Customers in both the B2B and B2C spaces are today far more inclined and equipped than ever before to take the buying process into their own hands – at least as far as the prevailing sales cycle allows.
In fact, according to the Gartner Future of Sales research, “33% of all [B2B] buyers desire a seller-free sales experience”, while according to the Harvard Business Review, “81% of customers across industries attempt to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a live representative.”
Whether this is a result of increasingly finicky and intuitive buyers in the B2C space, the burgeoning incidence of digital natives as primary decision makers in B2B purchases, or pervasive skepticism about the added value of the traditional sales representative, rethinking your company’s conventional sales model seems the prudent thing to do today.
It therefore comes as no surprise that with this shift in consumer buying behavior, intuitive business leaders are today commissioning sweeping changes to their companies’ digital platforms – chief among which are new customer-centric reconfigurations such as self-service and real-time conversational features on company websites.
Self-service as a Lead Generation Tool
Though not an entirely new concept, self-service – which finds its roots in a 1917 Clarence Saunders patent – is today a key driver in marketing automation, where lead generation is grounded largely in rich, customizable and highly-relevant content and experiences.
The intent behind the self-service feature of a company’s website, is to bring a prospect as close to opt-in as possible, without ever breaking the rhythm of their learning and decision-making about a product or service.
The ideal scenario is that a prospect should at no point feel compelled to seek out a sales representative to respond to a query that could otherwise be covered by a self-service feature – the direct benefits of which may include:
Improved customer service delivery;
Higher conversion rates;
Higher customer retention and referral rates;
Lower overheads in direct sales support; and
Improved sales efficiency – from initial prospecting to closure.
It is therefore not at all surprising that the Gartner research highlights that by 2022, “85% of all customer service interactions will start with self-service,” and that by then, “Customer self-service will make up for 64% of all customer engagement.”
Now while low-cost, daily-use commodities and services would tend to command low consumer involvement in the purchase decision, those of higher value are typically associated with more complex and dissonance-reducing buying behaviors – where the prospect seeks to gather as much information as possible before making a purchase decision.
Self-service features are designed with the latter mind – offering the most relevant information and experiences, based on criteria set via automated forms or the activation of digital triggers that map browsing behavior.
However, even where inbound marketing and self-service tools are designed and integrated to cover as many conceivable aspects of the sales cycle as possible, conversational provisions remain critical to the success of the your company’s sales model – regardless of the industry or market.
Selecting the Right Combination of Tools
A key consideration in marketing automation, is that consumers are seeking to have their problems and objections addressed with some measure of urgency; and while self-service tools are designed to provide customized solutions, a live chat feature on a high-intent page can go a long way in addressing concerns requiring more nuanced responses.
The caveat here of course, is that even where accommodations are made for live chat functionalities on a company’s website, recent studies suggest that the effectiveness of automated conversational tools such as chat bots fell significantly in 2020 – 28% in fact, according to the 2020 Microsoft Global State of Customer Service report.
No clearer caution has however been sounded than that of the 2020 Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, which states that, “More than 50% of customers across all age groups typically use the phone to reach out to a service team, making it the most used channel for customer service.”
While this statistic may not come as a surprise for most sales and marketing practitioners, it is indeed a most welcomed reminder that marketing automation tools should not be seen as standalone solutions for optimizing lead generation – at least, not just yet.
For now, it is understood – as mentioned earlier – that as higher value commodities and services attract more complex and dissonance-reducing buying behaviors, consumers will continue to gravitate towards channels that offer the quickest and most adequate redress.
Conversational marketing should therefore be seen as an important final layer of your overall marketing strategy – complimenting a suite of highly responsive digital self-selection features, and a robust database of retrievable digital content in both textual and visual formats.
As a channel of last resort for warm leads and prospects – and where resources permit – maintaining a customer support hotline, or even assigning personnel to your company’s live chat function can go a long way in providing a positive customer service experience.
Think about it… You simply cannot go wrong by having a real person, with the requisite knowledge and training, offering real-time customer support, to compensate for any unforeseen shortfalls of your website’s automated features.
All that being said, what matters most, is that we now understand how consumer buying behavior has changed; that the wrong combination of marketing tools can do more harm than good – driving leads and prospects to our competitors; and that a positive customer service experience should be the motivation behind all marketing innovations.
If this article has helped you in one way or another, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please CLICK HERE for direct messaging and email options.
Comments