Conversational Support: A Key to Success for New-Age Brands!

ustomer Support has Changed!

It has turned upside down and you must do something about it.

But what?

Transform your customer support. Embrace conversational support. What conversational support is and how to get started with it will be discussed in moments!

Time to Transform Customer Support!

Being consumers ourselves, we know that customer support has undergone numerous changes. Long phone calls have been replaced with chats. Customer support has become more personalized and less frustrating.

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With the internet driving customer choices, they can easily switch to brands that are offering a better customer experience. So, delivering awesome customer support is the key to making customers stick to you.

So, the massive customer support transformation calls for some real work. We mean that you need to enrich your customer support with personalized experiences to ensure customer satisfaction.

Currently, the brands are thriving to keep up with the dramatic explosion of epic trends – active presence on social media, more live chats, lesser phone calls, 24/7 availability, personalized experiences, and whatnot. So, all in all, businesses are investing in this new way of doing customer support.

Here’s what you should know and do about the entire transformation of customer support service.

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What is a Conversational Support Funnel?

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The conversational support funnel is the system that makes the customer experience wholesome.

The system combines proactive capabilities, self-service, and human interactions to ensure better problem identification, resolving repetitive queries with bots, and solving complex queries in an instant by routing them to the right team.

The biggest benefit of having a conversational support funnel is that your support teams can work freely on complex queries. All common questions asked by customers can be instantly responded to without any human intervention.

So, if you are planning to offer personal support to customers, a conversational support system is the most efficient way to do so.

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Proactive Support

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Proactive support is the best for the most common questions or FAQs. You can answer these questions even before they are being asked by customers.

For instance, machine learning technology can be used to predict when the question will be asked. Accordingly, your support teams can offer the answers in the product details.

At Konverse AI, chatbots can identify high-intent buyers with the help of AI. As a result, you can proactively reach out to the visitor, offer them personal support, and convert leads into customers.

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Self-Service

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The second phase of the conversational support funnel is self-serve support. Here customers can ask their questions to a chatbot and get automatic answers without any difficulty. Further, the bots can also direct them to the help center and the FAQs section where they can find the answers to most of their common queries.

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Agent Support

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When nothing works, human support comes into the picture. The last layer of the conversational support funnel is human support. When bots are unable to resolve the issue, they can smartly route the conversation to the ideal team that can solve the customer query. Once humans take over the customer conversation, they can solve it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

With the development of a conversational support system, the inbound volume of customer queries can be reduced drastically. In fact, 2021 forecasts suggested that 75% to 90% of queries will be handled by bots alone shortly.

We guess the future is now! Hence, we can assume that bots will manage most of the customer queries without any human intervention.

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The Evolution is Here: From Calls to Message Support

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A customer talking about their experience with you is worth ten times that which you write or say about yourself. – David J. Greer

To make your customer support service praiseworthy, all you need is adaptability. The evolution of customer support has already started and this change is irreversible. So, to ensure customer loyalty, catch up on these changes as quickly as possible.

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Check Out the Two Key Changes in Customer Support!

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Conversational AI is the key to making the growing changes in customer support. Here are two aspects of the change in customer service.

1. Customer expectations are rapidly changing. The ease and convenience of communication through messengers are driving them to make a shift from emails to messenger.

Be it Facebook messenger or WhatsApp, these platforms have become the primary support channel for customers. In fact, WhatsApp messages have 98% open rates compared to an average of 25% in emails.

A messaging platform allows more personalization. Hence, it is more powerful than emails!

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2. Offering a great customer experience is no more a choice. Hence, brands are moving beyond traditional systems and support tools to make their customer experiences better.

Instead of traditional tools, brands invest more in automation, bots, and proactive messaging support to make customers stay.

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The Shift from Forms and Email Ticketing Systems

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With businesses going online, there is an explosion of choices for customers. So, if you lag in providing convenience to customers, there are chances that your customers will switch to other brands.

For instance, suppose you are still stuck with long forms and emails while your customers are signing up with your competitors right there in a messaging platform.

