How consumer durable brands are driving increased sales using conversational channels.

The arrival of conversational AI to the consumer products industry opens new possibilities for the final consumers. Today, the consumer durables industry thrives because of three major innovations: advanced analytics with insights to support the decision-making process; autonomous business processes, eliminating manual process to achieve faster time to market; and AI-powered immersive, conversational, and continuous interfaces that help deliver a 'wow' experience and gain more involvement from the user. 

Conversational AI focuses on three fundamental pillars to help the consumer durables industry: employees, companies, and final customers. 

Conversational AI solutions create direct dialogs through convenient channels without friction, at an affordable cost, with a 24x7 service. 

Consumers' constantly demand for better, personalized experience has led to innovation across various products. Apart from being affordable and solving day-to-day problems, Conversational AI can capture the users' attention and provide a delightful experience.



Consumer Durables Industry in Revolutionizing

The modern-day buyers' unique decision journeys and preferences sort into distinct consumer segments, with different characteristics of each segment. Brands must use Conversational AI as they plan marketing spending, messaging, and positioning. Conversational AI helps brands to grasp online behavioral nuances of each segment's buying patterns and the information and influencers it relies on to target segments through relevant channels and messages.

Brands need to grasp what motivates consumers to consider a purchase since the trigger point determines whether a brand makes it to the initial consideration stage. Using Conversational AI and conversational analytics to understand the preferences and sentiment of multiple demographics helps a brand position itself appropriately in the consumer's mind. 

With loyalty not guaranteed in today's market. Consumers tended to shop around rather than automatically choosing the same brand from one purchase to another. This suggests that marketers need to fine-tune their understanding of consumers in each segment, what triggers them to shop by employing innovative tools like Conversational AI. 

It is also, during the post-purchase experience, marketers must continue to highlight quality and service or offer rewards to the most loyal customers. It is easier to lose customers than add new ones in today's environment. Hence, spending disproportionate marketing money on loyalty can prove risky. Usually, the persuasive information in the durable consumer business includes brands, price, warranty, product features, after-sales service, offers or special promotions, availability, and user reviews.

Marketing in the Shopping-driven World

Before the digital era, every communication with customers included a variable media cost that usually surpassed the fixed expenses of creatives. Thus, management began focussing on 'working media spend', which is the part of the marketing budget to what today is known as paid media. Today, marketers must also consider "owned media"-the channels they control, such as websites-and "earned media," created by customers such as communities of brand enthusiasts.

During the functional evaluation, consumer behavior is greatly influenced by past experience with the product or service. Conversational AI can boost consumer awareness of their brand's products and services through significant media or social channels, motivating consumers to learn more about them. Conversational AI can provide creative interactions that convey a fuller picture of the brand's value and is an excellent approach to moving beyond simple awareness to real brand consideration.

In the consumer-durables sector, buyers tend to purchase a brand in their initial consideration set. But marketers who understand customer motivation can use Conversational AI along the entire consumer decision journey to influence final purchase decisions.

6 Ways Conversational AI can influence the buyer journey:

Brands increasingly focus on becoming more customer-centric and elevating customer experience to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value. Companies that supply high value and complex consumer durables face unique challenges.

Ease of access to relevant knowledge

Conversational AI offers easy access to an integrated knowledge base with support that will help reduce the cost of information delivery and help the customers find faster, and more relevant products and answers round the clock.

Modern-day customers want seamless and unified integration, rather than being passed off to different departments. Centralized access to all knowledge sources, including registrations, product configuration, service plan entitlements, support queries, inspections, warranty & warranty claims, service orders, and service campaigns, will help customers solve their issues in no time. It will help reduce the cost of support systems and provide a complete picture of all customer support needs. It will also leverage enterprise-wide resources to provide a consistent and seamless customer service experience. 

In instances where the customer demand is too complex for the Conversational AI to solve. In that case, it can escalate the issue to human agents with complete context of previous conversations - who can resolve the issue and add a new technical solution to the knowledge library, making it an invaluable asset over time.

Go Omnichannel and Digital

Calling to wait in line and navigate the maze of multiple IVR options. In today's world, brands must provide consistent support and service across multiple channels, including the web, mobile, messaging channels and email.

Conversational AI lowers the overall costs for companies to create an omnichannel digital experience and is preferred by most customers because of ease of access, time savings, and convenience.

Use of Conversational AI to Improve Online Sales Performance

Conversational AI can help by analyzing customer support data to improve product quality and operational performance. 

Through customer conversations, brands can gain a deep insight into softer customer aspects such as color preferences, evaluation criteria, other brands etc and reposition and realign their product offerings in real time. These insights are called conversational analytics - and you can view more about these here.  

Further - brands can use insights gained from support data to improve their products and services by helping to fix the problems at the source. Repeat issues can be prevented by using support data to identify emerging quality concerns early and implement necessary actions. 

The study of customer complaints and their feedback also helps identify and fix operational performance issues within the company or channel partners.

Boost Customer engagement

Brands can leverage Conversational AI for push notifications across multiple popular consumer facing channels to provide proactive alerts, announcements, and timely information. 

Conversational AI can be made available on multiple channels, such as mobile phone, web, IVR, smart speakers, or even smartwatches, making it device/technology-agnostic. 

This will keep your customers engaged and improve their perceptions of responsiveness. 

Additional revenue generation options can be generated by maintaining customer contact information accurately, registering their products, and offering related services, accessories and other complementary products.

Customer loyalty, referrals, and advocacy arise from engaged customers.

Enable Self-Service for customers

Conversational AI enables customers to find answers to support inquiries fast and anytime by providing accessible and intuitive self-service options on various channels. 

As most customers prefer self-service, companies have the opportunity to minimize their call volume. 

As mobile devices have become the primary communication channel, having a Conversational AI-powered mobile application or a mobile-friendly responsive website allows your customers to access the information they require on any device quickly, with the help of an intuitive conversational experience.

Convert Conversations into Revenue

The Conversational AI interface uses a machine-learning algorithm and Natural language processing to make sense of buyer queries.

It then uses metas and API calls to pull up the right product that suits the customer, helping turn automated chats into new revenue.

A revenue acceleration sales agent like Convert AI, constantly nudges the customer towards purchase by proactively prompting and guiding the user on the most optimal path along the buyer journey.

The Bottom Line 

Incorporating Conversational AI with consumer goods enables simpler and more direct shopping for producers and consumers. This allows consumers to spend more time doing (and finding) what they want, as they want.

Companies can leverage these innovations to contend with increasingly value-conscious and tech-savvy consumers. As increasing numbers of consumers depend on using digital and mobile devices to shop, many consumer goods companies invest in existing and emerging technologies to better understand, connect, and engage with consumers.