through more personalized notifications. Sending notifications at the right moment, especially with personalized content, is a great way to connect with customers and increases the possibility of customer retention.
However, this strategy needs to be carefully considered to avoid leaving the impression of aggressive spamming. Overzealous usage of sending customized notifications to customers can erode their trust and annoy them, especially if the notification is irrelevant and contains no significant or helpful content.
Instead, businesses can send personalized notifications. In this case, personalizing notifications based on customer data ensures the content remain relevant. For example, based on a customer’s purchase history or cart, a relevant and valuable message that can be sent to the customer could be a reminder that the customer did not complete the purchase or still has remaining items in his or her shopping cart.
Notifications containing relevant messages such as the above, or on shipment tracking or other valuable information will be very helpful for customers. 48% of customers said updates on shipment tracking for products are how they prefer that businesses stay in touch while 44% of customers prefers to receive order confirmations and purchase status updates.
WhatsApp is the right communication channel to send customer notifications
WhatsApp is an instant messaging application with one of the largest user base in the world. Most people in this age of increasingly sophisticated technology certainly are familiar with WhatsApp as a platform to communicate, not surprising since it currently boastsmore than 2 billion monthly active users. This makes WhatApp a well-targeted communication platform for businesses to send customer notifications.
The presence of WhatsApp Business API has made it easier for businesses to communicate with customers. Through WhatsApp Business API integrated into Qiscus Multichannel Chat, Qiscus helps businesses to deliver notifications at the right moment according to the business process. Businesses can send notifications for specific processes including negotiation, delivery, sending invoices, shopping cart alerts, or at any other appropriate stages.
As experienced by Morula IVF, one of the clients of Qiscus who use the WhatsApp Business API, the integrated use of the WhatsApp Business API in Qiscus Multichannel allows one of the largest fertility clinics in Indonesia to now be able to disseminate large-scale notifications faster and easily, making the patient administration process become more automated and convenient.
Personalized conversations are more effective with visuals
Apart from relevant and valuable notification messages, businesses are also able to accompany personalized messages with the customer’s name or include interactive files such as images, videos, and so on. This is much more effective than messages with overly formal or monotonous words. Close to 91% of customers now favor interactive and visual content over text-only content.
Based on what the brand needs, the enterprise’s IT team can disseminate a variety of messages and notifications to customers with the Multichannel API from Qiscus. In addition, Qiscus also has a Multichannel Inbox that supports several message types so that businesses can attend to the multitude of customer messages coming from various communication channels more effectively and efficiently. Through the Multichannel Inbox, businesses can now send personalized messages with texts, images, videos, documents, and other file types to customers.
Notifications for agents prevents customer messages from being ignored
Above all, the success of personalized conversations ultimately depends on how customers are treated. When customers contact customer service, they don’t want to wait too long to receive a response. For this reason, messages from customers should never be ignored.
In fact, 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a customer service question. The key to effective and personalized conversations is to avoid the possibility of customers feeling left out due to long waiting times. Longer response times to incoming customer messages can erode customers’ trust in a business by making them feel not sufficiently valued.
Qiscus provides a combination of notifications and information on the number of unserved customer messages (Unserved Count). This way way, agents will not be able to ignore or overlook customer messages. In fact, notifications for agents are available on the web and mobile applications, including on both Android and iOS. Without having to open Qiscus Multichannel Chat via web, this availability makes it easier for agents to manage their responses to customer messages since they can easily respond to customer messages from the Multichannel application on Android or iOS.
In addition to the communication channels that are already integrated directly with Qiscus Multichannel, businesses can also execute Custom Channels for third-party applications such as other notification tools including SMS, email, or other third party services. Through these tools, businesses can streamline customer replies on the Multichannel platform with the Custom Channel feature customised according to the brand’s IT team setup.
Various services from Qiscus allow businesses to create personal conversations with customers
Creating personalized conversation with customers is one customer engagement strategy that can help business grow. With the combination of human-bots, notifications (including for agents) and easy access that can be done via the web or mobile, Qiscus helps businesses create conversations which meet the needs and desires of customers more efficiently and effectively.
If you want to learn more about personalized conversations and interactions with customers to increase business growth effectively, visit this page or have a discussion with our team here.
