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Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence: how to improve the efficiency of your sales network

Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence: how to improve the efficiency of your sales network

On 2nd and 3rd September 2020 Mapadore was a guest of the London Summit on Artificial Intelligence which was held entirely in digital form.

It was an opportunity to meet with leading companies that are taking advantage of technology to face the market challenges.

This annual summit aims to provide guidelines for all those companies that want to implement artificial intelligence in their processes in order to optimize costs and increase revenues.

In last month’s newsletter we covered the topics of CRM as a starting point and how digital experience management can be useful for you.

In this month’s newsletter we will address the following points:

  • Chatbot: another example of the practical application of artificial intelligence. 5 steps to maximize the potential of chatbots in the new normal
  • Your action plan: how to leverage AI in sales, marketing and CX

Chatbot: 5 steps to maximize your potential

Another example of practical application of artificial intelligence are chatbots, a topic discussed at the event “5 steps to maximize the potential of chatbots in the new normal” by Andy Peart, CMO for Artificial Solutions.

Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic has completely changed the world we knew and many companies have seen user requests for support on the site dramatically increase.

Chatbots are becoming the primary means for customers to get the help and support they need from public and private organizations.

However, designing such a tool is not always easy and should be seen as part of a larger digital transformation strategy, rather than treating it as a one-time solution that solves a single problem.

Specifically, this type of artificial intelligence is defined as “conversational” and was the subject of a recent article by MIT “The pandemic is emptying call centers, chatbots are coming”.

Conversational AI is revolutionizing business processes and according to strategic consulting firm Gartner, 25% of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual assistance technology by the end of the year.

This allows companies to face the high volume of support requests from users and to provide a good user experience, which is now essential to avoid being put out of the market.

During the event, the speaker provided five essential key steps for a successful implementation of chatbots with artificial intelligence.

The five steps are as follows:

  1. Make the chatbot look like humans. People nowadays expect to talk to technology as if they were talking to another human being. Therefore, it’s essential that the chatbot is similar to a human conversation;
  2. Don’t experiment on your customers. Using your customers to experiment with this technology could be the wrong choice. Nowadays, in fact, if users do not have a good user experience, they quickly change companies and it is very difficult and expensive to take them back;
  3. Don’t compromise your customer data. Personal data is something very valuable and its protection is subject to international standards. Compromising their security would mean losing the trust of your users and ending up under the crosshairs of justice;
  4. Clear business strategy. Before implementing a chatbot on your site, you must have a clear understanding of the corporate objectives and strategy in order to place the tool in a broader project of change;
  5. Choose a scalable platform. Scalability is the key to the success of today’s businesses. You cannot think of using a tool that is not scalable because otherwise you would have a drastic increase in the costs of managing requests.

As we have seen, artificial intelligence is the key to addressing the business challenges of the future and already today it is permeating many areas of our lives.

But how is it possible to implement a corporate AI strategy in the area of ​​sales & marketing?

Your action plan: how to exploit artificial intelligence in sales and marketing

This topic was covered at the event “Your Action Plan: How to Harness Artificial Intelligence in Sales, Marketing and CX” by Katie King, a member of the UK AI taskforce.

During the event, the speaker illustrated her action plan to understand how to implement artificial intelligence:

  1. Identify the problems to be solved
  2. Understanding when to use artificial intelligence
  3. Develop a plan to implement it: optimize operations and improve efficiency
  4. Measure your ROI

Let’s start by explaining the first point, namely the identification of the problems to be solved.

The speaker advises you to prepare a list of problems you encounter within your company and next to note how artificial intelligence could solve them.

Some practical examples were presented during the event:

  • Content delivery: The AI ​​can scan your site / library of content and can organize, categorize and offer the right content, the right offer and the right pages to every user who interacts with your company;
  • Lead scoring: Artificial intelligence can help you prioritize your leads in real time by giving them a score that is based on the degree of interaction with your company. Lead scoring is one of Mapadore’s features, if you want to learn more about the topic, we invite you to watch the free webinar on this page.
  • Improvement of communication. AI is capable of transforming large volumes of data into valuable insights that can help you segment your user base and find people similar to your current customers.

The next step is to understand when it is appropriate to implement AI and when not.

To do this, of course, you must take into account the type of process you want to automate with AI.

The goal is to automate all routine activities that do not bring added value to your customers and your company.

After that, once the points where artificial intelligence can be introduced have been identified, the next step is to develop a step-by-step process to integrate it into that specific business area.

Some of the possible activities are:

  • Use lead scoring to prioritize prospects who are most likely to convert
  • Automatically adapt the journey for each potential customer
  • Recommend to your potential customers the best product and offer for them
  • Predict customer behavior. During the event, the speaker gave the example of a Japanese restaurant that with the use of AI is able to predict the number of seats also analyzing the data on climate and tourism with an accuracy of 95 %

The last step is to measure the ROI of the AI ​​implementation. To do this you have to take into account several factors, which are not only numerical:

  • The cost savings and additional revenues you have encountered;
  • Any drop in expenses in other business areas
  • The reduction of “inattention” errors
  • An increase in customer satisfaction

If you want to better understand how to implement artificial intelligence and a tool like Mapadore within your company, contact one of our consultants by clicking here.