Chatbots – The new frontier in Artificial Intelligence driven Sales

May 09, 2018 Sneha Shankar Naikwadi

Imagine on a weekend, a customer decides to buy a laptop; he has made a list of all features and technical specifications required. Next, he visits your website to check prices, but its Saturday late evening and ends up at a Contact form telling “we will get back you soon”. 

Sounds disappointing?

The customer was in a mindset to buy the product but now is left with no option but wait.

Your sales team calls the customer on Monday after 48 hours, by which time the customer has already visited your competitor’s website that responded to him quickly and a demo of the product was also given.

This example above shows how lead response time is so critical in the world of sales and marketing.

Typically a marketing team generates leads and the sales team takes it further from cold call, lead nurturing to closing the deal. Often in times of disaster, marketing blames sales of not following up leads quickly and in turn, sales blames marketing for not generating good leads in the first place.

79% of marketing leads never convert into sales, says a research study from HubSpot.

Do you see the gap?

Another study states that the ideal lead response time is 5 minutes and a400% decrease in odds of qualifying a lead, if contacted in 10 minutes vs. 5 minutes.

So how do you make sure you are available round the clock? Deploy more sales personnel? Make sure they are alert all time to respond quickly?

Answer is NO.

The solution to all of the above problems is Artificial Intelligence (AI).

AI can empower Sales & Marketing in many ways, one of it is AI enabled Chatbots.

Gone are the days of contact forms, calls and emails for business. It’s the era of messaging now. There are millions of users active on messaging apps every month and as Niko Bonatsos rightly said “~90% of our time on mobile is spent on email and messaging platforms. I would love to back teams that build stuff for places where the consumers hang out!

What are Chatbots?

Chatbots are conventionally conversational agents. And, adding artificial intelligence has had a major impact on the way chatbots are used in recent times. Today they are so versatile that you can automate many of your business processes via AI enabled chatbots.

What can a chatbot do for you?

chatbot
  • Chatbots can give personalized responses to your leads
  • They can engage your customers longer with intent specific content provision
  • They are available 24/7, with no need for human intervention for their running
  • They have access to virtually infinite audience as they can be integrated across multiple messaging apps

As per Forbes, 53% of marketers plan to adopt AI in the next two years & 65% of B2B buyers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t make an effort to personalize its communications to them.

So are you lagging behind the race?

No worries, we are here to help your business flourish better by adding AI to your products.

Sneha Shankar Naikwadi

Sneha is passionate Microsoft full stack programmer at iNatrix, with experience in public sector & industrial automation domains. A music lover who can be seen always with her earphones plugged in, whether its coding or cooking.