Category: Chat

Is customer success just a buzzword? A jazzed-up, rebranded version of customer service?

Or could it be something more?‍

What is customer success?

Customer success is all about making sure that your customers get exactly what they want while using your offerings. It revolves around the philosophy that you succeed only when your customers succeed. An effective customer success strategy could be the difference between having a high churn rate and having customers that turn into brand evangelists.

Essentially, customer success is exactly what it sounds like — setting your customers up for success.

How is customer success different from customer support?

Customer service tends to be reactive in nature. It’s all about resolving the customer issues after they arise. You solve their problems and hope to make them happy.

Customer success takes another approach. It’s proactive. Customer success teams try to solve problems before they even arise. Customer success involves constantly looking at feedback and data, hunting for ways to streamline the experience and help customers achieve their goals.

Customer service representatives help with customers only when they have questions or issues, but customer success teams work together with customers proactively to help them get the most out of their purchase.

While customer service tends to be transactional, customer success is all about building and nurturing relationships. Customer success involves understanding your customers’ organizational goals and KPIs, ensuring that your offerings help them exceed their goals.‍

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4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

Why is customer success important for your business?

Your business cannot succeed in the long run if you do not focus on helping your customers succeed. That would leave you with abysmal retention rates, forcing you to spend a ridiculous amount of time, money, and energy trying to acquire new customers, most of which would not stick around with your business for too long.

Customer success management is very effective at helping you retain customers for the long haul, but it even helps you earn new customers. When you make efforts to help them achieve their goals, your customers will turn into brand evangelists.

Research shows that only 1 in 26 customers who face issues tend to reach out and complain. And 91% of customers who don’t complain, simply leave. That means, without a proactive customer success strategy, without looking to resolve issues before they arise, you stand to lose most of your unhappy customers. Now you’re back to spending absurd amounts of money hunting for new customers when you could have got recurring revenues from your existing ones by focusing on customer success.‍

How does customer success influence your customer experience?

Customer success helps your business look at the customer experience and understand it better. It involves using data and feedback to find potential gaps in the customer experience and also looks for ways to improve the experience and create new peaks.

Essentially, customer success is a part of the overall customer experience, but it plays an important role in understanding the improving the overall customer experience.

How does customer success drive revenue for your business?

The most obvious way in which customer success helps drive revenue is by renewals. When you set your customers up for success and guide them, solving problems before they arise and help them get the most out of your offerings, they’re likely to stick around. If you have a subscription-based business, this means they won’t need to spend too much time figuring out whether renewing their subscription is worth the investment.

But that’s not the only way it helps you increase your revenue.

Your acquisition activities got them in the door, your customer success activities got them to stay, and they played a key role in getting your customers to trust you. This means that it paved the way for you to cross-sell and upsell them.

They already know that you will be there for them when they need help with these new solutions as well.

3 powerful customer success tips

1. Do not limit customer success to silos

Your customer success team should never alienate itself from other departments in your organization. They should work with all these departments, collaborating with the common goal of eliminating customer problems and helping them get the most out of your solution.

If yours is a SaaS company, this could involve working with the tech team to solve problems before they arise.

2. Create a well-defined customer success program

You can’t just wing it. You need to have a clearly thought-out plan and allocate dedicated resources if you can afford it.

But, you need to remember that planning it is not a one-and-done activity. As your business evolves, so should your customer success program.‍

3. Provide your customers with all the information they need

You know that most customers who face issues don’t reach out. A lot of them will try to solve the issue on their own — give them the resources they need to do that.

Create a knowledge base and maintain a blog that deals with common issues that might arise.

To make it even easier, create a chatbot that helps them find the information they need without having to navigate through your website. Or eliminate the effort involved in opening your website by deploying the bot on WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, and other channels which they spend time using.

TLDR

It is impossible for your business to succeed if you do not focus on helping your customers succeed. Set up a dedicated them that focuses on helping them make the most of your offering and eliminates issues before your customers even face them.

Deploy an intelligent bot that can answer all their questions in their language of choice, without making them wait at all.

