AI has empowered intelligent chat beyond answering simple queries. See how they can super power your customer journey.

At the advent of automated chat agents, the mere novelty of it all was perhaps its greatest value. A pop-up window in the corner of a site that could answer common questions with a few canned responses quickly became a valuable way for enterprises to respond to FAQs and save a few phone calls from coming into their support channels.

But as the power of AI has advanced dramatically in recent years, so too has the power of conversational automation. No longer are chatbots just a novelty: they are an essential part of a business’s marketing strategy, sales funnel, and customer journey — not to mention an even-more powerful tool for customer support and retention.

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Here are a few ways a modern implementation of intelligent marketing can immediately increase your marketing conversions.

1) Take charge of your funnel

Moving prospective customers from their first flash of interest to an eventual sale is the primary objective of any marketing business function. Using conversational automation can make your marketing team’s job exponentially easier.

Traditional methods of contact forms, gated content, and the like require significant action from the user — and don’t necessarily gather the information required to appropriately understand your lead. However, an engaging, automated chat agent can quickly and automatically understand your visitor’s needs, ask follow-up questions, and provide them with exactly the information they require, all while collecting valuable data and information about a prospective buyer.

Conversational automation actively moves a visitor from passive purveyor to engaged consumer: they have what they’re looking for — and then some — leading to fewer customers lost and more customers found, faster.

2) Qualify your leads faster

Studies have shown that response time is essential in properly qualifying leads and moving them through the funnel. Waiting even an hour to respond to an inquiry can dramatically reduce your ability to connect with a prospect, so having an automated chatbot ready and able to understand where your visitors are in their journey is an incredibly powerful way to convert a higher percentage of prospective customers.

In the span of a quick chat conversation, your intelligent agent can answer key questions, provide useful content, and offer a product demo or calendar booking — or it can simply ascertain where that visitor is in their journey. Through sophisticated AI, your agent can know the right time to ask, can provide the right options for a response — and then can know the right time to hand the visitor off to a human for the next step.

3) Empower your sales & support reps

The human touch will always be necessary for closing a big sale or keeping your customers satisfied, but those personal interactions are costly and time-intensive. Imagine only having your sales and support reps on call when they need to be, and fully prepared for the exact needs of the prospective customer.

A conversational marketing solution can gather details from the prospect, warm them with the appropriate information they are seeking, answer questions, and then hand them off at just the right moment. Sophisticated machine learning algorithms can even continually improve the quality of conversations and the range of topics chat agents can cover. This way, your people are only working with the folks who really need them and are ready to be helped.

4) Gather real-time data and feedback

Along the same lines, a marketing and sales team that is supported by powerful data and analytics is something to behold. Yes, there are plenty of tools for understanding where and when visitors are lost from your page or where they’re spending the majority of their time — but imagine getting that information straight from the source, in real time. And then imagine gathering that data across all of your site’s conversations and interactions.

Chat agents give you a better chance to spot trends on the fly, as well as to understand what folks are asking and where they need help. Furthermore, built-in analytics platforms can help you easily track how specific pages and campaigns improve customer experience based on hard data and live insights.

5) Engage your visitors with a human touch

There’s a reason that retail stores don’t keep their sellers hidden behind a counter: customers want to be greeted, they want to know they’re in good hands, and they want to know that they can get help when they need it.

Conversational automation adds a human touch to browsing. AI allows you to personalize outreach — to recognize a repeat visitor, for instance, or to ask the right follow-up question to someone on a pricing page — and inject some energy into the online experience to keep leads engaged and active.

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