How to Use Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence to Scale Your Sales and Marketing
Adam Payne • Oct 24, 2021
MarketingPower of Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence
Adam:
Here we go. Yes, welcome we've got, Luke, Andrew, and me, discussing the ‘Marketing Power of Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence,’ and we have the leading guru and expert on this, which is Mr Andrew Thomas. So, it looks like me and Luke are probably just going to fire questions around this and the progression of it to Andrew.
I suppose one of the things for me is, whenever I've dealt with chatbots previously, you've always known they were a chatbot. And I think the progression now has gone at a rate of knots that it's completely different, and that's something I was going to ask you, is it the Artificial Intelligence
side that's helped within that or is there other stuff that has progressed it from a marketing point of view.
Andrew:
The Artificial Intelligence
has progressed considerably so it can pick up pretty much in a number of different ways of saying, ‘yes’, and ‘go on’, and ‘okay’, and all these sorts of things. So, it's much better at parsing and the number of languages that they can support is growing considerably. Not so much on the voice front, but on the chat front it is. Also, conversation designers are getting much better at writing conversational code so that they can offer randomizers, so you can have the same sentence said multiple different ways, you can then code it up, so it makes it sound more original. So, every time you go into it, you would know, “Oh it did sell it to me last time” and that obviously makes it slightly more realistic.
Adam:
Okay, so there is a way of it remembering the conversations it’s had.
Andrew:
Yeah, so now you've got storage so you can note when someone's visited and say, “Welcome back,” and you can pull up variables like postcodes, it can ask “is that still correct”, so you can reconfirm things.
There were a few things that got turned off for us in the UK and Europe because of GDPR, they're slowly undoing the screws on that and letting us back in again with lots of facilities, but in the meantime those platforms have been innovating, so it's a lot easier now to build the actual flows, conversate flows, add random elements
in, take people through different paths. It's a lot different to the voice space where if you want to ask people for information, because it's locked behind that platforms security walls like Amazon
or Google, you now have to do authentication, and ask them and provide a reason why they want to be granted permission, but on the Chatbot
front, you can just say, can I have your email address and we'll send you a brochure or send you an email, and they can say ‘yes’ straight in front of you. So, a lot of things are moving forward.
We have gone to 3D Visualisation
of a person’s chatbot. You can actually digitise yourself. You can then actually record your conversation, it will map your visual appearance, and you can have that pop up at the bottom of your website and start talking to people. I don’t think it’s on the social media yet, but those technologies are there. So, everything is moving forward.
Luke:
I think we'll stay away from that one. That might scare me again.
Adam:
I was just thinking there, if you see my face pop-up it would scare the living daylights out of you.
Andrew:
Well, it's an evolution of the deep fake technology so you must have seen Tom Cruise ‘Deep Fake,’ that's just a skin overlay mapping onto a person. So, if you then take that the next logical step is you programme the Artificial Intelligence
with how you say things, and it will just say those things but control a dummy Chatbot.
Adam:
And this is in already but not mainstream social media aspect.
Andrew:
No, it's designed primarily for pop up sales screens and things, so let's say you walk into a hotel, you might have a pop-up person who says, “Hi I'm reception” and have a chat conversation with you, because people want to see your face. I think there's a hotel in Japan where actually all the receptionists are robots. And they're all different, so there's a dinosaur robot and a robot shape robot and a crocodile shaped robot, it's hilarious. And they just check you in using what is effectively a chatbot. It’s amazing.
Adam:
I was just going to say what are some of the basics from where we are now with the Chatbots
and Artificial Intelligence
for people that wanted to go into it, because I imagine some issues are going to around GDPR, that probably is in the back of their minds, and how do I get around that, might be what worthwhile explain.
