The Role of Call Center Agents in Conversational Marketing

The Role of Call Center Agents in Conversational Marketing. What Is Conversational Marketing? This type of marketing uses real-time automatic conversations to move potential buyers through your sales funnel as fast as possible. Its main focus is to start and build B2C relationships and create a custom customer experience. It’s a strategy that works alongside inbound marketing. For this, it nurtures the leads you generate through your online presence.

There are many channels to implement this kind of marketing. For example, text messages, phone calls, Chatbots, Automated assistants, WhatsApp, and Social Media. Most of these platforms are very easy to use and integrate with your current software.

Why does your Business Need Conversational Marketing?

As a result of marketing innovations, most companies discovered that their users and customers want them to be more proactive in the way they deliver products and services.

Using this kind of marketing offers you insightful data about call center metrics and KPIs. Thanks to it, you can use it to predict customer behavior and improve your agent’s performance.

This approach is not about replacing human interaction with computers. Instead, it’s all about having the right conversation, with the right person, at the right time. This is something that turns out to be much more effective and useful in this digital era.

Who Is A Call Center Agent?

A call center agent is in charge of many things. For example, dealing with customers’ calls, hearing complaints, and solving customer service problems. On the other hand, they also give general information and guide customers through the purchase process.

Besides, as a call center agent, you also have to let customers know about the terms and features of a product. Added to this, you also have to showcase the company’s expertise through voice and online chats.

A marketing strategy of this kind is usually built around either one or many channels.

Each one of these allows you to reach your website’s visitors and engage them.

What Is the Role of Call Center Agents in Conversational Marketing?

Will conversational AI replace call center agents? Not in the near future, at least.

Conversational Marketing and AI are here to stay, and they can bring a huge amount of benefits to the call center industry, but this doesn’t mean they will take away call center jobs.

Call centers have always found ways to take advantage of new technologies and improve their efforts and services. Chatbots and auto-responders are no exception.

But what will call center agents do if everything is being automated? Let’s find out in the list below.

1.   The human touch

Automated responders still have a long way to go before they can fully interact like a human. Expressing and reacting to emotions, making jokes, showing empathy… these are very hard tasks for AI still. Be sure to train your agents in empathic skills.

On the other hand, many of us still prefer to hear a human voice reply to us when we have an inquiry, complaint, or something urgent. Sometimes we need to feel that our question or query was understood and acknowledged by someone at the company. That’s where call center agents kick-in.

Automated responders still have a long way to go before they can fully interact like a human. Expressing and reacting to emotions, making jokes, showing empathy… these are very hard tasks for AI still. Be sure to train your agents in empathic skills.

On the other hand, many of us still prefer to hear a human voice reply to us when we have an inquiry, complaint, or something urgent. Sometimes we need to feel that our question or query was understood and acknowledged by someone at the company. That’s where call center agents kick-in.

2.   Mutual learning

As we told you earlier, conversational AI can offer and study a huge amount of data from customers and interactions.

It can also record and check each agent’s performance. As a result, you can use this data to keep improving your company’s productivity and create training sessions.

At the same time, new data from customer’s concerns, FAQ’s, and common issues are the pillars that will allow you to create your Conversational Marketing strategy.

You can keep adding to this information and keep it up to date to make your bots more effective.

3.   Creativity in sales

You need to be creative to close deals. AI is smart, ingenious, and accurate when processing huge amounts of data. However, it’s still far from being able to be as creative as a human being.

Factors like the moment of the sale, the customer’s tone of voice, or even holidays can greatly influence the result.

As a salesperson, you need to figure out the best way to answer customers’ questions. On the other hand, you also need to rebut their objection and make them understand. For all of this, one must be creative.

Now that you know it, you should start thinking of creating a creativity training session.

4.   Building a relationship

Today, most businesses understand how important is to build long-lasting relationships with their clients.

In this sense, AI isn’t yet better than humans when it comes to this.

We’re still a little far from saying to our friends “hey I met the coolest AI the other day, we had such a good laugh over the phone”.

This is still the agent’s territory and will continue to be for some good time into the future. Your brand needs to build relationships and your representatives must be the frontliners.

5.   AI is the opening, Agents are the Closing

Every sales team needs some opener agents and closing agents. The first ones take care of making the first impression and warming up a prospect to start a sale process.

This job is now being handed over to Chatbots and Auto-responders since customers like to be greeted the second they contact your brand. They like their questions to be answered fast and accurately and this is a job that AI knows how to perform very well.

On the other hand, when doing follow-ups, subscriptions, solving customer inquiries, or closing a sale, your agents will do a much better job than AI. For this, you need to train them on how to take advantage of AI data and improve the skills we talked about earlier.

Conclusion of Call Center Agents in Conversational Marketing

Conversational Marketing is taking the world by storm and call centers shouldn’t be left behind.

As a call center manager, you need to understand that humans and AI work great together. Thus, using AI analytics and services as well as training your agents are highly cost-effective investments to make.

AI is here to stay, but instead of taking the place of agents, it’s going to make their jobs more effective, organized, and fast.

Chatbots are still very far away from creating meaningful relationships. Because of this, your agents need to pay close attention to this key area to become experts.

Author:

Bryan Osorio is a Blogger, SEO enthusiast, Content Marketer, and Digital Marketer with 3 years of experience within the Tech and Digital Marketing Industry.

He likes to read, write and talk about Science, Technology, AI, Video Games, World News and more.

He studied Psychology at the National University of Colombia and enjoys writing about leadership, remote work, team motivation and others. LinkedIn