How Does Conversational Texting Work?

 

Customer conversations have evolved from simple text message blasts.

Customer experience is crucial in today’s connected world.  Customers are having so many of their daily conversations in messaging channels they now expect the convenience and ease of conversational texting to be part of their experience with their brands.

Customers respond well when connected to a contact centre agent that can answer their questions quickly and at a pace that the customer dictates.  This is what is most powerful about conversations for texting a business. Unlike live chat, where if the session ends, it has to be restarted with a new agent, messaging allows the conversation to flow and be picked up at any time.

Simply put, for conversational customer engagement to be successful, it is important to pick a technology partner that can deliver full messaging capabilities at scale. Here is what you should be looking for:

Messaging Channels
Your conversations need to be able to occur on all messaging channels whether it’s SMS, WhatsApp, or another messaging app. Having the ability to easily add new channels and engage customers over multiple channels is a must.  And even switch between channels during a conversation if needed.

Automation and Chatbots
With the power of technology, simultaneously carry out highly personalized conversations with thousands, or indeed millions of customers.  Add automated chatbots to act as your concierge for inbound messaging and a proactive outbound chatbot to send fully personalised messaging that reduces the number of inbound phone calls into the call centre.

Blended engagement
Not all conversations have to be completed through automation. That is just common sense.  The purpose of technology is not to push customers down a route that they do not want to go down.  There are times when a customer wants to be connected to an agent and with clever technology this transition can be managed seamlessly with the customer being routed to the correct agent team.

Adding Smart Tools lets agents access smart phrases for faster agent compliant responses, use AI to optimise queuing and routing, and understand when you might be dealing with a vulnerable customer.

Machine Learning

This is where the good stuff really happens. If you have a technology partner, like Webio, engaging with customers and managing the nuances of each individual customer’s personal circumstances, especially for digital conversations isn't a challenge. Adding Natural Language Understanding, customer intents, sentiment analysis into a messaging campaign enables the business to manage each individual customer better.  Not applying a one-fits-all engagement path ensures that each conversation is managed on a customer basis.  

With Webio’s propensity guidance, customers’ language, response behaviours and previous conversational history are analysed to determine how best to manage each interaction that drives conversation engagement to a successful outcome each time.

Clients who have upgraded to conversational texting or messaging have seen the rate of engagement grow and more importantly, the conversation conversion rates have skyrocketed.