How do you talk to your prospective clients? If you’re able to pick up the phone and speak one-on-one to each and every one of them, more power to you! But this is rarely a realistic approach to client communications. So, how do the rest of us balance existing clients, caseloads, and new relationships with prospects? The answer is social media.
Social media plays an important role in creating meaningful connections with clients. Even if you could take a phone call from every single client, fewer people are relying on email and phone calls to get support from companies. Customers — both existing and prospective clients — turn to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to contact businesses, and they want replies FAST!
How fast is fast? According to research, 32% of customers expect a response in 30 minutes or less. For businesses that ignore or neglect social media communications, the churn rate — when customers abandon a business — goes up 15%! Speed isn’t the only thing you have to worry about, you also need to consider the number of social communication streams at your disposal. There’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and, importantly for this article, WhatsApp.
I recently wrote about how immigration law firms should be using WhatsApp as a marketing channel, and followed up my article with a simple survey: Do you use WhatsApp for business? The responses were often just a simple “yes” or “no,” but there was one immigration lawyer who replied with exasperation: “Oh great, another client communication channel to monitor.”
And it was this comment that made me realize two really important points:
First, it’s that immigration lawyers want to communicate with clients and prospects across multiple channels and they realize the value in being “where the client is,” but the effort and frustration involved just feels like too much.
And second, that the solution to this frustrating problem was right in front of my nose, but I didn’t even realize it – my immigration chatbot startup YoTengo Bot.
What’s up with WhatsApp?
WhatsApp, that messaging app you use to text and chat with family and friends abroad, is available in more than 180 countries and in 60 different languages, and has a staggering two billion users worldwide. As an immigration law firm helping people from all over the world immigrate to the US, WhatsApp puts a massive global market of potential clients at your fingertips.
WhatsApp Business, the app’s business version, gives you the power to talk directly with your prospects and clients just like you would with your friends and family. Because of this direct communication capability, WhatsApp has the potential to become the most powerful customer engagement channel, particularly in the immigration industry. And that’s because its reach is global, its two billion users are highly engaged, and it often works well on all types of mobile and smart, which is great for dealing with customers around the world who are not overwhelmingly iPhone users.
So, connecting your law firm to WhatsApp Business allows you to communicate with individuals looking to move to the US in a way that’s almost unprecedented.
In theory, it’s exciting to have two billion potential clients at our fingertips, but in practice, it’s overwhelming to manage the many communication streams we use to connect with clients. Every day you log in to each individual account, check new messages and draft responses, follow up on old conversations, etc.
This process of managing each individual social media network is time-consuming and inefficient, but it’s possible to transform this tangled mess into a manageable marketing client communication channel. Here are two methods you can try to manage your multi-stream communications.
Three ways to manage your multiple communication streams
Would you feel as overwhelmed with social media if there was a way to centralize all communications in one location?
Here are three ways you can handle your multi-stream social media client communications:
1
Single email method. The first method of managing these streams is by creating a single email address for inbound leads. Rather than continue conversations with potential clients over Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. you’ll provide a special email address and prompt them to schedule a consultation using this email. Centralizing all inbound leads to one email address reduces the confusion of balancing many conversations over multiple social media networks. However, it does create a new hoop for potential clients to jump through.
Communications Platform as a Service. The second method of managing multiple social media streams is with the help of a Communications Platform as a Service, also known as a CPaaS. Companies that offer CPaaS give users real-time access to communication features such as videos, chats, or voice calls using APIs. Customers want to communicate with businesses using the channel of their choice, and CPaaS gives companies the power to control these multichannel communications. There are many CPaaS options on the market, including one by tech giant Amazon.
YoTengoBot: CPaaS + AI. Similar to CPaaS — but with more power — is YoTengoBot, a bilingual (English and Spanish) artificial intelligence-powered immigration chatbot that helps immigration lawyers connect and qualify inbound leads at scale. The most obvious benefit of relying on YoTengoBot, or any other chatbot, to handle social media communications is that it greatly decreases the need for human labor since it’s not you or someone in your firm replying to initial client, but instead a smart, automated system. But what YoTengoBot does that other chatbots can’t do, is centralize multiple social media streams into one interface.
Here’s what that means.
YoTengoBot can manage your multi-stream client communications
YoTengoBot responds instantly to clients on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger both in English and Spanish as mentioned above. But this isn’t your average customer service chatbot. YoTengoBot is powered by artificial intelligence and uses natural language processing, which means it understands text responses and isn’t limited to a set of pre-scripted answers. YoTengoBot can answer general questions, qualify a lead and schedule a consultation. Plus, with every conversation it has, it gets smarter and better at responding the next time around.
So how does YoTengoBot solve the multi-stream client communication problem? Basically, the bot pulls all of your firm’s Facebook and WhatsApp chats into one central administrative interface where multiple users can log in and manage communications.
So while each chat still exists in its original platform, as the user you can view and manage them all in one place, which means no more switching between Facebook messenger, WhatsApp business and other platforms to manage all those communications!
YoTengoBot users can also tag certain conversations to easily track and manage them and can even switch the chatbot on and off for specific conversations to jump in when there’s a need for some human interaction.
YoTengoBot is the future of multi-stream client communication for immigration law firms
YoTengoBot answers the question: how do I add a new marketing channel without overwhelming my immigration law firm? It’s tempting to avoid or ignore new or additional social media platforms because of the extra work it brings, but of course doing so can also hurt your law firm, or at least keep it from growing further.
Plus, building customer relationships on social media helps consumers feel connected to brands and helps brands to improve their bottom line. Social media is the perfect place to start building these special connections with your customers, and chatbots are a way for those consumers to actually connect with brands, including law firms, for more information or to engage their services.
From YoTengoBot’s AI-powered chat capabilities to its ability to centralize communications coming from multiple marketing channels, we’re building the future of immigration law firm marketing communication. Connecting YoTengoBot to your WhatsApp Business account and Facebook Messenger can be done quickly and has measurable results, and while chatbots can’t and won’t replace humans, they can offer potential clients the immediate customer service they need.
Want to see YoTengoBot in action?We’re launching a free version of the bot for a limited number of initial users, so shoot me an email if you want in!
