What Connected Conversations Mean for Your Customers

Any single relationship manifests across dozens of mediums. Between iMessage, Skype, FB Messenger, Slack, HipChat, phone, SMS, email, Twitter, Salesforce, Instagram, Snapchat, Tinder, and Google Hangouts — just to name a few — the opportunities for communication are endless. The vast majority of consumers take advantage of these opportunities: we establish relationships with bosses, significant others, family members, and friends that are spread across myriad communication channels, but form, as a whole, a single and continuous relationship. This phenomenon, wherein disparate mediums together form a cohesive connection, is what we call connected conversations.

Consumers have connected conversations in their personal and professional lives, but this ability is lacking when it comes to the relationship between consumers and brands. Even with omni-channel support, on the consumer side every conversation exists in a vacuum — there is no ability to move between mediums while maintaining a continuous conversation.

Until now.

This is the next frontier for customer service. The industry has always emulated the ways in which consumers interact with one another, and continuous, connected conversations are the logical next step in 2019.

Connected Conversations in Action: What Enabling Continuity Looks Like

Continuous conversations for customer service is not an abstract concept; there are concrete ways in which brands can leverage today’s technology to integrate disparate mediums on the consumer side.

Over the course of the next decade, conversations will become increasingly connected across devices and channels. For now, these are the top three ways in which brands can connect primary communication outlets for their customers.

1. Phone Automation to Messaging

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is one of the most universally despised forms of customer service automation. It’s slow, difficult to understand, and often doesn’t even result in time-savings on the customer or the agent side. Oftentimes, customers are routed to the wrong agent or end up just hanging up out of frustration.

However, with connected conversations, IVR can actually play an important role. Brands can leverage IVR to deflect non-urgent tickets to messaging, which helps customers get a fast and frictionless resolution without waiting on hold. Furthermore, brands can use SMS-to-web deep links to ensure that customers can message without having the app installed, which makes the medium seamlessly available to all customers. This keeps phone communication reserved for high priority escalations, with messaging used for remaining support inquiries.

2. Messaging to Phone Escalation

On the flip side, brands can also integrate phone into messaging for escalation and urgent inquiries. Escalation can occur through bots, which helps expedite the conversation and eliminates the possibility of customers being passed back and forth between agents. When there’s hold time, agents can use a ‘Call customers back’ functionality, which eliminates hold times and reduces friction on both ends.

By integrating the two mediums, brands ensure that customers don’t have to go through laborious processes to escalation. Currently, customers typically have to move from messaging, to Google to get a phone number, to long hold times, only to potentially be told the answer to their question could have been solved easily through a faster medium.