What is Conversational Customer Engagement? How to Apply it?

Have you ever stopped to think if your strategies for conversing with the consumer, providing necessary support, and increasing engagement with your audience are working? 🤔

If these questions are topics you haven’t been paying much attention to or if you’re unsure what else to do to stand out, Conversational Customer Engagement can help you!

This new concept is becoming increasingly important for companies, as it aims to maintain clear, direct dialogue focused on the customer throughout the process.

Therefore, staying aligned with market trends and investing in new concepts is essential to generate good results.

Ready to learn more about Conversational Customer Engagement and what it has to offer your business? 😉

What is Conversational Customer Engagement?

Conversational Customer Engagement” is a strategy of interaction between a company and its customers aimed at real-time conversations throughout the sales cycle.

The goal here is to assist the consumer at all times, demonstrating availability to provide support, answer questions, receive feedback, and truly engage in dialogue to build a relationship of trust.

This strategy can be implemented through chatbots, virtual assistants, messaging apps, and social media, but it’s not limited to these platforms.

A common mistake when discussing conversational customer engagement is focusing solely on the tools. While they are crucial, the overall philosophy of the methodology also involves offline methods such as in-person and phone-based customer service.

In summary, conversational customer engagement is a customer-focused methodology carried out through conversation, aiming to create engagement through dialogue and support in all stages of the sales funnel.

The 4 pillars of conversational customer engagement

Engaging in conversations with your customers is a necessity for all businesses. But what exactly should these conversations look like?

Our work here at Leadster, as a conversational marketing platform, often overlaps with engagement through conversation.

Our primary focus is lead generation, but the Leadster tool also serves as a valuable asset for approaching and conversing with customers.

And of course, we also engage with customers at various points in our own sales strategies.

All of this is to say that we’ve developed the following pillars as part of our efforts to define the key qualities that conversations should have in marketing.

To further deepen our understanding of this new concept, let’s explore the 4 pillars that uphold Conversational Customer Engagement!

Ease

Make your user’s life easier!

Think about the entire experience they will have when interacting with your product or service. Design passive touchpoints—like responding to a customer’s query—and active ones—like reaching out to the customer.

Ease is related to the availability of communication channels for your customers, along with simplicity in their access. Don’t waste time on complex and unintuitive designs, as they will only hinder the consumer.

Utility

Ensure that the customer can resolve their issue after contacting your brand through any channel you provide—whether automated or not.

Does your strategy provide utility for the customer? Do you know what they will gain from contacting your brand?

These are questions you need to answer—hopefully in the affirmative—if you want to have a good relationship with your consumer.

Authenticity

Is your communication unique, personalized, and truthful? The more authentic it is, the higher the engagement your customer will have with your channels.

Remember, we are in a highly competitive environment, so you need to invest in your authenticity; otherwise, the customer won’t trust in resolving their issues or continuing negotiations.

For chatbots and artificial intelligence, it’s crucial to take the time to train the platform or write truly authentic and on-brand texts.

In the case of human attendants, training never ends because you learn from the customer. To aid in this learning, consider developing templates and scripts, as well as training the team to approach customers correctly. Then, monitor and repeat continuously.

Scalability

Your conversations need to be scalable and adaptable.

In other words, it’s ideal to have the capacity to handle a large volume of simultaneous interactions and to adapt to different situations and customer needs.

Consider: if you can handle 10, can you handle 100? 🤔

This question often leads most brands to opt for support through chatbots and artificial intelligence. The scalability costs are much lower, but this won’t always be the best alternative for the business. Therefore, it’s essential to adapt each pillar to the reality of your company.

The conversational customer engagement in the consumer journey and sales funnel

You already know the concept and pillars of Conversational Customer Engagement, now let’s understand how this strategy operates within the sales funnel.

This step is crucial to follow because many people end up thinking that conversing with their customer only happens when closing the sale or offering support, and things are not quite like that by far.

All stages of the funnel present opportunities for a conversational approach. Here you will discover how. Shall we?

