In today's competitive business environment, manufacturing companies simply can't rely on industry demand alone. Considering the higher demand for goods and the costs associated with those purchases, customers need all of their questions answered before they commit to a purchase. Given the vast number of options available to customers and the noise in the market, manufacturing companies have to put a great deal of effort into staying at the top of their customers’ minds. Having an effective customer engagement strategy in place and improving the customer experience is essential to achieving this top-of-the-mind recall.
Following up on our latest blog about how to improve customer experience in the manufacturing industry, we’ll discuss how Zoho SalesIQ's live chat software can help manufacturing companies by giving customers a medium through which they can easily reach out to get their questions answered, and providing timely after-sales support to increase sales and retain customers. We’ll also look at how live chat for manufacturing can help you achieve all of this without having to increase your workforce substantially.
In this blog, we'll cover the following ways you can improve your manufacturing business with SalesIQ:
Chat with context, including customer history and inventory numbers.
Automate product recommendation and routine queries with chatbots.
Let's get started.
Capture leads right within your website
Today's customers are increasingly conscious about their online privacy and they shy away from static lead generation forms on websites. Real-time interaction with your business is much more likely to get visitors talking. Adding proactive chat invites, pre-chat forms, and conversational lead capture using chatbots for manufacturing are some effective ways to get through to your visitors and capture more leads.
Turn visits into RFQs with proactive chat
The average website conversion rate (the number of visitors who take action on your website) across all industries is only 2.35%, and that of best-performing websites is a mere 11%1. From this, it's clear that a reactive approach for live chat in marketing—where you wait for your website visitors to reach out to you—is probably the leak in the bucket that you need to fix.
Your leads could be leaving your website without purchasing anything due to one of these reasons:
They may not have found what they need.
Your checkout process is too long or confusing.
They have concerns regarding your products, pricing, or payment security.
By setting up automatic proactive live chat triggers on your manufacturing company's website to cater to all three criteria, you can significantly increase your conversion rate. Here's a presentation we've created about how you can make the best use of proactive chat triggers.
Make product/logistics-related details readily accessible
We've seen how proactive chat can help increase conversions. But what if you don't have the workforce to handle live chat queries?
Don't worry. Zoho SalesIQ lets you enable customer self-service by displaying answers to common queries, return and replacement policies, product information documents, and more in your manufacturing website live chat window so that prospects can find anything they want instantly.
Chat with context, including customer history and inventory numbers
Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Besides being a source of recurring revenue, happy customers can bring you more leads through referrals from their professional and social circles.
The first step in this direction is ensuring that your customers have the best experience with your company, and one small change in your live chat operation will go a long way.
Ensure you have the customer’s details, purchase history, support tickets, and older chats at hand before a live chat session. Using built-in integrations with Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk, SalesIQ gives you a 360° view of your customers right within your agent live chat screen. But that's not all. You can even create custom widgets to display data from third-party tools or your internal databases, push details to a database, block out your calendar, or even extend a customer's trial period, without ever leaving the chat screen.
Related resources
Integrate CRM with live chat software
Automate product recommendation and routine queries with chatbots
At the beginning of this blog post, we promised you a way to improve customer engagement without increasing your workforce. So, here you go.
Set up a conversational chatbot for your manufacturing website to ensure your customers find the products they need. Configure the chatbot to ask detailed questions to find your customers' requirements and all of the functionalities they're looking for in a product, to suggest one that fits their needs.
Creating a chatbot for manufacturing use cases can't get any simpler with SalesIQ's codeless chatbot builder. Simply drag and drop data and action blocks, add bot responses, preview your bot, and deploy it.
That's not our only chatbot solution for the manufacturing industry. Automate routine query resolution with Answer Bot—an AI-powered chatbot that understands your customers’ questions and responds using your knowledge base.
Chatbots for the manufacturing industry can't just have basic functions like suggesting products or answering customer queries. For this reason, SalesIQ also allows you to merge Answer Bot capabilities to your codeless bot to make a hybrid chatbot.
Grow your manufacturing business globally
Going global is part of every business's long-term agenda, and in an industry like manufacturing, where there are many multinational players already, it's even more difficult to ensure good market share in new geographical locations.
In addition to providing best-in-class products at a competitive price, talking to your prospects and customers in their own language helps you foster a connection with them. Customers reportedly trust websites that offer services in their language over those that don't. Automatic chat translation in Zoho SalesIQ's live chat tool for manufacturing helps you do exactly this by translating conversations in real time.
Assist customers with post-purchase queries
Make it easy for customers to reach out to you and get real-time resolutions for any questions or issues they have regarding their purchases. Zoho SalesIQ's live chat for manufacturing is the perfect solution for this as it comes with voice note, audio call, screen share, and remote assist capabilities to make your customers feel like you're assisting them in person. Customers can also view each of their older chats with you as separate conversations and even reopen a chat for further help on the topic.
Customers can even get in touch with you on their preferred messaging channel, be it website or mobile app live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook Messenger for instant responses.
This doesn't mean that email conversations with them are lost. SalesIQ also shows you customers' older tickets along with their status every time you assist them through chat.
Communicate with your suppliers and distributors
Not only is live chat an excellent way for manufacturing companies to assist prospects and customers, it also keeps the lines of communication open with suppliers, contractors, distributors, and wholesalers. With departments in SalesIQ, you can ensure that each type of stakeholder is connected to the right teams.
Optimize your manufacturing business with data analytics
Communication, though the primary function, isn’t the only business benefit of live chat for the manufacturing industry. Your daily live chat operation is a vast data source that helps you optimize your business, if it’s used right. Get complete insights on how your website performs and what your customers are most interested in so you can stock up on raw materials and tweak your production lines accordingly. You’ll be able to meet the gap between customer expectations and what you offer, and even optimize your live chat team based on when you're likely to get the most chat requests.
Summing up—build lasting relationships with live chat for manufacturing
Everything that we talked about in this blog post—giving customers a medium to reach you, providing personalized suggestions based on customers’ data and their needs, proactively offering help at important stages of the buyer’s journey, ensuring complete transparency with all of the data they need in a click, assisting customers with their post-purchase queries, and making them feel welcome by speaking their language—leads to trust, and even an emotional connection to your brand in the minds of your customers. This ensures that they’ll come back to you for their future needs and purchases, and even makes them brand advocates.
Try these out with Zoho SalesIQ's free live chat software that lets you have up to 100 chat sessions per month, share files and voice notes via chat, set up departments, view chat history of up to 30 days, let customers send you offline messages, and even get daily live chat reports delivered right to your inbox!
Have you used live chat for your manufacturing business in a more creative or unconventional way? Or do you have a use case of chatbots for the manufacturing industry that could help other businesses too? Let us and our readers know in the comments below.
References
[1] "The 61 Most Important Conversion Rate Statistics for 2022" Ranktracker, Sep 16, 2022, https://www.ranktracker.com/blog/the-61-most-important-conversion-rate-statistics-for-2022/
Thanks for this great article! I appreciate the detail and clear examples you provide for readers. It's really helpful for those of us who are just getting started with this topic. Keep up the good work!
Thank you, glad to know you found it helpful :)