Consumer Support Technologies That Can Help in Branding and Marketing
Reading Time: 6 minutes What is the best strategy for marketing and branding purposes? Some would say creating excellent content. Some would say great advertising or marketing campaigns. Still, most would agree that the maximum impact over branding or marketing for that matter comes from after-sales support.
We all know how customer journeys are essential to branding and marketing purposes. Consumers have understood their worth, and 70% of such consumers believe in customer journeys based on the way a brand treats them. So, ignoring your customers is not an option anymore for any brand.
Consumer support technologies have been evolving, and with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence and other technologies like the Internet of Things, consumer support has been more agile, approachable, and always at your fingertips. This is a unique opportunity for brands and marketers to capitalize on the evolution of consumer support technologies and improve their strategies.
Table of Contents
1. Social Media Listening
In 2019, close to 3 billion people were on Social Media platforms, and this is a space that needs exploitation by several brands and marketers. Consumers are now open to share their data and information to help brands serve them better, especially on Social Media platforms.
Social Media Listening is listening to your consumers on these Social Media platforms for their after-sales issues. This can be done through several messaging services provided by these platforms and use for getting the all-important information and data related to their problems.
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This data can be used to design specific products and marketing strategies for consumers. They can be shared through the same channel. Though the instant response to your consumers will help you gain more loyal customers that can help canvas your products. With 90% of consumers expecting an instant response to their service questions, the delivery of instant solutions becomes essential.
2. Live Chat
Live chat is an essential tool used for consumer support these days. Most websites have a live chat feature that immediately pops up on the landing page. Live chat feature involves typically one of the departments from consumer support, marketing, or sales. Though consumers want interaction with all of them at once.
It remains a crucial issue with most businesses today, as they are unable to cope up with the live chat expectations of the consumers. Consumers are looking for quick solutions to their inquiries and queries related to products and services. Ten minutes is what it takes for 2/3rd of consumers to leave your brand or services to go for a competitor.
So, as a brand or a marketing team, you should be ready with an answer in less than ten minutes, or else you will lose your consumer. It is also essential to understand the medium of live chat as a whole. There is no room for discrepancies here, and you need to be agile with it and yet as accurate as you can be.
3. Voice Assistants
Some time ago, businesses were still struggling with a better way of communicating with their consumers, and then came the revolutionary technology called the Internet of Things or IoT. It changed the way brands communicate with consumers. Today, voice-based commerce has grappled with the E-Commerce market, and revenues have reached sky-high.
Voice assistants like Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Home are the most popular smart devices on the planet. These intelligent devices are becoming prime platforms for brands and marketers to look upon. It has already created a market of sorts known as the Voice Commerce.
Voice assistants have been now used for consumer support and after-sales services, and this is quite a revolution as connectivity between brands and consumers has become faster and intelligent.
4. Chatbots
Chatbots are programmed software that mimics the human-to-human interaction to interact with the consumers and users in natural language. We have already seen the rise of chatbots in consumer support applications. Brands are preferring to develop mobile apps by partnering with a mobile app development company to specifically design chatbot integration into its mainframe.
Through this integration, consumer support activities become relatively easy. As chatbots are quick with their resolutions, consumers stay more loyal to those brands. Chatbots also provide valuable consumer data through a series of a questionnaire and use this data to design products according to consumer needs.
5. IVRs- Interactive Voice Response
This is an old technology still relevant and prevalent in many consumer support strategies. But, one would question how one can leverage IVRs for branding or marketing, right? Here, it is not about IVRs that are used currently, the use of Artificial Intelligence can revamp IVRs, and a voice-bot system can be generated that can assist and support consumers on calls.
Brands can use these voice-bots for outbound marketing and branding solutions. These bots can work like chatbots and first gather data from the users and then suggest products and services based on the data aggregated by the system. Already IVR has become obsolete and the center of consumer anger, and revamping the same technology can change the way consumers see it.
6. Texting Your Customers
Texting your consumers is the most healthy habit any brand can keep up with. SMS Marketing is already a very lucrative strategy, and using it for branding strategies can undoubtedly lift your brand value. Most brands today use texting for promotions and offers that they share through short links. It is a great way to promote your products as branded quick links can provide 39% more clicks than quick generic links.
Testing is also a great way for consumer support, and it also provides quick solutions that consumers seek. Text messages on the phones also possess high open rates as consumers open more SMS than emails in the ratio of 90% to 20%.
Thus, optimizing your consumer support and marketing through SMS strategies can be more fruitful than email marketing strategies. Even consumers respond 7.5x more to the text messages on the phones than the emails in their inboxes. Hence, using original texts with short links to promotions and offers related to your products can drive more consumers towards your products.
Signing Off
Brands are now adopting unique ways to interact with consumers to achieve a better brand image and marketing opportunities. As business is an entity with consumers at their base, serving the consumers anytime or day of the year with quick and reliable solutions can work like magic!
Consumer support and after-sales treatment are the best gateways to your customer’s loyalty accounts. Loyal consumers will always bring more customers, and your marketing efforts will be reduced automatically. Thus, brands and marketers need to leverage these consumer support technologies to leverage them for branding and marketing needs.
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Co-Authored With
Manoj Rupareliya is the Online Marketing Expert and Blogger. He is an experienced writer with expertise in the field of technology, blockchain, crypto, AI, Digital Marketing and SEO. All the blogs he writes are aimed at providing credible help and insights for readers who want to stay updated all the time.
