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Field of Dreams

For centuries, companies have been trying to refine their sales and support funnels and trying to create more qualified sales opportunities or provide a higher level of support to their customers. In the 1990s, a tech revolution began.  Companies found a new way to “automate” the distribution of content and messages to market their company: corporate websites.  This solution would revolutionize how companies communicated with their potential customers.  The prevailing thought was, “if you build [a website], they will come.”  Sales will come pouring in so fast you won’t have time to count the money, all while taking a minimal toll on payroll. But have websites lived up to all the hype?

Let’s face the facts—it’s 2019.  A website that is easy on the eyes is important, but from a functional perspective, your website’s ability to drive sales or service customers is paramount.  In the name of creating a website that is as “functional” as possible, companies often unintentionally create a labyrinth of dozens tabs, categories, subcategories, links, and buttons to facilitate nearly anything the customer may want to see/do/learn.  Problem solved, right?  Infinite sales and perfect customer service are snowballing now that you’ve maximized functionality, right? WRONG!

Imagine a potential customer approaches a sales person you just hired. The sales person doesn’t say a word, but merely hands the customer a brochure of options and walks away.  How quick would you be to fire that salesperson?  Yet companies almost invariably set up a website as a tangled web of options. Hoping that potential customers will magically find what they are looking for. Worse yet,  praying that they will pick just the right option that leads to more sales or better customer service. Not likely!

Digital Conversations and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are pervasive

What if you could guide your potential customer through your website? Leading them to the info and CTAs that you want and which are best for your business. One of the primary tools companies have adopted to accomplish this is the use of chatbots and AI. These tools create and qualify potential leads in hundreds of industries, not just tech companies.  They are being used in the hospitality industry, retail, B2B sales, and even universities.  (As a reliable rule of thumb, universities and other such institutions are typically sluggish to adopt any new concepts/ideas.  That says a lot about how useful they can be.)

The power of Chatbots and AI used in conjunction with a good website is easy to grasp.  Thousands of companies have begun creating bots to engage with site visitors in effective and meaningful ways.  Chatbots create a human-like experience to help you achieve your goals such as booking meetings, gaining email subscribers, or simply engaging in live chat. These bots are triggered by specific site visitor behaviors, such as the amount of time on the web page, scroll percentage, or a button clicked.

Using AI, these bots can interact with site visitors, respond to requests, and even hand qualified leads over to a sales team.  As the processes, copy, and methods used by your bots are refined and optimized, your website becomes more like what it was originally imagined to be– a sales and customer success tool that actually works! (Did I mention it works 24 hours per day, 365 days per year?)

Does it work?

ChatFunnels has worked with many companies to implement chatbot functionality on their individual web pages.  This is a consultative, data driven process by which we help companies optimize the frequency, quality and economic impact of their digital conversations.  As a recent example, an IT software company we work with implemented several “offline” bots—bots that interact with the site visitor in specific ways outside of business hours—on their website and has amplified the power of their website as a sales tool.

Did it work?  In the last 30 days alone, the number of “offline” bot-driven conversations with site visitors is 525.  These conversations not only resulted in information capture of 43 site visitors (8% conversion rate), but the bot booked 25 meetings with qualified candidates.  Remember that if this company had not implemented bots on their website, these site visitors would have been met with a generic website with hundreds of options to choose from. Instead, these potential leads were engaged by the bot in a targeted way that led to dozens of leads that would have been lost otherwise.

If this is merely a sample of what an “offline” chatbot can do for your website, imagine what you can do to amplify the power of your website during business hours! Live chat, account-based marketing for targeted accounts, and dozens of other use cases make chatbots an undeniable expander of the effectiveness of your website.  Thousands of companies are seeing this as a solution which gives them the edge in their industry.  Will your company be among the initial adopters who capitalize on service and revenue by using chatbots and AI, or will it be consigned to the masses who wish they would’ve adopted it early on?

Message us on LinkedIn to let us know what you think!