Is your revenue team ready for what's next?
By Manoj Kokal
Website chat is one of the fastest-growing channels. And it’s easy to understand why. Customers appreciate quick and easy ways to engage with your brand. Similarly, businesses appreciate how website chat tools can act as a digital first-touch for online visitors.
Website chat can share helpful content, capture contact information, answer common questions, direct visitors to what they need, and handle simple support requests.
That’s the promise at least. Regrettably, many businesses and customers have encountered less than adequate experiences. What gives? Truth be told, website chat is only as effective as the technology powering it.
Let’s take a look at the spectrum of options available for website chat, why Conversica is the first fully AI-powered website chat solution, and a few industry-specific examples of how this technology leads to big benefits for businesses like yours.
Website chat is a rapidly evolving channel. What started as a tag-based FAQ lookup has advanced toward more sophisticated Natural-Language Processing (NLP) governance based on intent determination.
However, this level of sophistication is not evenly distributed. There are still lots of chatbots built upon scripted flows. This is ineffective for two reasons:
Conversation Experience (CX) design isn’t just an important part of the user experience anymore—now it’s a vital competitive (dis)advantage. If a visitor lands on your website looking for quick answers, chances are they are pursuing your competitors at the same time. Whichever brand can deliver a prompt, accurate, and helpful response to the contact has a better chance of closing the deal. So, if you’re leveraging website chat powered by an inefficient, easy-to-break bot, you are likely hurting yourself via subpar customer experiences.
Advances in artificial intelligence and the introduction of large language models over the last few years make it possible for website chat solutions to have an open-ended conversation on any topic.
Robust AI-powered website chat responds to even unexpected requests with natural, human-like dialogue that drives the conversation forward. This is a must-have in an ever-changing marketplace where real customers need answers to their questions. AI-powered website chat avoids the conversation roadblocks that trip up old-school chatbots. This means that customers experience the real conversations they expect.
At Conversica, we believe that scripting flows are obsolete. Our Revenue Digital Assistants™ (RDA) work with a fact-based corpus to create a model which understands facts related to the customer domain or business—and answers any questions based on those facts. For queries that are out of scope—i.e. that are not based on facts—we rely on state-of-the-art deep learning models like GPT3 to generate Natural Language Generation (NLG)-based answers to help with the conversation flow and steer users to the task at hand. Moreover, AI-powered Conversica RDA just needs a client-specific dataset to start working and return meaningful results. RDAs are self-learning and get smarter over time so they need low operational overhead to stay relevant.
All of this adds up to a really powerful website chat solution. A Revenue Digital Assistant is far more evolved than a rules-based chatbot. It’s powerfully human and serves as a digital “assistant” to the customer rather than just a piece of software performing a simple task. Our RDAs can handle a broad set of situations, and act independently simulating real human interaction.
A true, AI-powered website chat offers big benefits for almost any industry. But here are three specific examples.
Corporate: RDAs help corporate customers get answers to product-related questions, motivate downloads of whitepapers and other educational content, and schedule demos with hot leads looking to learn more. Better still, if a visitor shares their contact information before leaving the chat window, the RDA can continue asynchronous follow-up via email or SMS.
Sports: Sports fans are some of the most engaged customers around. Website chat powered by a Revenue Digital Assistant can handle out-of-scope questions like team stats, game schedules, season ticket information, and more. Scripted flows will fail these common interactions and escalate these engagements to a human in the loop. Conversica RDAs are not only able to answer these one-off questions—they can even bring the user back to the task and remind them to provide their info.
RDAs can send a link to the contact regarding season tickets—and since Conversica’s website chat saves the lead info with context, a follow-up email from the RDA can ensure that the user was able to complete their purchase or find out if the lead had any other questions.
Automotive Sales: Automotive customers run the gambit from well-informed buyers looking for a specific make, model, and trim with particular features all the way to prospective buyers looking for a ‘good family car.’ Conversica RDAs are perfect to handle the broad range of questions to support these different buyers. They browse through new vehicles and interact with the website chat to get more information about the dealership, hours of operation, and how to schedule a test drive. The RDA captures all this information, along with the visitor’s name, email, and phone number. A couple of days after the scheduled appointment, the RDA automatically sends an email follow-up asking about the experience. If the lead was not able to come for a test drive then the Digital Assistant urges her to reschedule. On the other hand, if she completed the test drive, then the Digital Assistant keeps the lead engaged and helps them answer any questions, and makes sure to loop the Sales Rep when needed to close the sale.
These are just a few examples of how an RDA-powered website chat handles real, human interactions.
Natural Language Understanding for website chat is extremely valuable. Not only does it give customers the quality experiences they crave, but it also collects the contact info businesses want while delivering human-like conversations that push toward revenue-generating events. They are well-suited for a variety of industries. And do not require the hand-holding that scripted flow chatbots require.
All in all, this is a welcomed leap in the evolution of website chat. And something every business should consider.
Want even more on this topic? Watch our on-demand webinar The Chatbot Is Dead: It’s Time to Modernize Your Online Experience.
This webinar examines old and new models of automating conversations with customers to drive revenue.
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