Digital conversations with clients can become very complex, especially when both parties use complex languages or jargon when they are chatting.
This is why it’s so important to practice digital communication every day with your potential or current clients. You should never let the technical jargon scare you away from your goal. After all, this is business and you should be speaking the language of your prospects, not theirs.
Using complicated keywords/phrase/arguments/corpun/past tense instead of concrete information is not helpful.
The best way to communicate with someone is to know exactly what they are asking about (or trying to find out) rather than attempting to use obscure, often incorrect English to communicate with them.
When having digital conversations, the only intent is for the two of you to get to the point where you can understand the person being spoken to and form a good idea about what they want.
Attempting to “spy” on your client or prospect by sending large amounts of unstructured data back and forth in digital conversations. This is often done by big data brokers who use Google Analytics, Facebook, or Twitter to analyze the conversations going back and forth between clients and prospects.
Many times, these “big data” brokers and analytics vendors make big assumptions about what the intent of their clients are and they end up in spamming them with lots of unwanted information that doesn’t help their businesses one bit.
If you’re going to use digital conversations to communicate with your clients, you absolutely must make sure you are using the appropriate subject line and permission features to limit the scope of the information you are collecting.
The other thing you may need to know about when having conversations over the internet is the difference between “attachment” and “indication”. An attachment is just that… something that someone pushes on your computer to gain permission to have a conversation with you.
An indication is much more direct. It provides the recipient with a way to react to the conversation. This could be triggered by various different factors, such as… if the person leaves the chat session, they don’t have to wait for you to push the link before they get a chance to say something, etc.
With this information, you can begin to think about your digital conversations differently. When a company has a “customer service” chat forum, they seem to have all kinds of suggestions about how people should talk to each other in these types of situations.
With an attachment, the person initiating the conversation has to give their permission first, which makes it sound like a sales pitch for services. With indication, the conversation goes “wherever” the subscriber chooses to take it.
In the future, a predictive analytics platform will be able to provide companies with the information about what types of digital conversations they are having, even with people that do not have Internet access or who have never had a conversation online. In fact, an iPad could have a screen that displayed a “dummy conversation log”.
Every time someone in the vicinity looked at the log, a notification would pop up with an estimate of the number of interactions that day. The interesting part of all this is that while a business may be losing a few casual customers every day because of the predictive analytics, they are probably gaining a lot of those customers in the process.
If the prediction is correct that the predictive analytics will become more popular, businesses will have the resources available to train their employees to be more active digital listeners. They will learn how to automatically respond to “active digital listening” that is provided by a company’s customer service department.
Instead of waiting for a customer service representative to initiate the conversation, which often results in a one-sided conversation, employees will be encouraged to actively listen during every interaction with the customer. Then, if they notice that a conversation is coming to an end, they will be encouraged to end it or make some other sort of agreement. This practice will significantly reduce the amount of time that customers spend talking to a live agent.
Companies need to consider whether they want to be using the digital communication methods of phone calls, instant messaging, and apps on their smart phones to communicate with real people, as well. After all, many of the clients that have these types of active digital conversations tend to be younger and more tech savvy.
When businesses choose to use these methods to conduct business over the phone, they may be missing out on the real life conversations that will ultimately lead to more sales.
5 Ways to Take Your Digital Conversations To The Next Level
We’re living in an increasingly digital world, with social media, e-commerce and other virtual platforms becoming commonplace. In fact, in the last couple of years alone, there has been a 75 percent increase in online interaction for businesses.
With so many opportunities for digital interaction opening up to us, it feels like the perfect time to take our conversations to another level. But what does that actually mean? There are lots of ways you can take your interactions with customers, partners and suppliers to the next level – from adopting new tech solutions to refining your company’s culture. So let’s take a look at some ways you can achieve this…
Be transparent
One of the most important things you can do to take digital conversations to the next level is to be more transparent. Businesses have to navigate a fine line between being transparent enough for people to believe in your brand and being so open that they take away your competitive advantage. But with digital transformation playing a role in almost every industry, being transparent is more important than ever. Transparent businesses get more buy-in from customers, engage more people and become more successful as a result.
Collaborate
With the rise of remote working and digital transformation, it’s never been easier to collaborate with other teams, clients and suppliers online. You can use messaging apps to collaborate over tasks, communication tools like Skype to connect with clients and video conferencing to bring teams together. You can even use tools like Zoom to host virtual meetings.
Collaboration isn’t just about engaging your virtual teams, though. It’s also about engaging your customers. You can use social media to get feedback, ask questions and crowdsource ideas. You can also invite your customers to participate in surveys and product reviews. You can use digital collaboration to connect with your suppliers and partners, too. Whether it’s over video calls, email or collaboration tools, connecting with your business partners digitally can help take your conversations to the next level.
Create a culture of feedback
As you become more transparent and collaborate with your customers and partners, it’s likely you’ll get more feedback. This can be hard to navigate, but it’s important to create a culture where feedback is welcome and appreciated. After all, when you’re getting feedback from customers, you can make the necessary tweaks to improve your product or service.
When it comes to managing feedback, the first thing you’ll want to do is set up a system for receiving it. If you’re getting feedback via social media, for example, you’ll want to have an open-door policy for comments. You’ll also want to have a system for acknowledging feedback and thanking people for giving it to you. This can be as simple as using an automated system like Mention, or you can respond to feedback manually.
Offer virtual interaction as standard
As you work to take your digital conversations to the next level, it’s important to offer virtual interaction as standard. For example, when someone calls your company or fills out a form online, you should respond with a virtual option as much as possible. When you’re scheduling appointments, talking to customers or even just dealing with inquiries, it’s easy to default to a real-world option. But when you’re considering your options, consider whether you can use a virtual solution instead.
Get onboard with AI and automation
There’s a lot of hype surrounding artificial intelligence and automation – and for good reason. It can help you to take your digital conversations to the next level. For example, you can use AI to automate your customer service department, booking appointments and sending out marketing emails. You can also use AI to help with your hiring strategy. When you’re hiring, you can use AI to mine your job listings for keywords to help you find the best candidates.
Roll out VR and AR solutions
Virtual reality and augmented reality are becoming increasingly popular for brands. They’re great for enhancing your customer experience and bringing your brand to life in a new way. You can use VR and AR to host brand experiences, bring customers into your office and even train your employees. VR and AR technologies are still in the early stages, though. So if you want to adopt them, make sure you start early so you can get the most out of them.
Conclusion
As customers become increasingly digital, so must businesses. In fact, there’s a 75 percent increase in online interaction for businesses in the last couple of years alone. And with more new technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual reality coming out, it’s the perfect time to take digital conversations to the next level.
When it comes to taking your digital conversations to the next level, it’s important to be transparent, collaborate with others, create a culture of feedback, offer virtual interaction as standard and get onboard with AI and automation. And when you’re ready, you can also roll out VR and AR solutions to take your digital conversations to the next level.