Setting your customers up for success is a surefire way to increase customer loyalty and cause a massive spike in your customer lifetime value.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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What is customer success? Does it drive revenue for your business? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Chatbots are a common feature of modern websites. Many B2B businesses now understand the value that a chatbot offers, so there is a surge in demand for such solutions, especially in the marketing sector. According to industry research, about 15% of buyers have used a chatbot to communicate with a business in the past year.

However, when it comes to ABM or the Account-Based Marketing approach, the extent of engagement differs from what you strategize during other promotional campaigns. It is a customized approach to marketing that allows organizations to target specific profiles. These accounts can be top-level executives or prospects that may end up offering business to the organization.

The level of personalization is high, and it enables businesses to improve product awareness among leads, which can drive their purchasing decisions. In addition, the creative content created during the ABM campaigns is in sync with the targeted profiles’ specific pain points.

However, engaging targeted profiles through content is an excellent approach; you will have to predict the mindset of an account. This is where a chatbot can help you with AI-based algorithms that gather data from targeted profiles through questionnaires, analyze them, and offer insights into their specific issues.

So, let’s see how you can build a chatbot for your ABM campaigns? But before we do that let’s understand what a chatbot is?

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program or software that mimics human conversations through speech recognition and Natural Language Programming(NLP). It stimulates the interaction between humans and machines in a way that is close to what people do in routine life.

The conversational capabilities of chatbots can be leveraged by marketers to generate leads and conversions. In addition, you can use chatbots to engage your target audience for better data capture and use AI-based algorithms for content suggestions.

There are several use cases for chatbots for marketing automation also. For example, you can use chatbot forms that ask for specific information through data inputs. It merges the gamification approach with the human-to-human-like interactions to enable higher engagements. Such chatbot forms can help identify critical targets for your ABM campaigns and then suggest relative content to these profiles based on that data.

However, one of the essential elements of any chatbot is its architecture that allows organizations to execute their marketing logic for target profiles. So, let’s discover what the architecture of a chatbot for your ABM campaigns is.

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4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

How to Build a Chatbot for your ABM campaigns?

The first step towards building a chatbot is to decide on what is the use case? The pre-defined usability will ensure that you make a custom logic that aligns with your ABM goals.

Usability

It is like deciding exactly what you will expect from the chatbot to deliver? For example, if you are pitching the chatbot upfront for an ABM profile to have a conversation, problems similar to this can start by asking questions about pain points.

Once the profile specifies the pain point like scaling issues or database management problems, the chatbot will suggest the content of the projects conducted by your firm to solve similar issues for your clients. Irrespective of what are the pain points, chatbots can ask for data about the size of the profile’s organization.

These two factors– team’s size, and relevancy of pain points can qualify a lead to either go to a human for closing the deal or offer relevant content for the top of the funnel profiles. Apart from this, there are several possibilities for the usage of chatbots.

However, whether to build a chatbot or not for your ABM campaigns also depends on the budget and scale of the promotional program. But, before we discuss these aspects, let’s discover more about the chatbot architecture.

Architecture

A chatbot’s architecture establishes its functionality and response to the user’s request for data. Behind the scenes processes for chatbots deal with data access and executing the business logic during the interaction with an ABM profile.

Receiving the user request for data needs a medium like websites, applications, or even software. Once the data request is placed through voice, text, or other inputs, the Natural Language Understanding(NLU) model analyzes it to identify the user’s intent. Once the algorithm embedded in the chatbot architecture gains a high confidence score on the user’s intent, it has to decide the further course of interaction.

For example, an ABM profile related to a startup wants to know about different ways in which they can gain funding for their business? Once the chatbot identifies the intent of the profile, it retrieves the information from the database related to similar use cases within the organization, which can help promote your services and offer value to the profile.

At the same time, If the chatbot offers data from an external source, it uses API calls to create a data exchange between heterogeneous systems. The entire conversation is managed through dialogue management systems that save every data. Now that we have a basic idea of how a chatbot architecture functions, let’s look at some types of chatbots that you can leverage for your campaigns.

Types of Chatbots

There are several different types of chatbots that you can build for your ABM campaigns. Some of them are based on pure interactions while others form inputs and questionnaires. Understanding the types and functions of these chatbots is essential for their usability and the extent of budget you will need to build them.

