Are Conversational Forms Beating the Pants Off Conventional Webforms?
As digital continues to rewrite the rules of engagement across business verticals and markets, a new insight is emerging: businesses will need to become intelligent to thrive and grow in the coming years. In the future, “being digital” won’t be enough.
Companies will use artificial intelligence and other technologies to help them feel faster, take more informed decisions, become far more efficient, and craft more personalised and relevant experiences for both customers and employees. That’s why businesses have increasingly started peeking into user’s mind.
One of the first stepping stones to this future are conversational forms
Among the standard ways of getting user’s data is providing them a web form to fill information. But with the arrival of chatbots powered by conversational UI, collecting data for leads and getting feedback has become more sophisticated. Since conversation is natural to human and we are getting used to it day by day through messaging apps, it makes sense that interaction based on these conversation should turn into valuable information for generating leads. This is where conversational form comes into the picture.
What Is A Conversational Form?
In simple terms, a conversational form is a smart way of starting a conversation and turning them into forms. They take the visitors to a conversational journey based on some decision tree. In short, replacing input fields and drop-downs of a boring web form with logic driven chat can enable a visitor to use a specific website in a natural and relatable way. Just imagine you are visiting a car portal. The first thing that comes in front of you is the web form or the lead form asking you for all the details.
Now imagine instead of filling the entire form (may be containing 10–15 inputs) by clicking in each and every text box, you are giving all your information by conversing with a “conversational form”. Which one is the best way to provide information? Of course, the first one looks practical & we see it all in the action everyday however, second one surely can drive more engagement though sounds futuristic but game changing at the same time. I tell you, why?
Reasons Why Conversational Forms Will Replace Web Forms
We all have gone through dreaded experience of filling bank, insurance, property and mutual fund forms on location 😢
If you analyse, you will see one of the reasons behind the success of customer care executives is that they simplify the process or even tell you to only sign the document and rest they did all the filling.
Filling web forms create even more difficulty. You have to put all the mandatory inputs and even one column is missing or wrong the web page will either redirect you to the same page asking you to fill the entire form or at least prompts you to fill the required field again. This really frustrates the user at times and notable culprit for higher bounce rate. But conversational forms offers you whole new experience by mimicking human element in filling forms and driving a conversation to generate leads. So what are salient features of conversational forms or how they are a better way to funnel leads and interact with a customer online? Here are some reasons.
Statistics — How The Trend Is Changing
Contact and registration forms have always been the traditional darling of any lead-building business. But this trend has seen a drastic change in the past few years.
According to Marketing charts, a survey conducted just a year ago shows that ‘contact us’ form got a miserable 1 percent conversion.
Conversational interfaces continues to rewrite the rules of engagement, designed specifically to drive better conversation with high engagement. Just ask Amtrak, whose use of conversational interface has generated $1 million in customer service email cost savings annually—a reported 8x return. Or soup ingredient maker Knorr, which saw a 50 percent increase in soup-stock cube consumption within just three months of launching a conversational interface that gives recipe support to mothers.
A Brand New Experience — Start Filling Forms With Interactivity
The main objective of any form is to ask a user for information which he or she might consider personal or sensitive. So trust here is a prerequisite. Imagine your form is talking to you and asking for information in a more meaningful way.
Suppose you are interacting with a conversational form regarding current offers on a specific make & model of the car let’s say Maruti Swift 2018. During the conversation it may ask you “Which colour do you like Red, White or Silver”? What type of engine do you prefer, petrol or diesel? Do you want to know the finance options on this car? Are you planning to book a test drive?
You may not know but the form is automatically filling in the background with user specific preferences as and when you are putting your inputs. Steadily, the conversation derives you to the point when it asks for the personal information. If you own a business, you are not only building trust of the customer but also making their process hassle free and generating qualified leads at the same time. So it’s like hitting two birds with one stone. So employing conversational forms to your website or brand gives it a human touch. There is a cherry on the top “Partial leads”. We will talk about it in the next section so hang in there.
Instant Validation — You Can’t Go Wrong!
‘Fill all the required fields’. If you have ever filled a form you would have definitely experienced this. You are filling a long piece of information carefully step by step and at the end you submit the button and nothing happens. You then scan through the form to correct the bunch of errors before the form will go through validation. It’s really a pain.
Now imagine this kind of form-filling going in a conversational manner. At each question, you are presented a bunch of options or rich media description to choose from. And since you are getting options, the answers are being validated at each step. You don’t have to go back for correcting any information you entered mistakenly. For example, the form ask you “What is your phone number” in case if the input is wrong it might ask back “Can you please confirm your phone number, it seems to be invalid”. In short, the form continues asking questions based on user preferences and at each step the validation is instant.
What if someone leaves the form in the middle of the conversation, then you have some partial information & self reported preferences in the form of partial leads which business can use smartly for re-marketing purposes later on. Bada Bing Bada Boom! 😃
Smart Opening — Personalise User Experience For Every Customer
Since conversational forms are dynamic in nature fine tuned by AI, they can smartly adjust the questions based on user input. For example, if a user is talking about finance, the forms prompt the user to select from multiple possible options from car, bike, home or property. If the user is only interested in a car finance, it removes the other options and continues the conversation based on the initial intent of the user.
So this conditional logic is displaying questions to the user based on the initial response and subsequent responses which makes the experience better and eventually, higher conversion rates. Secondly, instead of traditional checkboxes, drop-downs, etc. using rich graphical templates can make a conversation more interactive & friendly.
Are Conversational Forms Winning The Lead Conversion Game?
When it comes to ROI, conversational forms certainly have the potential to cut costs, increase revenue and improve engagement. As the use of conversational forms accelerates and becomes more pervasive over the next few years, their effectiveness will hinge on how well companies are integrating such conversational forms into their user journeys. However, we assume migrating from a conventional web form to more sophisticated conversational one is a huge step for every business and need extreme expertise to get it done in a right way. Thinking to implement it we can better assist you, say hello to makerobos …
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