How Can NLP Redefine Your Direct Selling CX Strategy?

Have you ever imagined a time when computers can read your customers ‘mind’, not ‘messages’, their mind in the literal sense of the word? I never did but did hope if it could.

And now the time has revealed itself the possibilities of realizing your customer attitude, save that of shaking hands directly with them. God knows if that would turn up in another century!!!

Every business thrives on interpersonal relationships, especially direct selling. The cornerstone of business communication is knowing the customer, their needs, and concerns and addressing them appropriately through support and faster resolution. Virtual agents and chatbots provided customers with a personalized way of addressing their problems. The drawback however remained that the automated messages at times failed to strike straight on the customer queries.

Consumer attitude shifts and their shopping behaviors change in the course of time. When the trends change consumers expect organizations to change with them. The new dawn in the customer-centric business culture saw AI tapping its fullest potential to help companies figure out what their consumers are feeling about their products and business. AI gets it done through Natural Language Processing (NLP) which analyzes and deciphers the interaction between computers and humans, picking up on the nuances of syntactic and semantics of the language realm.

NLP — A must-have ingredient in your CX strategy

Customers have shown an affinity towards brands that provide outstanding customer experiences rather than the quality of their products or services. This group of wide and varied audience expects you to attend to them warmly and positively when they reach out. They are no more happy with automated messages from chatbots in turn expect a straight and faster resolution to their queries and concerns.

NLP is designed to pick and plow this side of your CX strategy, redefining and recreating fresher plans to entice your customers. NLP sifts the expressions of your customers through their reviews, ratings, queries, and complaints across different channels, and analyzes to the minute detail, word by word, tracking the customer sentiments and emotion that is displayed in their content. NLP relies on Machine Learning to implement the strategy. Statistical techniques using machine learning for developing algorithmic models also help data scientists train an algorithm to understand the sentiment based on large sets of data. This helps in fine-tuning the model to predict sentiments in a completely new sentence and context.

How does NLP rejuvenate your direct selling business?

Direct selling has it from the very beginning, getting to the customers and delivering the service experience to the doorsteps. Party plan, a subset of direct selling, is the most effective of all the customer-centric models established until now. The constantly evolving shopping trends with more and more consumers shifting online make it difficult for direct sellers to maintain that personal relationship in its entirety. Talking to them virtually does not deliver the same effect as talking to them in person. NLP adds more value to the convenience of the digital space by analyzing the sentiment and emotions of customers.

Sentiments are analyzed as positive, negative, and neutral, derived from the depth of the words used and emotions such as joy, anger, sadness, etc are derived in the exact same way with insights provided to companies about their customer sentiments. These subtle elements serve as a major contribution in defining your customer experience strategy. Speech-to-text technology will help your business thrive across borders with speech recognition becoming more accurate with various accents and modulations. This makes it easier for your company to establish business relationships around the globe without having to worry about providing the best customer experience. Chatbots and virtual agents powered by AI with Natural Language Processing have become even smarter in decoding the context and intent in the customer language than mere content interpretation.

Setting the change: The top benefits of employing NLP in your direct selling business

1. More composed content: Organizations will be able to oversee the content sent by its employees and salesforce. With unexpected allegations striking the industry through bogus and conflicting claims, NLP can sieve through the content sent and received in emails, ad banners, and other digital channels by your salesforce. Earning claims guidance and strict monitoring of your salesforce marketing methods can be done through the deployment of NLP on your direct selling platform to suit your company’s regulatory policies. Like for example, NLP can identify and block content that involves conflicting claims such as ‘get rich quicker’, ‘be your own boss’ and ‘be set for life’, etc from your platform to various channels by your salesforce.
2. Cordial customer interaction: Understanding customer concerns and moods are key to sculpting the right solution. Customer who is angry cannot be pacified with “Give us a moment. We’ll get back to you” type of responses. Deciphering their emotions will help companies and your frontline executives in dealing competently with your customers. NLP pecks out the sentiments and emotions of the customer about a particular product, service, or organization in general, and putting this to research will help organizations in designing more effective strategies to bring them back on board.
3. Empowered distributors: Minimizing the daily chores of your distributors will reduce disengagement and they can invest their time in higher-level tasks. AI accelerates business processes and streamlining them minimizes the unnecessary engagement of the workforce in repetitive tasks. NLP chatbots will make their tasks of retrieving data and information from multiple sources as quick as a wink. This would quench the irritation of skimming through files and using an outdated legacy system.
4. Easy on expenses: Operational efficiency reduces the costs involved. Deploying NLP relaxes the tight schedule of working on customer management and customer data but the quality of these tasks cannot be compromised either because customer-centricity is what takes a business forward especially one like direct selling. This AI counterpart helps businesses derive Customer LifeTime Value (CLTV) which is the revenue a customer generates during his period in the organization and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), the cost of acquiring a new customer. The end-to-end analysis of the proportion derived from these two factors - Customer LifeTime Value (CLTV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) - helps companies realize if the expenses they incur per customer are living up to their expectations.
5. Accelerated conversion rates: NLP solutions powered by machine learning optimize conversions and have proved to impact businesses with e-commerce more efficiently and effectively. The prevalent but outdated system of taking the customer through their shopping experience has moved way to walking with them, understanding their behaviors and preferences, and making highly personalized product recommendations. AI has revamped the concepts of cross-selling and upselling with superior and sophisticated product recommendations. NLP-based analysis of customer search behavior helps in devising appropriate marketing methods such as emails, newsletters, ad campaigns, and promotions.

Direct selling in general and network marketing, in particular, fought the imperfections of the pandemic era through one persistent strategy – customer-centric product culture – that’s the exact reason why the industry is over-scrutinizing the concept to evolve in 2021. NLP is expected to add fuel to the evolution of the industry to a customer-focused model.