Demystifying conversational experience: The ultimate guide to everything conversational

The conversational customer journey is also a great way to identify areas for personalization in messaging.

This is because customer data can be captured at different stages of the customer journey including personal details, preferences, shopping behavior and intent cues from conversations. All this can be leveraged and identified in developing a conversational journey.

To ensure the journey and chatbot are always on point, it’s important to invest in conversational design.

Conversational design techniques strive for quality interactions between your customer and chatbot, allowing for friction-free communication on both ends. This means providing clear instructions on what customers should do next when interacting with the chatbot. It also means factoring in all the different ways someone might say something when trying to communicate their needs. This helps them get the desired result without having to go through multiple steps or provide redundant information.

The main benefit of using conversational design is its efficiency as it helps reduce complexity while maintaining accuracy and speed. This helps create better conversational experiences since customers don’t have to jump through hoops to figure out what they need and can access something quickly on their fingertips.

Additionally, conversation designs often yield more accurate results than traditional search engines because natural language processing can help provide context which helps avoid misinterpretations from customers like misunderstanding technical jargon.

Finally, when done well conversational design can even improve customer loyalty and potential ease-of-use resulting from reduced complexity during interactions regardless of if it’s a human being or a chatbot.

Conversation design has been around for quite some time now but continues to gain traction as technology advances and AI becomes increasingly commonplace in our lives. By understanding how this experience works best, businesses can reap the full potential for their customers by giving them an enhanced user experience, leading to them staying connected longer, increasing loyalty and ultimately customer satisfaction.

Now that you have the foundations set with the right technology and an idea as to how to design your customer journey, it’s time to look at the key use cases that would help deliver a conversational experience.

As customers, we all get inundated with promotional content on various channels but for brands just sending that one email or text isn’t enough. To build interest and loyalty, it’s important to engage meaningfully and be able to demonstrate ROI on marketing efforts. In a nutshell convert marketing campaigns into customer lifetime value management campaigns. And that’s where conversational marketing comes in.

Conversational marketing is a two-way approach to marketing that uses real-time conversations to engage with customers and quickly move them across the purchase journey.

At Infobip, we created conversational marketing solutions to help brands and marketing agencies deliver valuable campaigns that drive loyalty and revenue.

So, instead of waiting for sales or support to jump in, now you can seamlessly engage with customers and direct them to the point of sale in the same chat app.

There are four main areas of conversational marketing:

Engage

That’s the first step when you draw your potential customer in with a conversation starter. And instead of just sending a promotion, make it a two-way conversation, compelling them to find out more.

Understand

Once engaged, leave your company mascot – the chatbot – to ask the right questions, so you can collect the right data and understand your customer better.

Recommend

With all this rich data on hand, continue the conversation with personalized messages and recommendations to make sure customers carry on with the conversation.

Re-engage

After they have purchased and become a loyal customer or have gone off the radar, you can draw them back in the conversation with a personalized re-engagement message.

Here are the biggest benefits of using conversational marketing:

Your customers demand for immediacy and convenience has grown exponentially. Having to move from a website to a chat app and then back to a website for payment is too much of a hassle. What they are looking for is an easy way to communicate and purchase, on their terms and their choice of platform.

That’s where conversational commerce comes in. The ability to carry on your marketing or support conversation all the way to a transaction within the single chat app of your customers’ choice. So, no moving between channels, apps or even devices.

Conversational commerce is a term used to describe using chat and other communication tools such as chat apps, chatbots, and virtual assistants. It is an advanced form of customer communication that uses AI technology to support consumer relationships. Through conversational commerce, customers can interact with products and services and initiate transactions in a conversational manner.

It empowers customers to use natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to converse with brands through text message or voice input on any mobile device to provide them answers on product queries in real time.

By engaging in conversations with customers, businesses learn more about them. This allows them to create predictive models that anticipate customer needs and enable personalized experiences based on those insights. Through this system, consumers are provided tailored information that’s relevant to their inquiries quickly and easily instead of having a static website page they must trawl through.

There are three areas of conversational commerce:

Connect and respond:

When a connection is made with the customer, it’s time to respond in a timely manner with answers that are personalized and compel the customer to take the conversation further.

Drive and persuade:

Share recommendations and the product catalog within the chat app to drive them to the point of purchase.

Qualify and influence:

For customers who already have a rich profile on your data platform, qualify them for certain offers and products to influence their buying habits.

Conversational commerce helps you tear down any friction in communication and give potential customers a direct, real-time connection to your product or service. Giving them the power to shop when and where convenient with the assistance of intelligent chatbots. And in return for your business that means:

Support being conversational does sound like an appealing concept, especially if you’re offering customers a preferred channel for them to get a quick response, provide answers that are scalable, diminish the frustration cycle and mimic the way people communicate in everyday life.

Thanks to technology that’s now possible – conversational support. Not the regular call center answer of “sorry you had to go through this” or “you’re in queue” or “our lines are busy”. You get the gist.

So, enter chat apps and conversational support technology. One is the most popular way to communicate with friends and family, the chances are even your grandparents are on it, and the other empowers businesses to support customers as friends.

Conversational support is the use of artificial intelligence to enable more human-like interactions between businesses and customers. By leveraging AI, companies can provide personalized customer service and offer tailored solutions.

Conversational support leverages sophisticated technology such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to enable customers to communicate with chatbots in a human way. Chatbots are now much better at interpreting and responding to human inputs so that agents don’t need to type complicated queries into a search bar. Instead, they can simply ask simple questions or make statements regarding customer problems, which AI-driven chatbots can interpret quickly and meaningfully. This eliminates the need for manual data entry or complex search queries and makes customer service interactions faster and more seamless.

There are three important components to conversational support:

Listen:

Train your chatbot to be a good listener and understand the query, at the same time make sure the conversation history is updated in case an agent is needed the customer doesn’t need to repeat themselves.

Respond:

Be proactive and respond in real-time. No one likes waiting, especially on chat apps. Be prompt and always there.

Resolve:

Understand the problem and find a quick resolution, along with knowing the right time to pass the conversation on to a human agent. This will keep your customer happy and eventually loyal.

The future of digital interactions is conversational, channel-agnostic, and hyper-personalized. And just as customers expect frictionless end-to-end journeys on channels of their choice —businesses seek similar experiences in their efforts to deliver on that expectation. That’s where Infobip comes in.

The future of digital interactions is now and with our conversational experience solution it’s possible over any chat app of your customers’ choice.

With us, businesses can cover all the touchpoints across the journey on a channel of their customers’ choice from a single intuitive interface, equipped with a customer engagement solution, chatbot building platform, and cloud contact center solution—all underpinned by a customer data platform.

From simple use cases to the most complex conversational scenarios, all can be built over your customers’ favorite digital channels. And being a leading CPaaS provider we make sure they’re simple to integrate into your communication stack. Just plug in and play.

Stay ahead of the messaging evolution curve with our cutting-edge conversational platform.