Attraction

The first step in the sales cycle is to attract consumers to your brand, meaning to pique the user’s interest and already invest in Conversational Customer Engagement to keep them in the funnel.

By providing good commercial service on the marketing channels where your audience is present, you show that your company cares about the consumer, and you can persuade them more directly and personally.

💡Example: Use chatbots on social media that answer users’ questions and provide information about the company. Personalize through intelligent calls to action.

Conversion

Great, you’ve captured the consumer’s attention, and now they’re in the conversion stage!

Here, you use Conversational Customer Engagement to help customers make the purchase decision, meaning it’s time to be available for questions, provide new information, and really help them decide.

This can be done through virtual assistants that send detailed information about the products and help customers choose the right product for their needs.

Closing

The conversion phase is over, let’s get the lead to complete the purchase!

In this stage, your brand can use Conversational Customer Engagement to make the customer’s life easier by providing necessary support, but also complement their journey with new information and updates, such as order status.

Post-sale

We can’t think of sales closure as the last stage of the sales funnel, after all, we need to keep this customer with the brand, right?

So, to apply this new concept in the post-sale stage, you’ll need to stay in touch with customers and provide continuous support.

For this, invest in chatbots or virtual assistants that can provide information about warranties, returns, and other product or service-related issues.

6 Resources to Help You Implement the Strategy

You may have noticed that throughout the text, I talked a lot about chatbots, virtual assistants, messaging apps, and so on.

That’s because it’s through these resources that you can implement Conversational Customer Engagement.

I’ll remind you once again that these resources are not exclusively where the work will happen. Conversational is related to all interactions your brand will have with the customer through conversation, including phone calls and in-person assistance.

Here’s a quick list of 6 resources to apply CCE:

Virtual Assistants

Virtual assistants are computer programs that use artificial intelligence to converse with users in natural language.

This resource can be integrated into websites, mobile apps, and other communication channels to provide real-time customer support.

Moreover, virtual assistants can also help customers navigate a website, answer questions, and make personalized recommendations based on user preferences.

Chatbots

Chatbots, on the other hand, are computer programs that simulate real conversations with users.

They can be used to provide real-time customer support, answer frequently asked questions, help find necessary solutions, and even qualify and distribute leads to the company.

This tool can be programmed to understand natural language and respond intelligently.

Lastly, they can also be integrated into messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger to provide support on a consumer’s familiar channel.

🧐 Learn more: 10 Best Online Chat Tools for Websites in 2024

Integration APIs

Integration APIs allow different applications and services to communicate with each other, a crucial point for implementing a Conversational Customer Engagement strategy.

APIs enable information sharing between different systems, such as CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, and chatbots.

For example, using Leadster to boost your lead generation, you can integrate it with various platforms like HubSpot, RD Station, etc.

This resource helps provide customers with real-time updated information, such as product prices, inventory, and order status.

AI-powered Customer Service

AI-powered customer service is an advanced form of Conversational Customer Engagement that enables communication between customers and companies through a voice or text interface.

AI solutions can be programmed to recognize natural language and respond to questions intelligently, allowing companies to provide real-time customer support even outside business hours.

Remember that this resource can also help reduce wait times and call volumes for customer service.

Messaging Apps

Finally, messaging apps are a popular form of Conversational Customer Engagement that enable companies to communicate with their customers through platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram Direct.

This resource allows companies to engage with their customers in an environment they are already accustomed to using.

Moreover, messaging apps also allow companies to send personalized notifications and reminders to their customers.

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Ready to implement this Conversational Customer Engagement strategy? If you have any doubts, feel free to ask us in the comments!

Now, if you want to invest in a combination of conversational strategies, let me introduce you to Conversational Marketing, a strategy that will help you increase both the volume and quality of leads.

Aligned with the concept of this article, Conversational Marketing provides you with the methods and tools to approach your visitors in real-time and in a personalized manner, aiming to assist them in the purchasing decision process. In other words, it goes beyond customer engagement and support.

We have a whole article talking about it. What do you say we take this conversation there?

Thanks for reading!