How to personalize customer service with conversational marketing

Customer service is essential to a business’s success. Poor customer service experiences can have a dramatically negative impact on a business.

According to Zendesk, over 50 percent of surveyed consumers reported that customer support experiences are stressing them out more and more and that a single negative experience will prompt them to patronize a competitor.

This is why investing in customer service and looking for ways to improve it is so important. One effective strategy is personalization — tailoring services and messages to individual needs and preferences.

And one effective way to personalize customer service is by implementing conversational marketing strategies. With conversational marketing, a company can have real-time interactions with consumers and respond directly to their wants and needs on an individual basis.

In this article, we’ll explore how organizations can use conversational marketing tools and strategies to provide more personalized customer service experiences. We’ll cover what conversational marketing is and offer six tips for using it to enhance your customer service offerings.

We’ll also show you how Jotform can support your personalization and conversational marketing efforts as part of your customer service strategy.

How conversational marketing supports personalized customer service

Let’s start with the basics: What is conversational marketing, and what does it have to do with personalized customer service?

Conversational marketing is a strategy in which businesses communicate with customers in real time to answer questions, make suggestions, and generally provide a personalized experience — an essential element of customer service interactions.

According to a McKinsey report, 71 percent of customers expect personalization when engaging with a business, and 76 percent are disappointed when they don’t get it. Businesses simply can’t afford to conduct customer service without some level of personalization.

Conversational marketing is essentially a series of one-on-one interactions between the business and individual customers. Customers initiate these interactions, and the engagements take place in real time. Conversations can happen via different channels, such as chatbots, social media, email, and forms.

For example, a common conversational marketing tool is a website chatbot. Website visitors can, at any time, engage with the chatbot and ask questions about specific products and services. The chatbot offers customized responses based on the information the visitor provides.

Conversational marketing allows businesses to gather information about customers’ likes, dislikes, and preferences, which the business can then use to target their marketing to that customer.

“This methodology enables the customization of responses according to the customer’s previous interactions and preferences, providing solutions that are pertinent to their particular requirements,” says Amelia Munday, social media marketing manager for Custom Neon, a global retailer and manufacturer of custom-designed LED neon lights.

“In addition to increasing consumer happiness, this personal touch fosters enduring loyalty.”

Customer service agents can provide a higher level of service by gathering certain information:

• Demographic details about the customer
• The reason the customer is initiating the conversation with the business
• Any previous interactions the customer has initiated with the business and the reasons for those interactions
• The current level of customer satisfaction
• The current level of customer loyalty
• Particular items or services the customer is interested in

How to personalize customer service with conversational marketing

Here are six tips for implementing a conversational marketing strategy to transform and personalize your customer service efforts.

1. Start with context.

Organizations need to collect data to conduct personalized conversations.

“Personalization comes from using customer data to tailor responses and solutions based on previous interactions,” says Ira Prevalova, growth marketing director at Adverity, a platform that specializes in data integration to drive impactful marketing strategies.

“This method is great for customer service, as it offers quick assistance, reduces response times, and makes customers feel valued, enhancing their overall experience.”

Prioritize data collection and management so you can turn that information into valuable insights to inform each customer interaction.

2. Use the right tools.

It can be difficult to implement conversational marketing without the right technology in place. Investing in tools that make it easy to collect, aggregate, and share data can help, such as platforms for building conversational customer service surveys.

Look for tools that enable conversations on multiple channels and integrate with your existing business solutions.

3. Scale your efforts.

Conversational marketing needs to be scalable without being resource intensive. This rule also applies to personalized customer service.

Organizations can scale their efforts with tools that automate customer service tasks — examples include chatbots, software integrations with customer management databases, and AI-powered solutions for summarizing and prioritizing conversations.

4. Offer multichannel support.

Conversational marketing isn’t a single-channel activity. It can take place anywhere — via a chatbot, social media, or email, for example.

“Businesses can leverage conversational marketing to create highly customized customer support via chatbots and other real-time messaging solutions,” says Lucas Botzen, CEO and human resources expert at Rivermate, a global HR and employer of record platform.

“The responses will be customized to the particular needs and preferences of every customer based on the data from the past interactions.”

5. Provide real-time support.

A report found that for two-thirds of customers, a quick response from a business is as important as price, which means they don’t want to be waiting days or even hours to hear back from you. Conversational marketing happens in real time.

“Rivermate’s chatbot provides personalized support by accessing customer history and offering relevant solutions based on past interactions,” says Botzen. “This level of personalization not only resolves issues quickly but enhances the overall customer experience as well. This provides support instantly, hence with context — making conversational marketing an excellent tool for delivering high-quality customer service.”

6. Stay ahead of conversational marketing trends.

Conversational marketing is a relatively new marketing strategy, which means it’s still evolving. Keeping up with the latest trends can help your business find new ways of personalizing customer service interactions.

And today, with AI transforming many elements of business operations, there’s more opportunity for adding automation and efficiency to customer service strategies, without sacrificing quality.

Stay ahead of the curve, and your customers will take notice.

How Jotform can help you offer personalized customer service with conversational marketing

Jotform is a powerful form-building platform that can help you implement conversational marketing strategies.

Our conversational forms make it easy to collect valuable customer data. Conversational forms display one question at a time to the respondent, instead of showing all the questions at once. This presentation mimics real-time dialogue.

Adding conditional logic to your forms allows you to personalize the customer experience even more. By using conditional questions in the forms you create with Jotform, you can ensure respondents see only the questions that are most relevant to them, personalizing their experience. You can also personalize the closing page customers see when they complete your form.

Conversational forms work well on desktop, mobile, and tablet, so form respondents can fill them out anywhere, anytime. Plus, you can embed them into websites and emails and share them via social media and QR codes.

You can even add a Messenger button and WhatsApp button to your forms, allowing customers to start a real-time chat with a customer service representative directly.

Use conversational surveys to collect feedback from customers, gather information about customer issues, conduct product surveys, and so much more.

Jotform can support your efforts in providing personalized customer service with conversational marketing. Try it for free today.

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash