Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a buzzword in the industry and is often related mostly to chatbots. While that’s fair, the truth is that Conversational AI goes way beyond chatbots and can play a big role in not just engaging with customers on websites and social media pages, but can also be integrated into every communication touchpoint for customers.
How Conversational AI works
Herein lies the irony – Conversational AI is AI that makes us sound more human! Conversational AI is the use of artificial intelligence so that businesses can have a more human conversation with customers instead of perhaps reading FAQs or waiting to be connected to a customer support executive over the phone. Conversational AI uses NLP or natural language processing and AI algorithms to understand the language and the question or intent of the user, and based on certain keywords or phrases, responds to the user in a language that he or she understands. It sounds simple enough but within it is the secret to have humanlike conversations in real-time and at scale.
So…How Conversational AI can play a role in enabling sales?
Both sales and marketing can benefit from the use of Conversational AI. If used correctly, it can empower both teams to work together for the customer. Here are a few simple ways this technology can enable sales:
- Better understanding of the customer: A Twilio survey found that 90% of consumers want to communicate with businesses through messaging. This tells us that people want to have conversations instead of viewing information passively through a webform or landing page. This also tells us that with Conversational AI comes the massive opportunity to learn more and more about customers in a way that was never possible before. This vast amount of data gives both sales and marketing insights into customers’ challenges, their highs and lows, and can impact anything from the messaging strategy to the sales strategy. These interactions are also a great way to create informed sales enablement tools that can be used by sales reps to convert.
- Better lead qualification: One of the key drivers of conflict between sales and marketing teams is the definition of leads. While most automation tools have the capability to assign lead scores to users, Conversational AI can be programmed to only pass on qualified leads to sales. In fact, their capability to learn more about users can actually help define a lead in a more efficient way.
- Conversational sales and marketing: Chatbots might be the most popular representation of Conversational AI as we know it, but its use does not end there. Several tools allow the use of Conversational AI for sales conversations via email, SMSs and messaging apps. Often termed, ‘AI Sales Assistants’, it allows sales reps to scale their outreach in a strategic manner. Studies show that 63% sales reps give up after contacting a lead one or two times. These AI assistants are a great way to keep a lead engaged in a professional, prompt, and humanlike manner with little manual effort. Moreover, through their interactions (which can be at scale), they can identify hot leads from cold ones and pass those on to salespeople.
Conversational Marketing employs the benefits of bots to learn more about the customer and use that information to customize messaging and offerings for them. Marketers love personalization – and why shouldn’t they? Nothing converts better than a one-on-one, highly personalized experience. Conversational AI-based chatbots and emerging speech-enabled and video-enabled conversational bots are great for facilitating personalized interactions at scale. Statistics show that chatbots increase lead engagement rate by 150-800%. Machine Learning allows marketers to continue learning more about the customer, so that marketing campaigns are perfectly tailored to your buyer personas. - Providing a feedback loop: When interacting with Conversational AI, customers are always speaking their mind about the product or service. After all, customers are three times more likely to offer feedback to bots. This is great, honest feedback that can help not only sales and marketing but also the product team to solve more problems for the customer and is a healthy way to maintain a company culture focused on customer satisfaction.
A business powered by Conversational AI is a conducive home to innovation focused on the needs of the customer. It also depicts a company-wide culture of using AI to bind the operations of various departments together. Conversational AI needs to be looked at as a holistic business strategy that cuts across departments so that all efforts are directed towards finding and converting the right leads, in less time.