Andrew:
If you're looking at Facebook Messenger Chatbots
and Instagram Chatbots. You’ve got a couple of things, there is a 23-hour window rolling. If someone's started talking to you on the chatbot, you've got 23 hours to continue that conversation should it stop. After that point they won't allow you just to go back and randomly spam that person’s inbox. You can do a broadcast but that has to have a reason behind it so, a broadcast is like a newsletter, where you can say, “Hey, we're doing this.” “Here's a special offer.” Then they can re-engage with you. But once you're into that 23-hour rolling cycle you can have conversations and a lot of bot coders will put something in, almost on the 23rd hour just to say, “Hey, did you read that”, and then they start the conversation, they'll say, “No, I haven't got around to it yet”. Bang, you're on to another 23 hours, so you can carry the conversation on.
Adam:
Is that something that you would recommend doing, you know, if you had gone down that conversation into that 23rd hour?
Andrew:
It depends on what you're trying to achieve, Instagram’s
exploding with the chatbot at the moment, since the 16th of April when any business account can have one. They have allowed you to start up and activate chatbot on someone mentioning your brand. So, somebody mentions your brand, and it triggers your chatbot and you say, “thanks for mentioning my brand, would you like to have a £10 discount voucher for our websites?”, and you drop that into the mailbox. But because they've mentioned your brand and it's a Friday night, they might not then look at it until Saturday morning, or Saturday afternoon, because nobody lives on social media in the business world. Then they might go, “oh thanks, I'll have a look,” but of course it goes on to Sunday they don't have a look, on the Monday morning in small hours, you could say, “Have you had a look at what you could spend your voucher on?.” You’ve carried the conversation on, so that's great! but yes If you've already had a conversation, they've requested a brochure, they want to set up a booking for a consultation, there would be no reason than to go back within 23-hour window. The only thing it does allow is if you booked and purchase something, you could go back to them and say, “Oh, that booking has been confirmed,” “you are good to have a conference call at this point,” or “yes your product is on its way.” “Yes, your tickets have been purchased and we’ve actually we put them into the post,” sort of thing. So, it's wide open at the moment for those corporations.
Luke:
Couple of questions. First one is, how do you see them being used to sort of help people and businesses grow their audience? Is there going to be options within chatbots
to follow a page once someone's connected or to ensure that people are liking the latest photos for example, I think the brand example you have just given there about notifying people once they mentioned your brand, is an intriguing one, to say the least it might be a few possibilities with that down the line. But from the first question: How would you see businesses really using that to grow their following on social media?
Andrew:
Okay, so there's a number of different ways that people can start a conversation with you, it varies between Facebook
and Instagram. Facebook
allows you to do comments on messages and comments on adverts. It has some sort of conversation starters and things like that. On Instagram, they put a certain collection of things together, so we can send you a message, it starts up a chatbot, or somebody types a keyword. They can comment on a post, they can comment on a story, they can click on an advert, just mentioning your brand, they can then click on a link, they can start a conversation where it just says, speak to this brand.
So, there's lots of different ways you can interact, I suppose, the natural thing is you're starting to interact more with your customers, people will follow you more automatically. You just have to put out really good content, and people are finding it's 50% useful stuff to 50% of offers, you know ‘the buy my stuff’ type posts, but 50/50 works really well when you put them out like that and then start having the conversations people, you're offering, personalised one to one conversation in their inbox. The open rates are ridiculous. So, the following happens automatically, because if they've just been given a voucher, because they mentioned your brand and they see the value.
I mean you can deep link into various things now, so if you wanted you could send them down into an app that they have on their phone that's your particular product, you can start doing things like that. We are still on the boundaries of conversational converse, people are not used to having lots of conversations, simultaneously. Chatbots
can handle that straight away, so you instantly have, ‘Wow, how did this person speak to me and all these other people’ because you feed in the replies. Let’s take an example.
You put out an advert, saying, “buy my widget.” “If you want 10% off, comment ‘offer’.” They put ‘offer’ in, you immediately respond with a message that saying, “hey great, check your inbox.” They go to their inbox there's chatbot waiting they're going, “Oh, here's your 10% Voucher.” “What sort of things are you looking for?” You can start to segment your market, you grab their email address, might even grab their business name, their first name. You could ask for their first name, cos it might not be their username, you pull that across into your CRM system
or your Google Sheets
or whatever you want to store it in. So, then you've got them in your ecosystem. And then you can start to push out stuff. So naturally they'll start to follow you more.
