06 Jul
4 Top B2B Chatbot Use Cases You Must Know
If you are wondering how to make your sales teams more efficient, leaner, highly predictable and motivated and reduce training costs, chatbots are the answer. This blog post will explore why.
Chatbots are making headlines in the B2B marketing world as the next big thing to assist businesses in their efforts towards enhancing customer service. Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots are expected to transform how people and businesses interact with brands and services.
Their ability to provide personalized and contextual responses via a chat interface on messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Skype and through virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana etc. without the constant need for involvement of human agents is touted to provide immense cost savings.
And in addition to the cost savings, the trend of people preferring to get information via chat compared to a traditional phone call is increasing.
The advancements in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) enabled the evolution of intelligent bots that could provide responses in a very natural language tone.
From lead qualification to data gathering, and finally to closing sales or problem-solving, chatbots can indeed create engaging and unique experiences with excellent results across the board, all while saving B2B companies time and money. Here is how:
4 B2B CHATBOT USE CASES YOU MUST KNOW
B2B CHATBOT USE CASE #1
LEAD QUALIFICATION
The road to get prospects to engage with a company on the website and turn them into serious customers is not a short one, but chatbots can be deployed at every stage to make it smoother in both B2B and B2C settings. A chatbot that can ask a website visitor the right questions and help them narrow down products or services that directly relate to their interests.
This eliminates the need to sift through content that is not relevant to the business or individual’s interests. Furthermore, bots can also analyze visitor patterns to help determine if they are likely a qualified lead, to begin with, saving the sales team precious time.
Chatbots facilitate a much faster sales cycle at every step of the way, but especially in the critical beginning stages. In turn, this reduces frustrations for your sales team and enables a much more seamless experience for prospects. Bots also make sales teams leaner and more productive by helping them chase better qualified leads, thereby reducing the sales training and direct sales costs significantly.
B2B Chatbot Example:
RapidMiner a B2B Technology company that provides analytics solutions deployed a website chatbot – MarlaBot, which asks relevant questions to visitors and determines their needs in a personalized manner.
The bot asks a series of qualifier questions starting with a simple “What brought you to RapidMiner today?”. This process cuts the wheat from the chaff and only the leads which are qualified will be connected to sales reps.
MarlaBot doesn’t completely eliminate the need for a sales staff, but it cuts down on their tedious workload and simultaneously collects data to improve future user interactions.
Other bots of these sort exist. Adopting them as sales assistants with a focus on helping human sales agents and customers alike, is key for their successful implementation.
B2B CHATBOT USE CASE #2
DATA MINING
Closely tied with lead qualification lies data gathering. Customers are not the only ones who must explore sources, process large amounts of information and then try to make informed choices. Sales teams also have to analyze data to figure out what the customers want or need, or to figure out the most qualified leads.
Especially when dealing with B2B marketing at a large scale, it is not possible for human agents to manually mine all of the relevant data, organize it, and also analyze it in order to improve services, target products to their desired audience, and tailor special approaches. Bots can automate the process of data management and can help human staff at mapping the data based on the changing organizational trends.
B2B CHATBOT USE CASE #3
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Chatbots can help an organization by improving the customer response rate around the clock. In other words, chatbots can give accurate, personalized and instant responses to common issues 24/7. Clients value this greatly, especially when checking for reliability and access information on products and services.
In addition, chatbots allow agents to focus on more complex customer service issues by handling a large volume of repetitive and basic queries without the need for interference.
Chatbots are customizable for different languages too, so it is not necessary to hire large numbers of staff who are fluent in many languages in order to assist clients from around the world. For these reasons, chatbots greatly reduce operational costs associated with the need to hire specialized staff or extra agents who need to be available at 24/7.
With the concept of data injection and machine learning, bots are learning faster based on the conversation they have with multiple users.
B2B CHATBOT USE CASE #4
EASY INFORMATION ACCESS FOR B2B SALES REPS AND MARKETERS
Sales representatives need access to key metrics to make informed decisions during the sales process. Having a virtual assistant to provide this information immediately, at any time and from anywhere saves time and enables a data-driven decision-making.
Acuvate’s AI Sales chatbot – SIA, can be added to a company’s internal messaging apps for sales teams to chat with and get data from CRM, LOB and BI systems.
SIA can be integrated with multiple databases and answers queries quickly and in natural language. Sales teams don’t have to manually obtain the required information from multiple systems and they can focus on more critical aspects of the sales process.
BOTCORE – AN ENTERPRISE CHATBOT BUILDER PLATFORM
In conclusion, B2B businesses are slowly realizing the potential of chatbots for customer service, sales, and marketing. Many B2B businesses have already deployed chatbots at least one of these business areas and exploring further use cases. At the very least, Chatbots can streamline the Lead Qualification process, greatly improve and speed up data gathering, enhance customer service, and simplify information access.
The use cases of B2B chatbots are endless and still emerging. If you’re planning to get started on your chatbot journey, you might be interested in our Build-A-Bot workshop in which we help enterprises capture the right bot use case and build a bot strategy. Alternatively, if you’re exploring different chatbot solutions, our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore might interest you!
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.
Rakesh Reddy is our co-founder and a serial entrepreneur. A mechanical engineer by education, his business vision and direction as Chairman & CEO drives us to excellence. An avid team player, he works with his executive team to trigger growth for Acuvate across geographies and business areas. His business acumen, strategy and planning skills catalyzed the growth of Acuvate since its inception. A natural leader, he has been able to successfully bootstrap his companies, help win customers and successfully constitute the company’s board and a robust leadership team.
Rakesh Reddy