It may sound counterintuitive to consider automation for customer engagement. After all, customer engagement is about enabling a quality conversation with an associate. Moreover, it’s growingly used by brands to offset automated and self-service and stay personal with customers.
Automation is a very important element of customer engagement though. It is essential to scale your outreach with agents assisting them, or without for agentless campaigns.
Automation lets you send notifications and reminders using voice drops, SMS, emails, and messaging applications, such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. It can be used for simple conversations using interactive voice dialogs, two-way SMS, or conversational bots. Popular examples include appointment scheduling and prescription refill.
You can leverage call progress analysis (CPA) and your CPaaS platform to confirm that your messages were delivered, if they were read, and if any URL included was open.
You can use automation for agentless or attended campaigns. In the former case, the campaign will run autonomously, while in the latter, you offer the option for customers to speak to someone. In both scenarios, you leverage your existing lists and compliance controls.
You can eventually deploy automation in segments of a multi-touch campaign. This is where you get the best of both worlds, leveraging automation for efficiency while staying human. Picture the following callback experience. You send a courtesy SMS reminder before calling back a customer. She can either confirm and get ready for the call or ask for rescheduling it. She would then be sent to a bot to find another time. It’s probably much better than what you experience today!
Automated outreach is a critical element of a customer engagement toolbox that should be added to your consideration list for 2022.