Conversational customer engagement is the newest strategy on the block—and its popularity is growing fast. By encouraging person-to-person chats between customers and your brand, you can personalize the customer experience and build strong, lasting relationships.
Business text messaging is the perfect channel for conversational customer engagement activities. It can help you engage your customers in a conversation. Your team can use it to send order follow-ups, feedback requests, expert advice, and other interactive content. It’s also a fast channel for answering incoming customer questions.
Customers respond to SMS engagement content because texting is convenient. On your team’s side, a business text messaging platform streamlines the process of sending conversational customer engagement content. With help from SMS integrations, your team can send texts and manage replies with ease.
Read this blog post to learn how conversational engagement works with SMS integrations.
SMS CRM Integrations and Conversational Customer Engagement
Conversational customer engagement content is personal. Customers should feel as though your team members send texts one at a time. The best way to ensure customers feel this way is by personalizing texts—which is where an SMS CRM integration comes in.
With an SMS CRM integration, your team can:
- Keep contact information up-to-date with automatic, continuous data syncing between platforms
- Add accurate CRM custom fields, like first names and loyalty statuses, to templates
- Log texts to your CRM automatically for future reference to tailor your customer service
Sending customers texts with accurate information increases the chances that they will answer it. For example, here’s an SMS template that your team could send to multiple members of a loyalty member list. Each recipient would receive a text filled in with their own custom information.
Hi {{customer name}}! First of all, thanks for being a loyalty member since {{date of joining loyalty status }}. That means a lot! Now, how did you like your order #{{order #}}? Is there any way we can make it even better? Text STOP to unsubscribe.
This sort of personalized message is far more likely to receive a response than a basic template without accurate custom fields. Thanks to your SMS CRM integration, keeping these custom fields up to date should be easy.
Messaging Channel Integrations and Conversational Customer Engagement
Successful conversational customer engagement strategies emphasize making it easy for customers to connect. That’s why your team should empower customers to reach out through the channels they prefer. Customers should be able to reach your brand through your website, their native SMS app, or other, popular services like Google Search and Apple Maps.
Integrate your business text messaging platform with popular messaging channels like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and Google’s Business Messages. Your team will be able to:
- Receive all messages in your shared inbox, centralizing your messaging efforts
- Answer messages immediately or assign them to coworkers
- Set your platform to send identical automated messages, no matter the channel
- Send or schedule conversational customer engagement content, depending on the channel (Apple Business Chat and Google’s Business Messages do not allow teams to open post-conversation chats)
Messaging channel integrations offer convenience for your customers and efficiency for your team. Ultimately, they’re key to making your conversational custom engagement activities succeed.
Customer Service Platform Integrations and Conversational Customer Engagement
As we mentioned before, personalization is key to a top-notch conversational customer engagement strategy. Customers are more likely to respond to content that seems as though it was sent directly to them from another person. A customer service platform SMS integration, like with Salesforce Service Cloud or HubSpot, can help your teams personalize messages.
With a customer service platform SMS integration, your team can:
- Set up your platforms to automatically share and update contact custom fields, similarly to a CRM integration
- See all contact communications, including emails and web chat messages, in one platform, for a big-picture view of engagement
- Reply to and send texts right from within the customer service platform, so you can refer to contact notes and in-depth history
Ultimately, integrating your business text messaging platform with your customer service platform helps your team achieve the main goal of conversational customer engagement: giving customers the best experience possible.
Want to learn more about conversational customer engagement or SMS integrations? Check out our blog.
