Ivan Ostojic, Chief Business Officer at Infobip catches up on the varied benefits chatbots can provide marketing teams in this short catch-up:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Ivan, tell us about your B2B journey and more about your role at Infobip… 

Thank you for having me!

I joined Infobip as chief business officer after 10 years at leading global consulting company McKinsey & Company, where I was a partner. During my tenure, I co-founded and co-led McKinsey´s Global Technology Council and McKinsey´s Innovation & New Business building (Leap) practices.

We’d love to dive into some of Infobip’s most recent innovations and learn more about the WhatsApp bot that enabled users to experience a different tennis tournament recently.

Our goal was to create an exceptional experience for tennis fans using channels they use to communicate with friends. We used this channel to create distinct conversational experience and interface. We the built ATP Umag Chatbot, enabling a conversational fan experience, on our chatbot-building platform Answers and WhatsApp Business, one of the most popular communication channels on our cloud communications platform. The ATP Umag Chatbot was a central location for tennis fans and Croatia Open Umag attendees to find details about players, the tournament, the schedule, draw, daily entertainment agenda, tickets and booking accommodation.

The engagement numbers on the chatbot were impressive:

• 86% engagement (engaged users are users who sent at least two messages)
• Chatbot visitors from 44 countries
• 3 average messages per session
• 02:45 average session duration

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How are you seeing newer trends such as this change how different industries/products enhance the overall user experience? Take us through some of the examples that have stood out for you from around the world.

We are seeing a massive movement to conversational user experience across industries. The ability to build a full customer journey in a customer´s preferred channel using messaging that is very intimate is big game changer for industries.

We have a great example that recently came out of Indonesia. Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, the most preferred digital telecommunications company of Indonesia, launched a new WhatsApp chatbot through Infobip’s chatbot-building platform, Answers, to reinvigorate interactions with millions of customers. In less than six months, the new chatbot has transformed the company’s customer service operations by increasing customer satisfaction by 40% and growing revenues directly attributable to WhatsApp by fivefold in the first year.

How can brands across industries drive more ROI on the whole with improved functions through chatbots/bots?

Chatbot or conversational experience is just a piece of the puzzle to build customer journeys. Brands should first think holistically about total experience. That should include thinking about how to connect customer interaction across all channels and across all employees with data about those customers and their prior interactions to drive the most impactful boost in customer satisfaction. Once a brand has strategy and is ready to use chatbots in a truly omnichannel way linked to other interactions, it can use such solutions to achieve as much as 400% of target sales and a 225% of sales boost.

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What are the four pieces of advice you would like to share with people in B2B marketing who are implementing new chatbot experiences/services across their websites or other channels?

1. Think holistically about total customer experience, combining data and touch points in one interaction continuum; avoid disconnected point solutions; and make customers feel there is continuum of interactions and its evolution across channels.
2. Think about the optimal channel to solve the problem your customer has. You need to tailor more of channel use to address the specific problem your customer is trying to solve. Chatbots are better for some and emails are better for other use cases.
3. Once you find the optimal channel for your customer use case, try to expand horizontally into an end-to-end customer journey (as much as possible) within that channel so customers can solve everything they need in the same channel. The ATP chatbot enabled tennis fans to do everything in WA from finding stats to buying tickets and finding accommodation.
4. With the magnitude of channels, content, etc., personalization of communication is getting a whole new meaning. There are many more degrees of complexity to manage — including more channels, more formats, more content, different use cases vs. channel — for your AI algorithms to optimize. This should be seamlessly embedded in the tech platform you use to execute this. Today, for many, this is a challenge.

What are your thoughts/predictions on the future of martech/bots? And how you feel this space will shape up and evolve further over the years?

I believe there will be three major trends:

1. A move to total experience and adding more channels to this experience i.e. connectedness of all channels including future channels like metaverse across full customer journey with all prior interactions, memory of those interactions. Customers will see all marketing interactions like continuum of conversation with a company as opposed to single touch points.
2. Emergence of conversational UI in martech. We already see advertising going into SMS and chat apps. I believe these will expand with functionalities to cover end-to-end customer journey, and we will see use cases in many industries.
3. We will see much more intelligent hyper automation. Booking of restaurants via call or chat will be done fully by AI-enabled bots. We will see the emergence of deep fake video bots or voice bots that take some simple tasks off the people. Today we already see that AI bots can write articles, talk to people, etc.

With all of this I believe we will see very distinct impacts for customers. Customer will be able to do more transactional tasks faster. Machines will leave much more time for meaningful human-to-human interactions, which will ultimately drive higher satisfaction for consumers and business impact for companies that endorse this.