Five ways AI-empowered conversations on social media enable customer loyalty

By Mike Myer

For many people, nothing beats being able to instantly message a company any time, any place. Messaging with a social app (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, etc) is unquestionably better than making a phone call, navigating an IVR and waiting on hold for an undisclosed length of time.

For businesses, not much beats the efficiency and flexibility of messaging for customer conversations, either. Messaging allows contact centers to manage high-volumes  of inquiries more efficiently and accurately than phone calls, all while being in the places customers want to carry on conversations.

With many tools at our disposal to help enable conversational commerce, particularly on social media, one might think it would be easy to deliver a great customer experience. After all, being on every channel is good, right? The reality is, adding too many channels at once without properly  planning how  to handle the volume and deliver consistent experiences across channels can spell trouble.

Building awesome customer service on social networks begins with conversational AI.

Good conversational AI can handle unexpected spikes in volume from social media and reduce the risk of bad experiences when well-meaning businesses become vulnerable to inconsistent customer service.

There are so many benefits of AI with  messaging systems. Here are five other ways AI-empowered customer conversations can personalize and power-up customer satisfaction:

• AI adds efficiency to managing customer inquiries. First and foremost, conversational AI automates simple, repetitive questions and requests from customers so your care teams can focus on more complex customer inquiries.

One of the biggest barriers to growth nowadays is being able to keep up with consumer demands and expectations. With the right AI system, businesses can use Natural Language Processing to understand  comments, concerns, and questions from customers and automate the routine inquiries. Giving customer care teams some breathing room by triaging calls based on importance or urgency ultimately creates a less stressful call center that’s better able to manage customer experience and influence sales.

• Give customers what they want: control over how they communicate with your company. Many shoppers who love Facebook or Instagram may not feel the same about your e-commerce website. Give the option to purchase, request more information and subscribe via social messaging, and retailers will have a customer for life.

Just like a lot of people prefer to send text messages rather than picking up the phone and making an actual call, retailers need to meet customers where their preferences are strongest. At its most fundamental level, that’s what will create a tailored experience to keep customers coming back.

• Shoppers can make purchasing decisions directly on your social media networks. If, for example, a majority of a business’s traffic comes from people interacting with a brand on Instagram, then it would only make sense to enable direct messaging on that platform. This will increase the likelihood brands will keep shoppers in conversation long enough to make a purchase, subscribe, and even become a loyal customer.
• Keep the conversation going and stay in front of the customer for a longer period of time. Keeping the conversation going has the added bonus of building consistency in communications (and consistency builds trust).

AI-enabled conversations really shine here, because AI can automatically trigger proactive outreach at the perfect times to increase the possibility of another sale, subscription, or upgrade.

• Securely gather and analyze customer data using powerful AI automated communication integrations. Retailers have the opportunity to understand more deeply their customer journey and how to gain traction in a highly competitive landscape.

Good AI-enabled conversational commerce systems will automate the process of gathering demographic information, for example, which can then help define sales goals and even help retailers predict how a future campaign might perform against data from previous efforts.

There are many ways AI-enabled conversational commerce can benefit businesses navigating sales and customer service on social platforms. But another important piece of the tech-stack puzzle is to not go through this process alone.

Brands are smart to hire a trusted CX  expert that has knowledge and experience implementing AI tech into existing systems. It will save companies stress, time, and potential mistakes that could cost money — and customers. Plus, these experts are extremely passionate about helping retailers create systems that truly engage, convert and build loyalty among retailers’ greatest advocates: their customers.