One problem that has besieged marketers over the years has been how to engage their teeming customers at scale, but thanks to the advancement in technology, with the continuing research and development as well as the push to innovate, chatbots have come to redress this situation.
Marketers now have chatbots, a unique and distinctive opportunity to engage their customers at scale. Chatbots have come to revolutionize the way customers’ questions are answered.
Customers are the central point of any kind of business, therefore, all your effort should be geared towards ensuring that your customers’ pain points are addressed promptly. This requires a 24/7 service and there is no way you can do that without chatbots, especially with the world population estimated to be 7.79 billion by 2020.
This could be the reason why Larry Kim the founder of one of the largest search marketing company(Wordstream) realized before selling the company to kickstart an entirely new company MobileMonkey that is centered on messaging.
In an interview, Larry Kim granted Nature Torch, he bares his mind on what the transition has been like.
1.) What is the transition from founding one of the largest search marketing company(Wordstream) to building a Chatbot company like for you?
It’s been hard! WordStream is a huge company with over 300 people and approximately $55 Million in revenues last year. I had a huge team to assist with pretty much everything. My new company, MobileMonkey is a much smaller team, and we’re just getting started – so I have to do a lot more work in content marketing, product management, and general administrative work.
In general, I think early stage start-up work is much harder than working at more established companies but offer a more rewarding experience if things work out.
2.) What were the goals you had in mind for consumers when you decided to build MobileMonkey?
From a technology and customer perspective, we believe that chatbots offer a unique opportunity for companies to engage their customers at scale via messaging platforms. Our internal goal is to grow the global adoption of these products from around 1% today to 30-40% in the next decade and to be among the top 2 platforms offering these new technologies. We’re already the World’s fastest-growing Facebook Messenger marketing platform!
3.) Chatbots have been the big thing for a short while now, do you see this phenomenon taking over the roles of customer reps?
I don’t think chatbots can take over roles for customer reps because the answers provided are very specific. We see chatbots as more of a “level one support” (answering the easy, frequently asked questions) or more of a “routing tool” to get customers to the right department and taking down basic information to pass along to the live support agent.
These chatbot tools should help customer service reps be more effective by freeing up their time to focus on solving more meaningful customer issues.
4.) What are the challenges you anticipate businesses are going to face with chatbots that didn’t exist before chatbots?
Chatbots are going to be an amazing source of business information for companies. For example, you’ll be able to analyze exactly what people are asking for, what their issues are, etc. It’s a bit like how websites transformed businesses over 2 decades ago, and how an entire discipline of marketing evolved to support that infrastructure.
5.) How do you think businesses can prepare for these challenge(s)?
Our chatbot platform, MobileMonkey, is available for free and is super easy to set up and use. We’re investing millions of dollars on producing tips and tutorials on how to use chatbots for business, here are a few recommended resources:
* MobileMonkey Island – Facebook Messenger Community
* Chatbot Training Course by MobileMonkey
* Online Marketing Summits by MobileMonkey.
6.) To wrap, where do you see chatbots and human interaction in the coming years?
It’s hard to imagine any significant business in the next 5-10 years that won’t offer some form of chat service for marketing and customer support. We believe that chatbots are essential to automating at least some part of these conversations, and will replace email for casual customer communications.
Granted it’s obvious that you need a means of engaging your customers at scale, what may be bothering you is why should it be chatbots?
Chatbots technologically, are meant to only represent the natural evolution of a Question Answering system based on Natural Language Processing (NLP). The formulation of responses to questions in natural language is one of the most typical Examples of Natural Language Processing applied in various enterprises’ end-use applications.
While you may just be thinking about ordinary chatbots, it’s necessary for you to realize that the live-chatting technology is seriously advancing and the incorporation of machine learning into conversational bots has seriously revolutionized the ability to scale-personalize, we have today the AI chatbots which can process the natural language and resolve simple problems of the users all by themselves.
You absolutely need automation to effectively scale-personalize marketing and AI Chatbots can help bring about the automation of your customer service and improve customer engagement process. AI chatbots are able to provide assistance for basic queries, such as resetting passwords and updating personal information.
In these cases, the answers are very similar and therefore customers can enjoy fast and real-time processing of their requests. Employees who ordinarily should have been bogged down are freed to focus on higher value-added tasks.
According to Omer Khan, CEO of VividTech, “Over two billion messages are sent between businesses and customers on Facebook alone. It’s no wonder over 100,000 businesses are using chatbots to deliver answers to consumers faster.”
With AI and machine learning, brands can hone in on signals and information produced by customers about their needs and intentions through activities and then, respond with relevant and timely content and experiences based on these triggers. This unique opportunity for you to engage customers at scale does not only enhance increased engagement but also the overall customer experience and loyalty by delivering messages that map to and even anticipate what customers will want.
The latest marketing technology platforms or AI chatbots also allow marketers to try out different campaign creative, content, and experiences and do so at scale in order to improve the relevancy for individual customers where, how, and when they want it along the customers’ journey. With this unique opportunity of engaging customers at scale, you are assured of,
- Around the clock chatting
- Latching onto the borderless market
- The opportunity for upselling and cross-selling
For you to accelerate your growth as a brand, you overwhelmingly need to engage customers at scale by scale-personalizing your marketing campaigns in this digitalized world. The task may seem onerous but with AI and automation, and the data you need easily accessible all you need do is integration.
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
