Relationships are essential for every business. The majority (73%) of companies with above-average customer experience perform better financially than their competitors, and 96% of customers base their brand loyalty on the quality of the customer service. It is impossible to build great relationships and provide excellent experience without top-notch communications. And this is why businesses worldwide shift from the traditional approach to communication and expand their toolkit.
Communications are going conversational, and today we will talk about the benefits of this new approach both to businesses and their clients.
Approaches to communication: traditional vs. conversational
Traditional business to customer communication strategy assumed working in one direction. The company would send emails, request filling forms, or cold calling potential customers. Such communications turned to be fragmented, impersonal, and not that convenient to the customers. This approach worked in the years when customers based their loyalty on price or the product solely. However, the rapid development of the internet, emerging technologies that made cross-channel shopping a reality broke the status quo.
Now, 86% of customers say they would pay more for a better experience. Their demands are increasing, and people want perfect service at every touchpoint with the business. They do not want to spend time waiting on the phone or experience slow answers via email. Companies that cannot keep up with these demands are losing customers and staying behind competitors.
Nowadays, the only strategy that stays on top of the customers’ demands is conversational communications. Businesses that use it talk to their customers and invest resources to make such conversations personalized, meaningful, and convenient.
What should this conversation be in 2021: personalization is key
During the past years, personalization became a commodity. People now expect personalized experience regardless of the industry, company size, and exact purpose of the contact.
Even the technical part of the communication should be personalized. According to HubSpot, 62% of customers want to communicate with companies via Email for customer service, while 48% want to use the phone, 42% live chat, and 36% “Contact Us” forms.” So, to increase retention, loyalty and fight churn, businesses should get people what they want.
But how do they do this?
Now, 86% of customers say they would pay more for a better experience. Their demands are increasing, and people want perfect service at every touchpoint with the business.
Building an omnichannel communication
According to stats, 78% of customers prefer different communication channels depending on the context. This means you can’t keep sending push notifications, SMS, or emails when you want it. Customers are willing to receive targeted communications that are aligned with their current situation. For the companies, this means the need to enhance their contact centers to make them more flexible.
The simple way is to add more customer support and sales representatives to cover all possible communication channels. However, this is not a sustainable model with its limitations. For example, even if you are continually growing your contact center, there will be demand spikes, holiday season, and other urgent situations, which will get you out of capacity. This is why businesses adopt smart technologies that help them build omnichannel communication while staying on a budget.
Conversational AI is a perfect solution for this task. The technology developed by Neuro.net allows the creation of virtual agents. These, i.e., smart AI bots, can understand human speech over the phone or in any other communication environment and generate personalized responses with a human-like voice. A human agent can’t interact with customers via multiple channels simultaneously. In turn, AI-fueled virtual agents designed by Neuro.net can talk to customers via Email, Whatsapp, or Viber if needed, and only 1% of customers can distinguish an AI from a real human.
Conversational relationships at scale
New technologies allow building conversational communications at a scale unimaginable before. Human contact center employees can get tired, forget the script, and sometimes even be rude. With a traditional approach, the higher the communication volume, the more such mistakes occur, causing real losses for the business.
AI-powered agents solve the scaling problem by offering a sustainable and predictable quality of communications regardless of the number of dialogs. Smart agents always choose the right and cheerful tone for every conversation, and it is easy to add more agents during the demand spikes. So, the company can make sure no one will hear “all of our agents are currently busy.”
Final thoughts: technology for a better experience
Conversational communications are better for both customers and businesses. With the voice technologies by Neuro.net, customers get a better experience when they do not have to wait in line or repeat their issue to multiple representatives and get help where they need it.
In turn, businesses can solve up to 80% of customer requests without forwarding them to human experts (and having fewer humans is cost-effective by itself), keep better conversions throughout the funnel as an AI will never forget the sales script, reduce churn by choosing the right tone for every conversation.
This is how conversational communications boost relationships and make everyone happier!