Luke:
My next question was about the Customer Value Journey. And you’ve just really touched on it there basically. You know at what points from each stage is this going to be useful, and I think we just answered it so the initial one would be a social media post, a comment on the post will then start the conversation, the Chatbot
can then be structured to direct people to different areas; such as the website, social media
profile, different social media
profile or an app. So, it looks like that’s possible, which I didn't Know, so that's really interesting. Then at the end you know you've got the offers of discount codes, people that are mentioning your business as well, to try and entice the sale at the end of the process. So that was my next question, but we’ve just covered that, so that's everything for me.
Adam:
That’s the thing so when you look at it from a top of funnel point of view, that awareness to the engagement, if they ‘like’ or if they ‘like’, ‘comment’ or whatever, you get the engagement, you can lead them down into the subscription, and then that conversion and excite by giving them a voucher and things like that. You’ve just led a virtually cold person all the way through the Customer Value Journey
in a relatively short space of time.
Andrew:
Yeah, if you're doing that on Facebook Messenger, then you've got their Facebook
ID you can add that to your follow up audience, you can then do follow up retargeting across Facebook
if you want to run ads across Facebook
on that sort of level. If you've got their mobile number you can say, “Hey, how do I fancy joining our private WhatsApp group?” where you’ll get one to one tips and stuff like that. You've pulled them off this effectively 23-hour restricted level, and you've got them into WhatsApp.
They are trying WhatsApp chatbots
as well, they're in beta, I can do a few things in WhatsApp. So, Facebook
wants to put all this across and have a unified chatbot so you can start the conversation in Facebook
Messenger, move across into direct messages and Instagram, and then potentially go straight into WhatsApp. So, if you imagine that you've got an effectively an Omni text messaging system plus email, because of course you can always send out stuff on email, it just closes the loop on all those conversations and brings one to one conversation which people much prefer.
Adam:
Is there any platform that's standing out more for lending itself to chatbots than others? I know we've spoke around Instagram but is there anyone that really is maximising it and optimising it the most.
Andrew:
Well, I mean the Messenger Platform
on Facebook
has been going for 10 years, so that's the probably the most established. I know they only opened up its API to chatbots about five years ago. So, then of course, two years ago for GDPR, they peeled everything back, we’re being sued, and to now where they’ve started to open it back up again. So that's the most established and people put the messenger contact at the bottom of every post now, which is very easily done.
I think they're fixing a lot of the things that turn people off chatbots, particularly in the early days, on Facebook
and in the Instagram. We’re waiting to see all the facilities that are going to come on to WhatsApp
at the moment. I'd love it if LinkedIn
offered the facility, but I think that would possibly push some people over the edge on LinkedIn, having automated messages as well as paid for ads popping into the inboxes.
Adam:
The question is, do you think it will come?
Andrew:
Well, the Japanese subsidiary of Microsoft have a Japanese speaking chatbot which is market leading, but they’ve seemed to have peeled back on Cortana, on Windows and made it more of a help you use Windows better, and then it's nothing better than the paperclip, which is really annoying. They've missed the opportunity on that and the same with Siri on Apple. They bought into loads of technology, but they've all kept it tight to using Apple and products, slightly easier. And that's the way Samsung's going with Bixby, help you open apps and do things better on your phone, I think it's a big open race at the moment, I mean, we're 10 years into messenger, we're 5 years into having chatbot messengers, there are numerous chatbot platforms for plugging into your websites. How many people actually go to websites anymore because we all live on social media?
Adam:
That is it, that’s probably another conversation because I have been wondering around this recently. I've been sitting here thinking, where is this going? because there are so many different arenas now that you can go to. If you take Virtual Reality, we've all been in my Virtual Reality
site, you can drop in there and that becomes your virtual room with all your links to your landing pages, that becomes your website homepage, and you just drop into anywhere from that.