#1. Contextual Type– It is a type of chatbot that leverages Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Algorithms try to identify the user’s intent and analyze them. They also save unique searches for each user for references.

#2. Keyword Type– It uses the concept of keyword search along with advanced NLP to power search-based interactions. The chatbot offers content suggestions based on the keywords that your ABM profiles may perform on different platforms.

#3. Voice-based– These are chatbots that receive user requests as voice inputs through smart devices, apps, or websites. Identify the exact intent through speech recognition and then leverage empirical patterns to offer data.

#4. Service-based– It uses the service request as input and asks several questions related to it. The type of service interacts with the user for data exchange and execution of specific tasks.

Conclusion

Chatbots can be the future of ABM marketing if executed well. However, you will need to work on several aspects of building such an intelligent solution like identifying profiles, offering the data on profiles to bot algorithms, and even creating an architecture that offers rich interactions. Thus, while it may seem easy on paper, you will need reliable solutions to counter the challenges of building a chatbot for marketing campaigns.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How to Build a Chatbot for Driving More Leads Through ABM campaigns? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to Enter an Unknown Terrain of Code

Writing every single line of code grounds up in every project you work on is reductio ad absurdum. Often times we need to look at and understand code written by our team members or some employees who no longer work on that project.

So if you are new to a project, here is what you could do before you ask one of your colleagues for assistance and try to increase your skills to debug existing code.

Read Product documentation

This is mostly the best place to start because this is where your customers start. For you to know a feature from end to end, this should give references or content that your customers actually go through to set up or use the feature. If you don’t find this, just imagine how a customer who doesn’t even have access to the code would be using the feature!‍

Try the feature in a lower environment

After you read up the documentation and you have some context, always try the feature yourself in a test account in one of the lower environments (something that’s your Continuous Integration environment). This will always give you the ability to be comfortable with some network calls and also with some interactions happening from the client which can help you kick start looking at code.

Go through the Technical Documentation

Every project ought to have some technical design document or some form of documentation for the feature that you are about to venture into. Going through the technical documentation will give you an idea of why a particular feature is developed in a particular way. It might answer some questions like `What were the design drivers, considerations, challenges?`, `What’s still to be done for the project?

Endpoint Identification

This section is only applicable if your application has HTTP (RESTful, GraphQL, SOAP, or such) Endpoints, Asynchronous Messaging Endpoint, Scheduler-based Endpoint, etc exposed that the client invokes to achieve a business functionality. Once you have the endpoint, you have to look for the endpoint pattern in the codebase of your application gateway (if you have a multi-tiered application) or the codebase of the microservices.

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1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

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3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

Unit test cases

This may seem weird to a few people, but unit test cases, if well written, can easily act as a guide to understand the business functionality and the output of a specific core business functionality for a given set of inputs

Specifically, as you write code and if you are debugging your application, always try to ensure that you have the call stack and its arguments written at each level. This gives an idea of which stack was invoked with what values to arguments. And NEVER PRESUME ANYTHING. One should make no presumptions around the code and start debugging every stack and every code within a method.

For example, let’s take a sample code where you are trying to start a group call with a participant where you first validate if a group call already exists with the participant, if not fetch the participant detail and then start group call.

‍

public GroupCallDTO startGroupCall(GroupCallRequest request) {

final GroupCall groupCall = getExistingGroupRequest(request.getRequestId());

if (groupCall != null && groupCall.alreadyExists()) {

log.error(“Group call already exists for request: {}”, request.getRequestId());

throw new GroupCallExistsException(“Group call already exists”);

}

final Optional<CallParticipant> optionalParticipant =

getParticipantDetails(request.getParticipantId());

if (!optionalParticipant.isPresent()) {

log.error(“Participant: {} does not exist”, request.getParticipantId);

throw new ParticipantException(“Participant does not exist”);

}

final CallParticipant participant = optionalParticipant.get();

final GroupCall groupCall = groupCallService.startGroupCall(participant);

return convertToDTO(groupCall);

}

‍

The code is a core logic and you would’ve gone through a lot of cases to understand each step. But what truly helps is something like

So always try to break the methods into smaller logical chunks based on the business workflow. Always understanding code based on business use-case mapping is easier.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How to Enter n Unknown Terrain Of Code was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chatbots take care of a significant portion of customers’ needs in today’s ultra-fast and competitive real estate market. When implemented on the website for any given company, these AI bots can answer prospect questions quickly and efficiently, help them search for properties to buy or rent with ease, and solve anything that may happen while browsing through listings. The best chatbots offer significant advantages to both the business owner and potential prospects: it reduces operational time spent by employees, which allows more deals to be closed faster.

