How Conversational Commerce Transforms the Customer Journey

Today’s customer journey consists of 140 touchpoints online and offline that influence your customer’s decisions to buy and re-purchase. As the customer journey spans the entire lifecycle of a customer’s relationship with your business from awareness (marketing) to purchase, loyalty and advocacy, experience is key to unlocking growth opportunities. And the experience customers are looking for? Conversational.

Customer experience is the new flagship store

Not only is the customer journey more robust than ever, expectations over experience have never been higher. Thus, mapping out your customer journey is even more important to deliver the right engagement at each touchpoint.

One win-win solution for both customers and businesses is to help customers get through their customer journey smoothly while providing a personalised and consistent experiences through conversational commerce.

What is Conversational Commerce?

Conversational commerce. Social commerce. Conversational marketing. This strategy goes by many names but has one purpose: To guide customers through their customer journey smoothly with real-time engagement such as messaging, video and voice, maximising the value of every touchpoint by engaging with the customer.

• Conversational support — providing quick, personalised answers to their questions
• Conversational engagement — proactively reaching out to customers before they need your help, like when their shopping cart is sitting empty or by using data to see when they might get stuck with something
• Conversational marketing — getting real with your customers, talk to them like a friend, and recommend products and services you think they’ll love

In the online realm, your “customer experience flagship store” means always being where your customer is to support them, guide them, and upsell them through conversations.

Conversational commerce throughout the customer journey

Every business has a unique customer journey. It is not until you map out your own customer journey that you can see the real brand experience from end to end, and every small decision they make across online and offline touchpoints and channels.

By gaining valuable insights into customers’ feelings, expectations and pain points, this exercise helps you to plan the engagement resources in order to provide empathetic and personalised experience, and the most important of all, prevent any leads from slipping through the cracks at different stages.

4 steps to strategically plan the customer journey with the right engagement

Step 1. Create target personas

What kinds of customers does your business attract? What keeps them awake at night and thus want to buy your products? Knowing their behaviours and needs allows you to elevate their experience interacting with your business.

Find out more about creating the best personas from CX expert Neil Patel.

Step 2. Depict expectations and emotional changes

Next up, understand how customers expect and feel. What is the attraction that entices them to stay with you, and issues that drives them to leave the journey?

Leverage a customer engagement software like maaiiconnect, which provides you with unparalleled insights into past customer relationship history. With full access to conversation records throughout the journey centralised in each dedicated chatroom, maaiiconnect lets you understand customers’ emotions, and provide suitable services.

Step 3. Define the lifecycle with the right engagement

Pin down the lifecycle of a customer journey on how customers usually come across your business, then plan the right engagement at each stage:

Brand awareness: Potential customers discovering your brand and products through digital and offline advertisements. Utilise web links and QR codes for live chat and web calls to instantly establish a customer relationship — and ensure you are reachable at every online and offline touchpoint.

Consideration: Potential customers reading reviews, and going to your website to learn about your products and prices.

Offer a personalised demo with video calls, and attend to their questions via the web widget to customers on your website. Follow up with an SMS of product information to secure their purchases.

Purchase: Customers making a buying decision. Embed a web link for chat or call in a confirmation receipt to keep the conversation going and create more repeated purchases.

Customer service: Customers seeking support when they use your products. Create customer-agent binding with sticky routing to ensure contextual support. Access to all omnichannel chat history and customer information in one chat room.

Retention: Retaining customers through reward programmess and/or outstanding service so they come back for more. Top tip: SMS is the top channel of choice for engaging customers through loyalty programme offers.

Step 4. Engage and connect each touchpoint with maaiiconnect

Touchpoints are where customers interact with you, such as ads, social media, your website, or phone calls. With one centralised interface for staff to efficiently converse with customers on any channel and touchpoint online and offline, conversational commerce has never been easier.

Ready to transform the customer journey with maaiiconnect?

maaiiconnect enables you to conveniently maximise RoI across the entire customer lifecycle.

• Centralise your customer’s preferred channels for easy engagement and personalisation across channels
• Enable smoother customer support with weblinks and QR codes to quickly launch live chats and web calls from any offline/online touchpoint
• Focus on customer service and let maaiiconnect do the tedious work through routing and smart management tools, to efficiently handle an increase in enquiries
• Rich messaging to share and receive images, files, and videos
• Advanced security standards, encryption and password policies
• 24/7 support worldwide in multiple languages

Connect maaiiconnect with your tools

maaiiconnect is readily available with popular ecommerce platforms and CMS like WordPress! Take your first step towards elevating the customer journey by signing up for maaiiconnect for FREE, and integrating maaiiconnect with your existing platforms.

This article was originally posted in the maaiiconnect blog by Emily Shu.