Chatbot leads are qualified leads
The lifeblood of any organization is customer leads and converting them into paying customers. The perfect solution would naturally be to put your best agent onto every lead that comes into the business. However, those resources don't scale, and they need to sleep and take vacations. The next best thing is a chatbot. It scales, can handle queries out of hours, and can be continually improved to consistently provide better dialogues.
Marketers are always looking for quality lead generation through SEO, emails, and other social channels. As a destination point for much of that outreach, a chatbot has an 'open all hours' capacity to engage in conversation with customers. Communicating with relevant information and able to qualify the prospect's needs.
Websites and online and apps have all helped with 24x7 access for customers or potential customers. Taking this further with service chatbots helps turn people with general interest (a cold lead) into a prospect (a warm lead).
Conversational capability through digital channels provides a powerful boost for online marketing at the right instant. How many times have you been ready, willing, and able to buy shoes, a computer, phone, or service only to face unhelpful staff, queues, closed doors, incomplete answers, or just given a form to fill out? All of these missed opportunities turn a prospect into an unsatisfied customer. Perhaps even a customer for your competitor.
Sales and Marketing lead generation is now much more than cold calling and email marketing and becomes serving the customer in real-time. Instead of selling to people, organizations help them on their buying journey, working with them to fulfill their buying needs (latent or otherwise). As technology has changed, so is the engagement and sales process, and giving individuals better experiences drives return visits and excellent feedback.
As services and products become increasingly complex, the ability to communicate and explain to a prospect is a way to differentiate from your competitors and deliver better leads. Instant servicing of customer needs leads to better customer satisfaction and conversions. Not to be confused with quality over quantity but successful conversion ratios from being helpful and informative through the buying process. Swift and efficient qualification of leads is better for all parties, and companies shouldn't mind helping people get to a decision point quicker.
In terms of driving sales, increasing conversion of leads, driving quality leads, and personal interaction – chatbots are the perfect solutions to enable that process that scale. Customers can feel 'attended to' if they are understood and can query effectively through a conversation. A uniform chatbot approach can capitalize on those engagements in any volume and at any time.
The personal interaction creates informed buyers
Humans all have core needs, food, shelter, to be loved and understood. Individual engagement and conversation make it feel personal, builds trust, and helps with speed and efficiency on the buying journey.
The buying process usually encompasses several interactions to walk with a prospect to the point at which they are ready to make a purchase or decision. Ensuring that the customer not only obtains comprehensive information about the product or service's features, why it will work for them as well as the cost for delivering that, it also moves the customer relationship from suspect to prospect which is from embryonic to active and paying.
Increasingly, personal interaction does not have to be with a human being. Personalized apps, social media, and chatbots provide the opportunity for an instant connection with the customer and to move them along the sales process. Funnily enough, often because it is an automated attendant, people are often more open about probing at this stage as long as they see and feel progress to their expected outcome for them during the process.
Chatbots are providing the means of welcoming prospects and ensuring that customers are assisted and informed through the buying process. As each interaction is unique and with the right chatbot design, the conversations are personal.
The need to prompt, prod, and dextrously prise qualifying information from a prospect should help direct them to the right information at the time they need it. After a quick introduction and some gentle questions, the customer the chatbot can navigate the customer to a more meaningful endpoint.
Most importantly, the customer will be closer to making a decision and better informed through the process at their own pace.
Conversational understanding
Conversational understanding by your chatbot will help solve the customer's problem. Chatbots can process, and react to human language based on their ability to understand the user's utterance and act on it effectively, utterance understanding and variance are essential to excellent service.
The first critical choice in building a chatbot is selecting the chatbot platform provider. The second is understanding where your language training data is going to come from.
The right level of chatbot interaction
Note of course that If you implement a too basic a chatbot you won't be able to save your customers time and effort and you may be unsuccessful in pulling through chatbot generated leads. In fact a poorly executed service can cause damage to your brand, sales and marketing pipeline.
So you should think through the complete flow of actions that a customer might need while interacting with a customer service/sales representative, this flow should be able to be done by the customer while using your chatbot. To enable that conversation, an effective chatbot requires a decent to massive amount of training data in order to quickly solve user inquiries without human intervention – depdning at wht stag you are putting the service elive – proof of concept/limited safe users, internal teams through to general release.
Most times the primary bottleneck in chatbot development is obtaining realistic, task-oriented dialog data to train a chatbot.
The bottom line is that a chatbot needs to understand what the prospect Is saying and asking. Utterances (what the customer types or says) and understanding them in a chatbot setting will be the key to success, its just using chatbot helps you do it in a quality way in addition to and on success before they contact office staff, out of hours without limitation to scale. Out of hours quality lead generation through this immediacy is a highly valuable tool in the lead generation pipeline.
Here a prospect is semi interested but doesn't become a customer then the next best thing is them being happy to stay in touch, again utterance understanding is key and the benefit are a weighted funnel. Yesterdays leads may be tomorrows customers. Marketing activites work hard to get folks to your website in the first place leveraging SEO, Ad spend, referrals, customer references and links back from news, blogs , reviews and other sites just to get people to the front door.
Immediacy of answers during exploration has never been more important, people wants information, services and products on demand.
A Converstion actively welcomes prospects and ensure both parties get something through the interaction and because it is an automated attendant people are often more open about probing funnily enough at this stage as long s the see and feel progress to their expected outcome for them during the process.
Often bonuses or rewarded, sales, customer service, support always seek out warm leads as they have a greter probability of making it over to the customer line. A permant chatbot here provides scale, out of hours and additionl in hour support and or can simply front end all initial interactions to ensure both prties are on the same page and redy for the next step qualified more on both sides.
Customer service representatives want to deal with individual customer enquiries, take time for them and not always answer the same questions in orer to ty motivsted, engaueg and groing themselves in knowledge, skills and career or pay. The integration of a chatbot act as an additional worker who takes over the repetitive requests at scale, often where questions and answers are uniform time and again is an easy first step to implement.
Marketing teams and the business can often track the cost per acquisition of getting someboy to the front door – be that a website, chatbot, shop, other. The cost and success per interaction using a chatbot can also provide another clear measurable end validation on ROI from the implementation to lead pipeline and then onto conversion.
With the help of this lower level of artificial intelligence, a chatbot can find out what the prospective customer needs through a predefined process. For example, if the user is looking for a suitable broadband plan, first general and then increasingly specific questions can be used to classify the user into the correct contract category. At the end of the process, the potential customer is presented with information about a broadband contract that is specifically tailored to his or her requirements and budget adding personal value by removing search process around a website and preparing the prospect for actioning the contract or more complex questions where customer service can now take over and convert the hot lead.
Conclusion
The use of chatbots for lead generation is valuable and versatile solution to support the marketing, sales and customer service teams, allowing them to focus on more complex and often more fruitful conversations. Repetitive and inefficient tasks are best handled automatically by the chatbot and potential customers come into contact with humans as real hot leads, ensuring great conversion percentages to customers.