If you’re in marketing, you know that brands are now expected to get closer to customers than ever before. 52% of customers are more likely to buy from companies offering live chat support. It’s no wonder companies are expected to constantly be available to talk.

Conversational support is expected as standard. But, if it’s done properly, you can make an asset that drives up your CSAT scores above and beyond the competition. If it’s not done properly, however, a poor conversational support channel can frustrate customers at the worst time – when they already have a problem.

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We’ll cover ten reasons brands are flocking to conversational support and how you can make sure you get it right the first time.

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1. Enhance omnichannel

One motivation behind conversational support is that it plays into an omnichannel strategy. Unified communication technology lets you reach customers across website chatbots, email, and SMS, all from one dashboard. For your team, all the information they need to help customers is all in one place. For customers, they get a joined-up service no matter what channel they’re reaching you from.

Conversational experiences aren’t just a marketing tool. By integrating a chat box into your web app, as you would with your marketing site, you can use in-app conversational support to help users with anything and exceed customer expectations.

If you’re running an online magazine maker, that’s a complicated product that busy users need to navigate efficiently. Conversational support will improve customer satisfaction and prevent users from churning from a product they don’t know how to use.

2. Get customer interactions just right

Conversational support can be applied to any stage of the customer journey. At the top of your marketing funnel, you could answer basic FAQs, then design your conversation flows to cover detailed custom orders, packages, and deals as your customer gets ready to purchase.

Your buyer’s journey could start anywhere. So, to benefit from this, you need a clear buyer persona. This means you can customize your conversational support flows to your ideal customer, their preferred channel, and the journey that gets them to convert.

Maybe your ideal customers are thoughtful B2B buyers who need in-depth written content. Maybe they’re shopping around, and you need a snappy video with animation and royalty-free music to grab their attention.

Whatever your situation, conversational experiences let you customize flows for any stage of the customer journey.

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3. Be proactive

Conversational support enables businesses to build relationships with every interaction. By reaching out proactively and having a real conversation, businesses can offer assistance while making customers feel like they’re being listened to.

This is great for a B2B site where visitors are often looking for a very specific piece of information, like a security certification. If they don’t find it fast, they’re likely to leave quickly.

And with conversational support tools offering video chat, customers can even meet you face-to-face, where you’ll stand out from your competitors in the other tabs.

4. Automate away repetitive questions

68% of customers say they like the speedy responses they get from chatbots. The automation enabled by conversational support benefits you and your customers.

And with “smart routing” features, there’s no conflict between the efficiency of automation and a human touch. By asking some questions, chatbots can put customers in touch with the right person at the company to answer their questions.

5. Handle common questions

Conversational support also boosts companies’ existing self-serve support for potential customers. Where your FAQs page might go unnoticed, buried in the navigation menu in the site’s footer, either chatbots or live chat flows can surface the relevant Q&A to your customers.

This is great for users because it means they don’t have to search your site for the information they need. For you, it means you can qualify leads and take customers to the most high-converting content for them without having to lift a finger.

6. Embrace bots

This is all enabled by chatbot integration with your conversational support channels. Chatbots integrate with most chat apps and come in three main types. Button-and-menu, keyword recognition, and natural language processing.

Button-menu bots just present the user with a message and buttons like “yes,” “no,” and “more than 30 days ago” to respond. They’re simple, but they effectively route customers around to the right human team member.

Keyword-based chatbots will analyze customers’ text inputs for certain words and trigger different routes in the conversation based on those. NLP bots are the cutting edge, using AI to make decisions about customers’ answers with little instruction from the company.

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7. Gauge sentiment

Having a conversational support channel, either human or automated, enables sentiment analysis. Across your customers’ social posts and conversations with you, sentiment analysis highlights emotional keywords like “great!” or “frustrated.” In the middle of a chat, this can help your bots escalate conversations quickly to the right person before that customer churns.

8. Track KPIs

Conversational support enables you to better track certain customer service KPIs, like response time, conversation length, and customer satisfaction. When Forrester surveyed leaders and decision-makers on the benefits of conversational support, 60% reported improved customer retention, 58% reported enhanced customer satisfaction, and 54% saw an increase in ROI.

9. Build strong customer relationships

A personalized service is one of the main benefits of collecting data on your customers and operations. Conversational support makes it easy to collect data on your customers across channels. It’s obvious to customers why you’re asking for information on their location, and once you have that, you can feed into your unified communications platform and recognize customers across every channel.

10. Learn and develop

Conversational support can feed into an “all-hands” customer support program, where every member of the team is talking to customers on a regular basis. It’s a philosophy espoused by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who was fielding customer support emails to his public email years into his run as CEO.

“All-hands” customer support could mean team members are sitting with customer support taking calls, or it could mean they’re interviewing key accounts over email or free video chats from time to time.

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The future of conversational support

These are just ten of the reasons conversational support is becoming such a priority for businesses. As chatbot AI continues to improve, we’re going to see even more of an emphasis on companies talking to their customers directly over text, video, or calls.