Conversational Touchpoints: More efficiency for lead management processes

Lead management is a hot topic for all companies that sell via the web. However, many marketers are still not leveraging the potential of conversational touchpoints efficiently enough, missing out on up to 30 percent of the lead potential from these channels.

Most companies have already set up their marketing digitally – from Google Ads and banner advertising to innovative tracking, CRM and analysis solutions. This means they always have an eye on all areas that have to do with ‘clicks’ and gain in-depth customer insights to precisely target and adjust marketing strategies and campaigns.

But what happens when, after visiting a website, the customer contacts the company directly via (video) phone, chat or e-mail to get advice on products and services? If it is not possible at this point to filter out the relevant information from the conversations or written correspondence generated via the conversational touchpoints and make it usable, many leads are lost immediately. It is precisely this data about the challenges, preferences and wishes of customers that makes it possible to optimize marketing processes, measures and investments as well as the entire lead management strategy.

Conversational communication channels are therefore an essential part of any marketing and lead management strategy. To achieve this, the insights from the conversations must be brought together in a centrally managed platform and made available across departments in the company. At the same time, marketers must ensure that the customer information gained in this way can be used for further action. This can only be achieved through seamless integration with integrated third-party systems such as CRM and analytics tools – the prerequisite for an efficient lead management process. Such solutions are called communication based lead management platforms (CbLM). They combine conventional lead management and customer communication management software in one integrated system.

Companies can generate the following three benefits with CbLM platforms to better leverage conversations with their customers than ever before:

Anyone familiar with the MarTech market knows that it brings sweat to the brow not only of marketing novices, but also of seasoned specialists and long-time CMOs. From a multitude of more than 8,000 individual and isolated solutions, they have to pick out precisely those conversational applications that fit their very specific requirements – chat, mail or video call tools. In addition, the integration and maintenance of these individual modules are often resource hogs – in the marketing department, but also in the IT department.

Communication based lead management systems massively simplify both aspects: On the one hand, they eliminate long selection processes and compatibility checks, as CbLM systems are often technology and vendor agnostic – basically, all direct communication tools can be integrated with a single solution. On the other hand, they simplify integration through the use of so-called webmaster plug-ins, small Java scripts that are built directly into the website and thus make all desired communication channels available quickly and easily.

CbLM platforms also make the conversational channels usable in other ways to create value: They aggregate all incoming contacts (leads) from the direct communication channels on a central user interface and thus create the prerequisite that, in addition to marketing, other business areas such as sales, customer care, or corporate development also benefit from the know-how brought together there. This enables managers at all levels of the company to develop measures to enhance the customer experience and customer loyalty, which ultimately also improves lead numbers and quality.

Furthermore, the bundled customer knowledge from e-mails, contact forms, telephone calls, video calls and chats can finally be clearly visualized and analyzed and can thus be used to optimize online and dialog marketing strategies. Marketers can now not only design their campaigns more efficiently, but also adapt the frequency and channel of the customer approach to specific users much more individually than before.

And last but not least, innovative CbLM systems seamlessly integrate insights from conversations into existing CRM structures and analytics tools. As a result, decision-makers now know not only who communicates with the company at what time via which channel, but also what was agreed and exchanged. This makes it possible to determine the concrete value of each individual lead. Customer profiles already stored in the CRM can then be refined with this valuable conversion data. This massively increases lead quality and thus also pays directly into the Google strategy, since only the right lead data is fed in there.

The topics of conversational touchpoints and CbLM also have a lot of music in them – especially when you think about future technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and Big Data. Intelligent data models and algorithms that evaluate conversations in real time can be used to massively improve consulting processes and thus the entire customer experience in the online retail environment. A much deeper level of insight is created, enabling smart decision-makers to design complete sales and consulting processes more efficiently.

Example: In an ongoing video consultation, the platform’s AI analyzes indicators such as dropped keywords, emotional tone, or speaking rate, and plays real-time suggestions for improvement to the consultant to increase the quality of the exchange. These can be specific branding messages or blacklists and whitelists of specific terms. Suggestions for specific further materials such as how-to videos or product sheets are also conceivable. For this purpose, the AI uses all factors evaluated in the conversation to support the best possible outcome of the exchange.

Another use case would be for the AI to specifically evaluate the user behavior of a website visitor in order to then provide him or her with further content in an automated and personalized manner – up to and including callbacks or chats by consultants. If you then also include the existing data from the CRM, even more interesting use cases arise, all of which pay off in terms of lead management and the customer experience. This leads to more customer loyalty and satisfaction – which translates into more revenue.

With the innovative communication-based lead management platforms, companies in online retail gain significantly more flexibility and efficiency and thus increase their sales success very quickly and easily. From the first click on the website to the transfer of complete lead and conversion data to the CRM and analytics tools, to the optimization of campaigns and customer targeting, the entire lead management process is fully mapped. The key to this is the Conversational Touchpoints, without which none of this would be possible.

The german article was published on January 19th 2023 on the platform ecommerce Magazin.