Andrew:
Absolutely, and I thought that was the way that Facebook Horizon
was going to go. That every business worth its weight would be building its shopping inside Facebook Horizon, because all of the Facebook
people would just put on their Ray Bans, and click the button and bang, you're in Facebook Horizons. They don't seem to be taking in quite that way, they seem to have cottoned on late that lots of businesses want our virtual office space for their staff to sit in and they've taken it that way, but that wasn't what they were selling at the beginning.
Adam:
I noticed that they've got the integration with Zoom now, haven’t they, with Horizon because they've integrated so you can actually drop in on zoom with it. I thought, okay, they're opening up a different angle with this. That was only the other night I clocked that. I think it was after you sent me the thing around the Ray Bans.
Andrew:
I’m sure they looked at Google Glasses
and went, ‘so they couldn't make it work’ but, you know, Zuckerberg has got a completely different point of view, he wants to become omni-present doesn't he? in every other aspect, why wouldn't you as you walk down the streets have your glasses on, and you'd have virtual shopfronts projected in front of the real shopfronts, which might, identify your ID, and as you're looking through those shop Windows present you with unique vouchers and things. And of course, they would be able to track your eye movements so as you walk past your shoe shop it says, “I can see you're looking at those particular Nikes, would you like your voucher, come in right this moment.” That’s what could restore our high streets.
Luke:
Yeah, then you get home and all you see is those pair of Nikes that you did look at in the shop window earlier.
Andrew:
with Augmented Reality
people would be sitting in their homes, potentially, and see all those things and I mean, there's smart mirrors, where woman can stand in front of a smart mirror and it projects different outfits and they can go, oh yeah, I like that ‘Click Buy,’ I'm assuming, there'll voice commands in that space as well. We're living just on the brink of Blade Runner world.
Adam:
That's a good comparison that is.
So, if you’re looking to go down the route of a Chatbot
and Artificial Intelligence
what sort of questions should we being asking ourselves?
Andrew:
Okay, if you're getting leads on Facebook
and Instagram
for example, I've actually got software that would look at all of your previous conversations and pull out which are the most asked questions, and then you'd start to build chatbot flows
around those conversations. That’ because those are the ones, you're being asked the most, those are the ones that you would tackle first.
It's even easier on Instagram because you can have four conversation starters. So, your top four questions would be answered by just pressing those four buttons, straight away. And then you start to look at okay well what do you want to use it for? If you're doing it for lead generation or are you building inline carousels of your products with buy buttons. You can do the whole thing inside the messenger. I mean I actually built a store with clothing and stuff and let people zoom and pan and click on that and you can go down you can look at mugs, press the button and buy everything, and that was with Facebook, and you can link it across to your Facebook shop.
So really to answer, what is your product? and Digital Products
are much easier. Products that are digitally fulfilled by third parties so they sort of say, okay, click here to buy T shirts or buy clothes and if you're offering courses and stuff like that then you can click through and sign people up, and then say right ‘we're about send you the link to our membership site’, ‘We've already registered for you’ and bang you go through to your membership site.
I mean, whatever you want to do that, you can tailor it. I've got multi-level marketing chatbots. I've got book, I've also launched chatbot where they go with ‘This is a sample of our book, if you want to know when it comes out, click Comment’ and they go into a mailing list, but it's our messenger contact list, and then we'll send you the link to Amazon, providing it.
There's so much you can do, but again it’s that initial setup is saying, ‘Am I getting people engaging and asking questions on my Facebook
page and Instagram
page website’ that’s a good starting point from there.
I mean there's a product called Chat Matic, which was very good at gathering masses of leads, you would put out a post and put a comment and it was designed for rapid fire. Just quickly engage with you and invite you straight off to a landing page on a funnel, and that was great, but it got a little bit out of hand.
From a customer experience point of view, it’s what you want, because if somebody is commenting or engaging with your post within Instagram, Facebook, wherever it is, you should be commenting back to engage them to make sure that they’re having this good experience, and this is again where the Chatbot
can come in, dealing with complaints, let alone actually leads and sales. If you've got 10,000 leads to go through you definitely want something like a chatbot
to work to engage and make sure that the user experiences are spot on.
If you need support in building a Chatbot and Artificial Intelligence, then please do get in touch with us by contacting us here.
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