If you’re a tech-savvy digital marketer fighting an uphill battle to stand out, this article about conversational analytics will help you break through the noise. 
The easy days of digital marketing are over. As tech giants are continuing to roll out privacy updates and regulation changes, marketers need to embrace a privacy-first world.
As if that wasn’t enough, customers these days expect companies to know them. Remember their names. Know their purchasing history. And provide them with personalized offers based on their preferences. But that’s not possible without data.
A lot of marketers we talk to feel like they’re fighting an uphill battle. And if you’re here, you’re probably one of them.
To deal with constant privacy changes, you’ll need to get creative and discover new ways of capturing data.
Zero and first party data offer a new and safe way of collecting data in our privacy first world. Both are information that consumers voluntarily share with brands, enabling digital marketers to identify customer needs, wants, and desires.
Here’s a hint: conversational analytics is your perfect opportunity to capture zero and first party data about how your customers think of your products, and what purchasing preferences they have.
In this article, we break down what conversational analytics is, how it works and how it enables you to win customers in a competitive marketplace where they are more concerned about online privacy.
What is conversational analytics?
Conversational analytics uses artificial intelligence, more specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP), to capture data from customer conversations and respond accordingly.
Natural language processing, a form of machine learning, is the practice of understanding how humans speak through artificial intelligence. NLP combines linguistics and machine learning to understand human language, such as customer conversations, in various forms including email, calls, social media interactions, chat conversations and more.
Using conversational analytics, businesses can understand and analyze their data and find useful insights into customer behavior and purchasing habits. We differentiate between voice and text data in conversational analytics. Voice data consists of various calls with customers while text data includes emails, social media interactions, bot conversations, and more.
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How does conversational analytics work?
The short explanation is that a program uses NLP to convert raw customer conversations into data that can be analyzed by algorithms.
But let’s take a closer look at why analyzing customer data is so essential these days.
Companies have unique customer intent data. For example, you wouldn’t expect a brand like Nike to have the same set of customer preferences as Vogue. They have completely different customers, receive unique questions, and require niche data on how people engage with their brand.
Customers, at the same time, expect businesses to provide them with personalized experiences. But how can you target them with relevant offers when they have completely different needs and preferences?
This is where conversational analytics will help. To put it simply, conversational technology uses NLP to process raw conversations and converts them into data that can be analyzed by algorithms.
But conversational analytics does more than just processing customer interactions. It captures and analyzes two-way casual communication between your business and customers, looking for subjective factors — like socio-linguistic diversity, colloquial language, and context — to give you an accurate picture of the conversation in real time.
That’s exactly why conversational analytics is so valuable. Because it not only captures data but also analyzes it with an extremely high level of accuracy to better understand audiences and guide them to the products that best fit their needs.
The real game-changer for marketers is the type of data captured by conversational analytics.
With conversational analytics, you can collect first party data directly from customer interactions, which reflects how your customers behave in conversations. The main benefit of first party data is that it is collected with consent, from a direct relationship with the customer, and is therefore highly accurate.
First party data is typically captured from customer calls, emails, social media activity and so on. It can be any type of data from location, demographics, budget or product preferences. Using first party data, you can learn more about yure customers and optimize your further conversations. By doing this, you can continuously improve your customer experience and increase conversation rates.
If you want to take things one step further, you can start capturing zero party data. It’s similar to first party data, but the major difference is that it is data declared on customer preferences.
Guided shopping experiences with conversational chatbots offer a great way to capture zero party data. You can set up an automated bot conversation and ask customers about their style, budget and product preferences. Conversational analytics will enable you to analyze this data within seconds and build segmented audiences that you can later reenage with ongoing offers. Overall, this improves targeting, conversion rates and customer profiles.
The main benefits of conversational analytics
1. Best source for zero party data
Conversational analytics is a goldmine of valuable customer insights. Chat conversations are the best source for collecting zero party data. This is data voluntarily shared by customers and contains insights into their shopping preferences and needs. This data can be used to analyze an audience and transform customer journeys to better target their needs.
2. Personalize customer experiences at scale
Understanding customers is the fuel to speed up your sales. Still, many companies struggle to capture real-time insights into precisely this.
By using a tool with conversational analytics, you’re enabling your business to understand every step of the customer journey with a particular focus on how customer preferences change throughout the journey.
Conversation analytics lets you learn customer behaviors and patterns from interactions, which you can use to personalize your experience at scale. The best part is that all this learning comes from accurate data, directly shared by customers. This allows you to fill the data gaps after the demise of third party data.
3. Target and track audience without third party data
As conversational analytics deliver data coming straight from customers, you don’t have to rely on assumptions about customer interests or track them extensively across websites and apps. Conversations create an open and honest exchange that enables you to collect zero and first party data. They reduce your dependence on third-party insights that don’t contribute to marketing performance as much as data directly shared by customers.
4. Deliver value in exchange for data
If you’re interested in using conversational analytics, I’m sure you’re wondering how you can convince customers to share data with you. The answer is simpler, thank you might think: deliver value, and they’ll be happy to share their data with you in exchange.
Customers are happy to share their data with you as long as you deliver value in exchange. An automated bot experience is able to guide customers through the journey, helping them find the products they’re looking for. A chat conversation is not only helpful, but it is also a highly entertaining way of engaging prospects. The best you can do is to launch your bot on the messaging channels your customers already use. This will improve the value of personalization and make the experience for customers even more convenient.
5. Use conversational analytics for product development
What’s better than receiving feedback directly from your customers? It’s the best way to develop your services to meet customer expectations.
Feedback can be incorporated into chat conversations. Finish your automated experience by asking your customers to evaluate your products and the automated experience you delivered. Then use this feedback to further improve your journey. Also, pass this information on to product development.
And while feedback is always very useful, with conversational analytics, you don’t even have to ask for it directly. If you set up an automated journey, you can ask your audience questions about their budget, needs, and preferences. It’s a great opportunity to discover what they like or dislike about particular products.
How major brands capture customer insights with conversational analytics
The travel app, Omio, launched an automated customer experience on Instagram using conversational analytics. The company guides customers to find travel info with automated FAQs on Instagram, which helps Omio capture zero party data on customer preferences. They use this to personalize the buyer journey in real-time and send personalized destination guides.
Below is an example of how Omio structures the data from chat to build audience segments and re-engage customers one to one with push notifications from Instagram. Read the full success story here!
Source: Instagram profile message button
Deichmann’s shoe finder assistant on Messenger recommends shoes based on customer preferences, personal style and budget. The bot asks questions, analyzes customer answers and responds to customers accordingly using conversational analytics.
This allowed Deichmann to collect customer signals and capture leads and retarget drop-offs without cookies. Using the customer data collected, Deichmann sends retargeting messages about personalized offers to drive continuous value.
The Messenger bot enabled Deichmann to achieve an 85% messaging CTR, 30% more purchases, and a 23% decrease in cost per additional conversion. Read the full story here!
Source: Click to Messenger Facebook ad
Beliani’s Messenger bot builds new audiences and activates younger customers on their preferred channel by helping them to find their ideal furniture. Using the data shared in chat conversations, the company converted customers with offers tailored to their needs. This allowed Beliani to achieve a 59% decrease in their cost per conversion lift and a 26% increase in engagement. Read the full success story here!
Source: Click to Messenger Facebook ad
Key Take Aways
Conversational analytics is the perfect opportunity to capture zero and first party data about how your customers think of your products, and what purchasing preferences they have. You can use this data to better target and track your audience, personalize your customer journey, and even improve product development.
Want better conversational analytics for your marketing campaigns? Get in touch with us today to learn how our conversational marketing platform can help grow your brand.