Here the only difference between your strategy and that of the competitors is convenience. Your long forms do not interest consumers as they are time-consuming. But your competing brands are offering customers the convenience to sign-up within a short time. They need not fill up long forms, wait for emails, or go to an external link. They are signing up easily through conversations over messaging.

So, now you decide – traditional customer support with long forms and emails or modern experience with message support?

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What Should you do Now?

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Now that we have told you about everything that’s happening around you, we can come to the main question – what do you need to do?

So, before we tell you a few strategies, here’s a piece of wisdom:

Embrace the Change!

The shift from traditional to modern customer support is real and irreversible. So, start embracing it. Take small steps towards implementing this modern conversational support system in your business. Start evolving from where you are and experiment with the new.

Below we have provided a few strategies to help you implement the conversational support funnel.

Add Messengers to your Customer Support System
Assess your Conversational Support Funnel at Every Stage
Identify Signals for Investing Resources
Track Your Team’s Progress and Optimize your Support Strategy

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Add Messengers to your Customer Support System

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The start of embracing the conversational support funnel is to get messaging platforms for conversational customer support. Whether it’s WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, be actively present on these messaging platforms for offering customer support.

Along with live chats, make sure you support customers through messengers too. Use AI chatbots for automating repetitive queries, make the conversations easy, engaging, and interesting, help customers shop with product recommendations, and much more.

You can also conduct quizzes and contests on these messaging platforms for better engagement.

Assess your Conversational Support Funnel at Every Stage

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We have already mentioned the three layers of the conversational support system. After creating your own support funnel, try and get a holistic view of what’s happening. Assess the funnel at every stage to see how well it is performing.

✅ Collaborate with other teams like product analytics, sales, and customer support, to check how the funnel is changing the face of your business.

✅ Check the average response time, customer satisfaction, customer feedback, and keep making improvements.

✅ Ask your support team to share conversational support funnel reports monthly that can provide insights into the performance.

On platforms like Konverse, you can get all the support data, track contact information, bot conversations from a single dashboard.

With such conversational support system reports, find answers to crucial questions like:

What percentage of queries does self-service or bot support solve instead of human support?
How many messages have you sent to reach out proactively?
How many monthly issues did your support team resolve before creating the conversational support funnel and after it?

Once you get the answers, you can easily find the best support method delivering the highest ROI.

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Identify Signals for Investing Resources

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Strategic investing of resources is necessary for maximum gains. So, put your resources where you are likely to gain more!

However, where to invest resources is one of the most difficult decisions you must make. Probably, you want to invest more in your support team when they are assisting more customers. After all, you know to measure their performance. Plus, it is a kind of your comfort zone.

But putting in all your resources to hire more support agents, training them will result in an ever-expanding customer support team. Plus, additional costs. If you try and cut down on costs, your team might face burnout and dissatisfaction.

So, all you need to focus on is taking the load off their shoulders. But how do you do that? How can you lighten the conversation load on your support team while maintaining customer satisfaction?

Well, the answer is by investing in modern support systems.

Invest your resources in the other two layers of the conversational support funnel. Grow your self-service and proactive support. Employ bots, automate, create a knowledge repository like help center, FAQs, blogs, etc.

Once you know the right places to invest your resources, customer satisfaction will be at your fingertips.

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Track Your Team’s Progress and Optimize your Support Strategy

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An area that you should closely monitor is the progress of your team. Check out the key metrics like;

The volume of queries reaching your human support team
Response time
Conversation Ratings

The signals from these metrics can help you make improvisations in your conversation support system. For instance, if you see the volume of queries for your support team increasing, it might indicate that you need to invest more resources for proactive support and self-serve support.

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Make your Customer Service Standout with Conversational Support!

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Want to deliver world-class customer support?

Then, envision your conversational support funnel. Invest in smart AI chatbots and let these bots take over most of the support queries.

With bots, you can automate answering FAQs, assist customers, route complex issues to human support, engage leads, speed up query resolution, and so much more.

To know more about AI chatbots and how they can help you create perfect conversational support, reach out to the Konverse AI team. You can also visit the Konverse help center.

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