Chatbots: MarTech investments that work

November 22, 2019 Paul Lee

A few weeks ago, I posted a short piece on the success LeadFabric is realising for its customers using Drift. If you haven’t sensed it yet, we’re big fans of conversational marketing for a number of reasons – it’s quick to deploy, easy to scale, done right it creates quick results and measurable ROI. Ask yourself the same question about other martech platforms you have purchased recently and their impact on revenue conversion and engagement? Here’s a quick update.

To remind you, this particular case is for the B2B branch of a telecom services provider. We unfortunately can’t disclose who it is however the story is universal enough. You’ll catch my drift!

One thing about telco’s is that many of the service offerings are fairly transactional. This means the buying or sales cycle can be short. While their service offerings are not difficult to understand, Telcos have the habit of using all sorts of techniques to maximise their income. Bundling services is such a practice which is sometimes very confusing for a self-service type of buyer.

That was the case with our client. They were already using LIVE chat and telephone-based sales support for confused buyers. But they realised that the SOHO segment (e.g. one-man operations) of their audience doesn’t have the time to buy during office hours. They typically do their admin at night or during the evening. This is when live chat and telephone sales support is offline. So we explored and recommended DRIFT to..

  • Pick up sales opportunities outside of regular business hours.
  • Extend customer experience to a 24/24 service right after a major product overhaul.

CX yes…. Not many people have the patience figuring things out via what is written on a website. Especially when it’s about product selection. In this particular case, because the client had just redefined its bundle structure, the product configurator on the website wasn’t available. We tried to kill two birds with one stone and make the chat script, or playbook, a product configurator too.

To set the scene even further:

  1. We did not deploy the bot on web pages showing the highest traffic and intent – the usual place to start with chat. We went very focused and instead prioritised a SINGLE business page promoting ONE bundled offer.
  2. We wanted to build the business case first without spending too much energy on fine tuning the effort out of the gate. The results we got from the pilot were amazing!
  3. If your business is less transactional, then your return might not be as instant as our client is getting but you’ll see the point I’m making regardless.
  4. The average annual order value starts at €1K per annum but could also be in excess of €10K.
  5. We’ve not yet integrated with live chat which is a phase two.
  6. To re-affirm, it’s not deployed on pages showing the highest traffic and it’s operating out-of-hours!

The chatbot is designed to guide customers through the product offering, something the client originally expected the job of content to do but it wasn’t effective. This is where the human “conversation” is at its most effective.

Steps are in place to direct the visitor to a bundle or stand-alone offer, there are also steps for a self-guided option or for direct contact with sales. If the self-guided option is requested, a series of qualification questions and supplementary information are proposed from which a product recommendation is made. At this point of the conversation, the visitor can add the product to their shopping basket and complete the purchase on-line or, they can be passed to sales for contact during regular office hours. Oh, and it’s all done in local language. For privacy reasons I’m unable to divulge which language, but it’s not English!

"We project revenue of €175,000 for a single product captured at night during the weekends"

After just three weeks, we have captured 6 deals with an extra 10 opportunities pending. Assuming a close rate of 50% this could realise 11 deals. Over a 4-week period that’s 14.6 deals or 175 over the year. Assuming an average order value of €1,000 (it’s much higher for some of the more extensive bundles), that’s projected revenue of €175,000 captured at night during the weekends for a single product from a single page and assuming a steady conversion rate is maintained.

The customers investment with us is undisclosed, but I can say that ROI is a whopping 483% - wow! This will only improve over time as we optimise scripts, introduce integrations with MAP and BDR functions and expand the bot to other web locations, product lines and regions as we aim to do this at scale.

If you are using chatbots like Drift and not getting this level of return, let’s have a conversation. If you’re not using chatbots, what are you waiting for? Based on the above, it’s a no brainer and we’re only scratching the surface right now. LeadFabric is the premium partner for Drift in EMEA. We have a tried and tested deployment model that provides quick time-to-value. Click here for more details.

About the Author

Paul Lee

For over a decade, Paul has been supporting sales and marketing leaders across a variety business sectors to help them understand how their activity drives revenue and customer engagement for their businesses.

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