With all of the discussion of digital personalization, the internet still seems to be a bit impersonal. Companies looking to distinguish itself will create multiple opportunities to engage and communicate with its customers by offering an optimal customer experience on any digital device.
Social media definitely offers brands and companies the opportunity to 'pre-sale' customers by offering quality content on these platforms to highlight brand value. Additionally, using social media can easily offer brands customer data to personalize content to specific markets.
Social media does create the context within which the added value of a product or service becomes apparent, ultimately leading to a conversion be it a sale or an offline conversation.Indeed, social media offers multiple touch points for customers to engage with a brand.
What about once the customer is on your site?
The ability to talk, engage and converse with potential customers who visit a site will easily allow you to distinguish yourself from the competition and increase customer satisfaction and conversions. Whether your businesses is primarily online or offline, interacting and guiding customers at all points of their navigation, helps customers feel confident with your brand, increasing the conversion potential.
Statistics show that 42% of US customers will abandon their online transaction if they do not feel as though their issues are being addressed in a timely manner.Further, 70% of buying experiences are based upon a customer's experience and how they feel they are being treated.
There are several options for customer engagement like real time chat or onsite guidance software.
In the ideal world, an optimal online customer service experience, you want to ensure that your site provides a personalized experience by addressing user concerns and navigating them to the right product or solution. Otherwise, you might be failing to offer the value that customers expect and need to complete a transaction.
Live Chat
Today, many sites have integrated real-time chat features providing an optimal one to one customer experience. These solutions give customers the ability to browse your site and reach out to an agent and, hopefully, receive immediate answers. Live chat is great for increasing engagement and gaining brand trust. With this great feature comes responsibility. It means staffing and training. This is where customer guidance could be helpful.
Personalized Guidance
There are many personalize guidance platforms aimed at reducing your company's customer support resources. These tools encourage self service and direct customers towards conversion. These conversion navigation services respond to specific customer characteristics, behavioral cues and variables on each page.
These solutions are great for the 'classic' website. In today's mobile first economy, these solutions are often not optimized for the prime real estate of smaller devices. In addition to mobile driven markets, customers want to remain in control of their online experience. Companies can 'guide' customers but they can't force them.
So what should your brand do, to enable customer engagement, offer a customer-driven experience and remain optimized for mobile?
As any company knows, each customer has a preferred means of communication. When they're on the go it may be email or text message. When they're at their desk it may be livechat. Each customer wants to engage with a brand in their preferred method of communication. They want to control the experience. Mobile friendly,multi-channel communication tools like Bontact, enable your customer to manage the means in which they converse with your brand, increasing their level of trust and conversion potential.
In the user-driven digital world, solutions that create a positive, easy and satisfying experience for the user across all devices, leave a lasting impression on your consumers.
Website today need to be responsive. Their integrated customer service and engagement solutions should be too.
Your business website relies on the quality and quantity of traffic. Your ability to convert this traffic, regardless of device, depends on how much control you give the customer to communicate and engage with your brand. By shifting the balance back to the customer, while still focusing onoptimizing the conversion funnel, you are increasing the long term success of your business.