Chatbots have been growing in popularity and for a good reason. With the rise of social media, people want information now, and they want it in an easy-to-digest form. Chatbots offer this type of information with the click of a button. In the process, these bots learn about the individual, their likes and dislikes, and when it is most convenient for them to be contacted. As a result, companies can provide a more personalized service that will increase customer satisfaction and interactivity on behalf of the company.

Millennials and Gen Z buyers now make up 44% of all American property buyers as of 2019.

With a younger demographic of homebuyers moving in, it has become even more important to implement these tech tools to make the buying process seamless and hassle-free. Millennials and Gen Z buyers now make up 44% of all American property buyers as of 2019. Today’s customer wants more convenience with fewer hassles when purchasing homes or commercial properties — and this is where new technologies come into play!

But before we dive too deep into how you can implement chatbots into your real estate business, let’s explore first what a chatbot is and a bit of the history of artificial intelligence.

What is a Chatbot, and where did they come from?

A Chatbot is a computer program that conducts conversations via auditory or textual methods. Chatbots are designed to simulate human conversation using artificial intelligence and conditional logic.

Believe it or not, the history of AI dates back from ancient Greece when philosophers like Aristotle discussed animism — how everything has some soul (or life force), whether animate or not — and believed that natural causes move the world within themselves rather than outside influences. This idea was later expanded by Islamic scholars who added “intelligence” to the definition and further discussed how this intelligence is present in everything around us.

Since antiquity, the concept of AI has existed, but it wasn’t until 1956 when a group of scientists at Dartmouth College led by John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence. Since then, advancements in text-based interactions with these types of bots have made them more usable for businesses today — genuine estate companies looking to make their customer service experience faster and easier!

As we know them today, the first chatbot was called Eliza, and its purpose was to psychotherapeutic treatment for people with psychological problems by pretending it had the same emotions as humans do. In today’s times, these bots have evolved into answering questions about products in an e-commerce setting or providing general customer service online through text messages/phone calls.

Although chatbots and the idea of artificial intelligence have been around for a very long time, it was not until the past five years or so that more businesses could put them to use. Companies like ManyChat, Chatfuel, and Mobile Monkey make it more attainable for companies to build out their own chat marketing solutions without knowing how to code.

While there is a bit of a learning curve for using these tools, there is so much education to help you accomplish your goals. Or, if you would prefer to have someone build them for you, I can help with that.

So how can chat automation help your real estate business?

The Benefits of Chatbots

Do you want your customers’ needs met 24/h a day? This is where chatbots come in.

Chatbot benefits from the business perspective:

• Reduced operational time for employees, which allows more deals to be closed faster
• Fewer customer service complaints
• Higher lead conversion rates

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1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

Chatbot benefits from the customer perspective:

• Instantaneous responses 24/h a day, every day of the week — no more “call us during office hours” or dealing with hold times while you’re trying to show your house on an open house. This also eliminates human error when working with other people in charge of answering phones and emails for messaging back and forth about customers’ questions!
• Less friction: Sometimes, customers are not quite ready to talk to a human. A chatbot can act as an in-between to help customers get the information they need while assisting agents in capturing important contact information and data about their needs.

Here are just some ways chatbots are transforming the real estate industry today:

Qualify Leads:

Chatbots can be used to gather information about leads that clients are providing. This is important because it enables agents to get a better idea of customer needs and preferences outside the context of a single sales process. This helps agents improve the effectiveness of their selling strategy and identify areas where they need to focus attention.

