What is conversational support or conversational support system?
Conversational support is the way of customer support where a business uses conversational or messaging solutions rather than mobile phones or emails to assist and extend live support. With the help of messengers or chatbots, we can deliver human, self-serve and proactive support to the customer in real-time. Live support makes the entire process of customer support much easier and more accessible, as the customer can get on the chatbots or live chat 24/7 without getting on a call with the business to solve basic queries or seek support.
Through AI, chatbots and live chats can be customized and given human feel, empathy, and intelligence. Companies that implement and incorporate chat support can expect higher rates of customer satisfaction, engagement, and improved customer relationships. Conversational support enhances the customer experience throughout the customer experience journey, increasing the opportunities for the business to retain customers and generate more revenues.
What is the importance of conversational support?
1. The conversational support helps you gather necessary customer data and insight in a frictionless way. This data can be utilized to enhance customer support delivery and knowledge base for the proactive support system.
2. The customer base is turning digital-native and moving towards mobile-first categories. The conversational support provides them a platform to engage with their favorite brands at their finder tips rather than going traditional, using mails or calls.
3. The conversational support system creates an environment that lets customers express themselves as they want and as per their flow. They can choose the methods and mediums to seek assistance at any time rather than waiting over IVR calls.
4. Businesses that automate their customer support system can speed up their resolution time multifold. It also segregates queries based on complexity, solving the basic ones via chatbots and others through human assistance.
What is the conversational support funnel?
The conversational support funnel is a framework that enables customer service teams to extend better outbound conversations and support to drive brand loyalty and enhance customer experience. Combing messaging platforms or chat solutions with AI can help businesses reach out to customers the instant they raise a query or ask a question. At the same time, it can divert complex issues to the live agents or customer support for better assistance.
The conversational support funnel is divided into 3 categories, Proactive Support, Self-Serve Support, and Human Support.
What is proactive support?
Proactive support aims to educate customers and reach out to them beforehand to avoid repetitive or most common questions, saving customer support teams' efforts and time. It also helps increase customer loyalty at the very beginning of the purchase cycle and improve customer experience. Through a messaging support system, a business can inform customers about the delivery time, order details, demos, product outages, website downtime, and bugs before they raise the query with the support team.
What is self-serve support?
A self-serve support system focus on providing assistance or contextual knowledge base to customers through automated chatbots where they can help themselves. With self-serve support, a business can empower customers to help themselves and look for answers to basic questions. It also helps reduce the response time by filtering out common and repetitive questions and allowing the support team to handle complex queries.
What is human support?
Human support is the bottom line of the conversational support funnel. All the queries that need human assistance or involvement of any degree reach down to this level. The conversational support funnel focuses on reducing the resolution time and improving the quality of customer support rather than just closing service tickets. It optimizes where issues are supposed to get resolved, so the customer that most needs it connects with another human.
How to provide good conversational customer support?
1. Build trust with customers through proactive support and engagement
2. Leverage chatbots with explainable AI
3. Use an omnichannel contact center platform
4. Provide smooth support escalation
5. Shift your language and mirror your customers' tone
What is conversational support software?
Conversational support software is also known as conversational customer engagement software, offers a refined approach to customer support, considering individual customers as unique entities rather than grouping them based on incidents or types of queries. These softwares compile and store the customer history, their conversations with the brand and utilize the same to bring context to future conversations. Conversational support software facilitates omnichannel customer support based on this database to trigger a contextual conversation with customers whenever they interact with the brand through any platform.
Following are the most useful conversational support softwares available.
1. Service Hub
2. Zendesk Support Suite
3. Intercom
4. Front
5. Freshdesk
6. Birdeye
7. Podium
8. Gladly
9. MobileMonkey
10. Kustomer
What is Conversational AI and how does it work?
Conversational AI chatbots integrate with channels like Facebook, WhatsApp, or even a website to connect with customers and provide live support. It gives businesses a new ability to gain deeper insights to serve their customers with a greater level of success. It can also be a voice-enabled instrument or any other text-enabled interactive interface. With the help of conversational AI, businesses can solve customer queries and extend support without any human intervention.
It is available 24/7! The largest advantage of having a conversational AI solution is the instant response rate. Your chances of converting a prospect will increase to a high level if you solve their query within the first hour. Customers are more likely to speak about a couple of negative experiences than a positive one.
