Creating conversations and ensuring conversions
Have you purchased something online recently? Trends indicate we’re shopping online 30% more since the pandemic began.
We are certainly living in different times, and companies are providing better services to customer’s changing needs. Digital communication and commerce are at an all-time high — usage of both new and existing digital technologies has skyrocketed.
As customer service continues to rapidly move online, customers are benefiting from the newfound convenience and accessibility. Major technology providers are competing to provide seamless, useful and available communication channels. As customers in this digital-first life, it means our communication with services can become always-on and consistent.
Our partners at Microsoft recently unveiled Azure Communication Services (ACS), a new utility aimed to help organizations serve richer and more in-depth communication to support your online customer service experience.
ACS offers a new set of features that allows developers to add voice and video calling, chat, text messages and old-school telephony to their apps and websites.
ACS can work alongside all the existing e-commerce platforms and services you’re already using, all while not requiring deep technical integration throughout the Azure stack.
We can’t hope to turn every visitor to our site into a conversion, but with ACS, you can ensure you have the ability to have a conversation.
For example, you can offer automated customer service via web chat to manage communication at scale, then as customer requests become more complex they can transition to your next available customer service agent, whether it’s through live chat, phone call or video call, it can all happen on your site.
Seamlessly converting website browsing into personalized conversations
Your e-commerce experience already helps customers search, research and purchase products. The opportunity now is to turn a boring browsing experience into a personalized conversation by seamlessly introducing visitors to your human customer service team for pre or post-sales support inquiries.
67 percent of younger online shoppers prefer to shop online due to convenience. It’s no shock to learn that the majority of customers also prefer to receive an extra level of personal service online too.
Whether it’s automated chat to answer questions or in-person video support to talk customers through a new product. As your customer makes an inquiry, you can use ACS to triage and figure out the best way to respond:
Connecting customers to the best possible service
The seamless conversational transitions are game-changing. Gone are the days when you visited a website, filled out a contact form, got an email, and eventually a phone call to chat about a new product, this can all happen in one visiting experience.
ACS offers total integration simplicity. In the past, online providers had to use different platforms and services for each method of communication; one service for sending text messages, another for email, and another for starting a video conference — ACS now controls those transitions within a single platform.
Conversions in conversations through ACS
Not every customer is a conversion, in fact, as little as 3% of first-time visitors convert online today.
Allowing your customers to converse with your business, whether it’s in-person or through AI will help facilitate future sales through your online store. As we are all aware online stores have quickly become the business shop front, but as communication channels, the internet, customer data and digital platforms begin to merge, regardless of the global pandemic, we need to think of them as one.
The critical step to streamlining your customer's online journey is developing a well-planned conversational strategy that blends customer service with engaging conversations. Finding the right agency partner, like VERSA that can provide both the technical and creative elements required is the only way to roll out such a project that ensures the customer experience is considered the center of every touchpoint.
Interested in understanding how technology can be leveraged to create better conversations online with your customer service team? Get in Touch with the experts at VERSA.
