Beyond Customer Success: How Conversational AI Does More Than Chat

Analyzing data from your conversational AI can help you gain unexpected insights into your business operations and performance.

“Hi! Do you need help with anything?”

If you've ever visited a site and a friendly, personal assistant-like greeting popped up, you’ve encountered conversational AI. Countless organizations use these smart solutions, which are designed to keep curious browsers engaged and interested. Their primary purpose is to provide potential leads and customers with a better buying experience and journey, 24/7, no matter what time of day or night they reach out to a business.  

But conversational AI is much more than a sales and marketing tool that optimizes the lead nurturing process. It provides a plethora of benefits, cuts out redundancies, and maximizes the value of your existing programs. 

Beyond supercharging your lead conversion funnel by taking the burden off sales and marketing teams, a conversational AI solution can serve important business and strategy development needs. It can reveal where your organization is thriving, the areas in which you may need to devote additional resources, and how to adjust your operations accordingly.

You can leverage data from conversational AI to streamline your business operations, detect trends and patterns, and even preemptively plan ahead to mitigate issues before they occur. Here’s how to make the most of your Conversational AI to make smarter, data-backed decisions.

What Is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI refers to a set of tools that respond to customers in a human-like way that feels far more natural than a canned, automatic response. Utilizing NLP (natural language processing) and machine learning, this advanced AI understands how to speak to customers for the best possible outcomes, and learns based on conversations with real people.

Chatbots, virtual assistants, and automated email communications may all be included within an organization’s conversational AI arsenal. These solutions are constantly evolving and aren’t static - their responses change, based on ongoing conversations with customers, in order to remain aligned with shifting consumer preferences.

Why Conversational AI Matters for Your Business Success

 From optimizing your sales funnel to easing the burden on marketers and SDRs, and helping you understand what’s working and what’s not in your business, here’s how conversational AI positively impacts outcomes for your organization.

Streamlining the Sales Funnel

With customer expectations higher than ever, experience as a service is a key differentiator in a highly competitive landscape. In a crowded marketplace, conversational AI provides customers with highly personalized, super quick responses to their queries that make them feel heard by a business.  

For your employees, conversational AI takes the guesswork and monotony out of repetitive, yet time-consuming tasks, like following up, providing basic information about a business, or scheduling a time for a call or a demo. By shifting the burden for these initial actions to an automated solution, sales and marketing teams are able to devote their focus to the bigger picture, more lucrative tasks.

These solutions are able to gauge which leads are hot and pass those along to a salesperson immediately. Conversely, they can accurately rank and qualify leads, meaning that sales teams don’t have to wade through leads that are unlikely to convert—those inquiries will be automatically shifted down lower on the priority list.

The filtering and sorting process in the qualification phase means that teams can work more efficiently and expend their time and energy on leads that are a better opportunity for the business.

Supercharging Your Lead Conversion Process

 Speed is one of the most critical factors for making a sale. And in an instant-gratification, a digital-first world in which consumers expect lightning-fast responses to their queries, no matter what time of day or night they reach out to a business, conversational AI delivers quick answers to keep leads interested. It strengthens your brand’s connection with potential customers.

 Unlike human sales reps, AI-driven virtual sales assistants, don’t get discouraged or frustrated with leads that are failing to blossom. A virtual sales assistant, powered by conversational AI knows how to wisely schedule follow-ups for maximum impact, when to circle back to cold leads at the right time, and never drop the ball.

Conversational AI solutions will never replace real-life salespeople, and the sales process will always require a human touch. But these solutions speed up the sales cycle and close the gaps at points where reps may lose touch, giving your lead nurturing process an expertly timed boost that can make the difference between losing a lead and converting to a sale.

How to Creatively Leverage Conversational AI for Your Business

Detecting trends and patterns with conversational AI can help you gain both a leg up on your competition, as well as enable you to plan and execute strategies that deliver value to your potential and existing clients.

Message Volume Tells a Story

Let’s say you’re planning to roll out a new feature or product launch. This is the perfect time to use your conversational AI to gauge successes and challenges around milestone events. Note if there’s an influx of inquiries from leads eager to schedule a demo, or if existing customers are now swarming your site looking for troubleshooting and technical support.

But even when there’s no upcoming event that would trigger an uptick in interest or requests for technical help, you can utilize information from your conversational AI to craft a marketing strategy that fits your audience’s unique preferences and behavior. Notice that inbound queries from customers peak at a specific time or day of the week? Tailor your advertising and campaigns to ride that momentum.

You can also analyze your conversational AI data to determine what the most common complaints or sore spots are in terms of your UX, and make changes to your product or site accordingly. Being responsive to and even preemptively anticipating customers’ needs is a critical step to providing the stellar customer experience that will set your brand apart from the pack.

Trim Down Your Marketing Stack

Redundancies in your martech stack could be costing your organization tens of thousands of dollars—or even more—annually. Many businesses use tools or solutions with overlapping benefits when they could instead downsize their subscriptions and licenses and use one program that covers all or most of their bases.

A number of sales and marketing solutions that are taking up a significant portion of your tech budget can be consolidated or eliminated. Consider auditing your existing stack to determine if you are using separate programs for each phase of the buyer’s journey.

Are your outreach, scheduling, follow-ups, and lead regeneration efforts all siloed into different solutions? If so, you should consider a platform that has you covered from start to finish.

If you’d like to learn more about how conversational AI in its form of an intelligent virtual assistant can help your company boost customer experience, get in touch with us. We’d love to show you more about how you can utilize conversational AI to give your business a unique competitive advantage.