Here’s how it works:

Chatbots are trained to filter out unqualified leads for the sales and marketing teams. At each stage of the lead scoring process, chatbots ask questions that qualify leads or send them through to a human sales or marketing person to continue engaging with them. Any leads not qualified by the end of the questionnaire are then marked as invalid and not passed along.

According to a 2016 report by the Boston Consulting Group, companies using chatbot technology have seen a 26% increase in customer satisfaction scores and a 30% decrease in their cost per acquisition.

Companies using chatbot technology have seen a 26% increase in customer satisfaction scores and a 30% decrease in their cost per acquisition.

Automated appointment setting:

Getting prospects on a call or to a pre-listing appointment can be the difference between a new customer and a missed opportunity. Chatbots can help a real estate agent book more calls by having leads book directly inside the chat automation. Most chatbot builders integrate with scheduling services to eliminate friction and make it super easy to book appointments. Calendars are updated automatically, and everyone is kept in the loop.

According to a case study by chatbot platform Chatfuel, one of their clients saw an increase of 567% in appointments by adding a bot to their websites. They went from around 30 appointments a month to 200 appointments a month, all through the power of bots!

Booking more calls and listing appointments means more money in your pocket.

Keeps your customers engaged:

You can be on 24/h a day, every day of the week, with some help from a chatbot! Your customer will never have to wait for you or call back later if they need something because they know that when they contact you — you’ll always be there waiting for them. Plus, leveraging the power of AI to make your website stand out and get that sale you’ve always wanted. According to WebFX, 89% of people shop with a competitor after a poor online user experience, and 38% of people stop engaging with a website if it’s unattractive. A Chatbot helps make the user experience better by providing an automated and easy way to get the information and answers they need in real-time.

According to WebFX, 89% of people shop with a competitor after a poor online user experience

Captured offline leads:

People want convenient experiences everywhere, including buying homes, so using QR codes at live events, trade shows, open houses, etc., becomes crucial. Before this technology existed, people could show up interested but leave without giving any information about themselves (i.e., Name, email address). Nowadays, with QR code scanning and chatbots, you can capture their data in real-time!

QR codes are the most common form of dynamic data collection in mobile apps today. When the user scans a code with their camera, a URL is opened to display content and receive input from the user interactively. Nowadays, all mobile devices can scan a QR code by opening the native camera app and hovering over the code.

With the help of a chatbot, you can even make the experience more personalized by creating an interactive chat experience after they scan. Give valuable information about a home they are viewing, share video tours, and get their contact information, all with the help of a QR code.

The future of chatbots and ai

Chatbots are just one example of how artificial intelligence will continue to transform the world as we know it. The industry is advancing at a rapid pace. Real Estate agents who adopt technology to help their clients and grow their business will see success in an ever-competitive landscape.

Around 90% of the world’s data was only produced in the last two years

If it feels like technology is growing more rapidly by the second, you are not wrong. Although the internet was invented half a century ago, around 90% of the world’s data was only produced in the last two years. In the first half of 2017 alone, we created as much digital data as we did in all of the 20th century.

The exponential rise of both digital data and technology is a phenomenon we are experiencing firsthand, but it is also something that futurists have been predicting for decades. Everything from artificial intelligence to virtual reality to the blockchain is supposed to be on the brink of an explosive new phase of growth — some even say revolutionizing society as we know it. Innovative businesses will jump on and start adopting these fast-evolving technologies now or risk falling behind in the coming years.

Real Estate companies and agents who have started to utilize chatbots in their lead generation and marketing are already far ahead in the race to dominate the market.

Chatbots are a valuable tool for real estate agents and brokers to use to increase their sales. This article has gone over some of the reasons why chatbot technology is worth exploring and how it could be used in your business.

If you’re considering using an automated assistant like this on your website or social media channels, set up a call so I can help walk through all the steps with you and get you on the right path! I’ll save you time by taking care of the installation and setup while also teaching you more about how these bots work. Whether you need assistance making sense of what’s possible now or instead focusing on getting started right away, my team will provide one-on-one guidance every step of the way. www.StellarMediaMarketing.com

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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A Case for Chatbots for Real Estate Companies was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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