Many competent businesses fail to thrive because of poor customer engagement strategies. They have an innovative team, excellent products, and services to offer. But without engaging with their customers, it gets difficult to know what the customers want; slowly, their visions will get diverted from customers' expectations, and after a point, the customer will never be able to relate to the brand that they once loved and cherished. This post is not just for businesses that make products or sell services but for everyone who wants to run a business that their customers cherish.

What is the messenger-first approach?   

When we talk about customer engagement, if the first thing that comes to your mind is email or campaign marketing, then you are doing something wrong. There isn't anything that customers hate more than being spammed with cold emails. And even worse, if you are thinking about Ads and intrusive pop-ups.

Customer engagement should be organic and natural, like a conversation, a small chat, or an audio call. Just like how you would approach someone in the real world, that's how you must approach your customers too.

Using SalesIQ, you can make the approach as natural and simple as possible with a live chat messenger. And that is what we call the messenger-first approach. Now, let's see how you can use this for your support and sales.

Messenger-first approach for support    

Most businesses will have a static customer complaint logging page where the customer provides their contact details, describes the issue, creates a ticket, and waits for a few days to get a proper response. The ticket response that arrives days after the customer's request will be sent via mail, or they will have to revisit your website to check the ticket's status. This will not only require extra effort on the customer's side; it will also make them favor your business less every time they get an issue with your product or service. Using the messenger approach to create and manage will make the support experience feel more natural.

A product can never be error-free. If your customers find resolving their issues through support more frustrating than the actual issue in the product, it means you are handing your support wrong. Whenever your customer faces a problem, they must feel it is effortless to approach you and get it fixed.

In SalesIQ, you can use the messenger-first approach to log your support tickets and get updates on the ticket status via chat. Now let's see how you can do that.

1. Integrate your Zoho SalesIQ account with Zoho Desk.
2. You can use our versatile no-code chatbots to interact with your customers and log their complaints as tickets in Zoho Desk, all from SalesIQ.
3. Customers can also get immediate support from your operators if they require it.
4. Checking the status of the existing tickets
5. You can also allow your customer to check the status of their current tickets by configuring it in the chatbots. 
   

Messenger-first engagement for sales     

Sales can always be very tricky when it comes to live chat, some operators can be very pushy, and some reveal how desperate they are to get the deal signed or products sold. In most cases, it is not the operator's or the business's fault; it is because of the app/tool they use. Most live chat apps lack follow-up actions and tools that let them take the sales process across multiple sessions. Instead, they are forced to complete the deal in one session. Otherwise, the customers would be lost forever. This would make your business sound very needy and push back even genuine prospects.

How can this be overcome using SalesIQ?

The follow-up features and SalesIQ's tight integration with other Zoho apps enable you to span the sales process over multiple organic sessions and make it a smooth process for your customers to sign deals.

1. Connect your Zoho SalesIQ with CRM and Campaigns.
2. Start a proactive conversation with your visitor using our automated chatbots and get the visitor's details using the bots.
3. Get your visitor's consent and loop them in your newsletters and sales mailers.
4. Once you have essential information about your visitor, like their email, phone number, and consent, you can sync these details to your CRM and Campaigns and set a follow-up task in CRM.
5. You can send a proactive chat with subtle updates or offers the next time they visit your website or app with chat triggers.
6. You can also follow up on them with emails, push notifications, or quickly connect with them via audio call using Telephony even if they are not online.
   

One of the significant advantages of the messenger-first approach in SalesIQ is that the visitor doesn't see your approach as an Ad or a cold email that they are trained to avoid. It will be more organic, like how a sales process progresses when you visit a car showroom in real life.

We hope this was helpful to you. Feel free to share your most frustrating support and sales experience in the comments below. 

Regards,

Naveen