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Turn personalization into profit with Conversational Sales and Care
Product updates: What’s new in LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud
Chris Radanovic
March 29, 2022 • 7 minutes
Richard Tso
March 29, 2022 • 7 minutes
We’re constantly exploring what it means to power Curiously Human™ digital experiences across the customer journey. This is especially true given the results of our recent Consumer Preference Report that reveals 79% of global consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand with which they feel a personal connection, and 86% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company that interacts with them in a personalized way. How then, are we innovating the LivePerson Conversational Cloud® to power personalized customer experience at scale?
The answer can be found in our latest set of Conversational Cloud features and capabilities, which will deliver more personalized conversations for customers, more intuitive tools for agents and sales teams, and more profitable business outcomes for brands. For the customer care team, this means increasing customer satisfaction (CSAT) while reducing service handling times and operational costs. For the marketing and sales team, this means unlocking revenue acceleration through Conversational Sales, enabling customers to make purchases across channels like SMS, Apple Messages for Business, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger.
Last month we announced the general availability of Dynamic Routing and Integration Hub, including a preview of Dynamic Actions. Our Chief Scientist Joe Bradley also published a blog that shared our journey toward creating Curiously Human digital experiences to address broken customer experiences. Today, we’re sharing additional research insights, integrations, and features that will help accelerate your business forward.
Product updates include the general availability of Conversation Assist, the addition of KakaoTalk to our growing list of integrations, and a new metric called Repeat Intent Rate that helps drive additional consumer personalization across the LivePerson platform.
Why we continually advance our Conversational Sales and Care solutions for personalization
There’s a reason LivePerson is constantly releasing updates like these to our products. To understand how the industry, sales process, and service process are evolving, we survey thousands of customers worldwide each year about what they want when interacting with brands. It’s no surprise that messaging across channels is in high demand. In fact, here are some new insights highlighting just how critical it is for companies to provide personalized conversational experiences.
Gen Z, Millennial, and Baby Boomers alike join the messaging revolution
While there are lots of stereotypes out there about age and how it relates to tech savviness, it turns out that even older consumers are interested in messaging directly with brands. Here’s the response breakdown by age of those who answered “yes” when asked: “Would you like the ability to securely message with any business (i.e. your bank/cable company/favorite store, etc.)?”
Notably, about 3 in 4 consumers aged 65 and over report they want messaging experiences. While brands of all kinds can benefit from deploying messaging channels for their customers, this suggests healthcare companies in particular may want to start or strengthen their offerings here.
Opportunity to win hearts and minds of messaging Boomers
While all age groups are hot on messaging, the differences between what they’ve experienced so far and what they’re asking for stand out. In fact, more than half of consumers have not yet used text messaging, messaging apps, or messaging on mobile apps or social media to communicate with brands.
The differences here grow with age, with younger people reporting more messaging use compared to older people. With such high demand for messaging experiences across all age groups, there is significant room to grow in terms of providing experiences consumers actually want.
Powering Conversational Sales with Millennials
Strong majorities across age groups not only want to message with brands, they also say they’re more likely to actually make a purchase if they can do so. Here’s how each age group responded when we asked: “True or false? “I’d be more likely to make a purchase if I could browse and get answers over messaging.”
Based on the data, every age group is more likely to make a purchase when they can message, but younger consumers are leading the pack. My niece falls in Gen-Z and definitely prefers texting over other communication channels. She also prefers mobile interactions over visiting live chat on a website via her laptop. As her generation ages, brands need to be prepared to meet these potential customers where they prefer.
The bottom line for Conversational Sales? The opportunity to make more money with messaging is only going to grow over time.
4 of the latest product updates
By combining consumer trend research like the above with customer and prospect insights, LivePerson develops product updates to power unified customer experiences for our customers through AI. Here’s what’s new this month in LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud:
1. Conversation Assist: Arm your agents with the right words and bots
Conversation Assist is now generally available, and offers agents real-time content suggestions that can be dragged and dropped directly into customer conversations. Now, your agents will have the right words and automated bots at their fingertips to answer common questions, provide customer support or conversational selling, and also provide links to content across your company’s knowledge base.
These pre-defined recommendations are based on customer questions and needs, and supervisors can facilitate more seamless handoffs between human agents and bots. Agents can also easily build specialized bots and have them join conversations in a natural way to handle pre-defined, repeatable processes like obtaining consumer acceptance of terms and conditions or collecting information required to process a service upgrade.
2. Repeat Intent Rate metric: Service repeat customers with ease
Historically, brands were only able to use repeat conversation rate to understand if consumer intents were not resolved on first customer contact. Today, we are announcing a new, generally available metric called Repeat Intent Rate within the Conversational Cloud that allows agents and supervisors to identify if consumers come back with the same question, and if so, understand why their inquiry was not resolved the first time.
Brands can use that valuable data to improve automations, processes, and agent coaching — leading to improved personalization, which can ultimately improve Conversational Sales and Care experiences. With LivePerson’s new Repeat Intent Rate metric, brands can now focus analysis on subsequent conversations with the same customer intent. For example, a brand with an automated password reset experience and who sees a high Repeat Intent Rate, can pinpoint where the bot is failing, and update the bot configuration to better resolve the password reset intent. This improves the customer experience and increases first contact resolution.
Brands must have both Intent Manager and Performance Optimizer for this metric to appear within the Performance Optimizer module.
3. KaKaoTalk: Reach customers through this new messaging channel integration
KakaoTalk is one of the fastest growing communication channels in South Korea, with over 220M registered users, and 52M active users worldwide. To give you an indication of scale, KakaoTalk is used by 93% of active smartphone users in South Korea. That’s huge! In efforts to continually evolve messaging channels for greater customer service reach, we’re excited to announce LivePerson Conversational Cloud platform can now seamlessly integrate into KakaoTalk.
This new integration allows brands to expand messaging capabilities to reach the millions of users actively engaged in the KakaoTalk platform. This not only allows brands to create ongoing connections with existing customers, but also scale and enhance contact center/CCaaS operations by utilizing the power of the Conversational Cloud platform for deeper functionality on pieces like:
- Image and file sharing
- PDF file sharing (Agent to consumer only)
- Quick replies
- Secure forms
- Post conversation surveys
4. Video calls: Customize backgrounds to align to your brand
New this month is the ability to upload a custom background for video chat, allowing you to convey a consistent brand across your customer support channels. At LivePerson, we recently unveiled our new brand, Curiously Human, to the world and we use custom backgrounds to help communicate our new brand on customer calls and sales conversations with prospects. This customization allows you to do the same for a unified, on-brand presence.