How AI-powered chatbots are transforming marketing and sales operations

In this AI and digital age, customer expectations have evolved. Customers increasingly expect instant gratification: personalized, accurate answers faster and easier than ever before. They don’t want to fill out a form to request a quote, send an email to get pricing information, or wait to get simple answers; they want real-time answers and action. While live agents have traditionally handled customer experiences, digital marketers are adapting to people’s current expectations while facing reduced marketing budgets. Marketing teams are embracing AI technology to drive more powerful marketing campaigns.

Artificial intelligence can be a powerful tool for developing exceptional conversational marketing strategies. AI chatbots are available to customers 24/7 and can deliver insights into your customer’s engagement and buying patterns to drive more compelling conversations and deliver more consistent and personalized digital experiences across your web and messaging channels. Now powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and new generative AI capabilities, chatbot marketing solutions have the potential to revolutionize digital user experiences, drive new levels of digital marketing efficiency, and engage more prospects leading to more opportunities for sales.

Marketing use cases with IBM Watson Assistant

IBM Watson Assistant is an enterprise conversational AI platform designed to build intelligent chatbots or virtual agents that can automate buyer processes, promote lead generation, and drive e-commerce with personalized customer self-service support. Powered by LLMs and machine learning capabilities, Watson Assistant understands natural language and provides customers with fast and accurate answers and actions to queries.

With IBM Watson Assistant customers can:

• Create omnichannel journeys that drive meaningful interactions with marketing and sales from prospecting to closing. Design automated conversational experiences that span across multiple digital channels and seamlessly connect them to your customer’s preferred channels of engagement from web chat, to customer emails, social messaging channels, or SMS text.
• Get started quickly with a low-code no code user experience that provides your digital marketing and sales teams with easy-to-use tools your teams can leverage to create dialogs and build conversational flows with less dependency on IT resources. Analyze Conversation logs and user interaction data to improve questions and answers, and update conversation flows to provide the most up-to-date pricing, offers, and product information. 
• Gain valuable insights into your chatbot’s performance. Obtain analytics that offer an end-to-end view of customer interactions and use conversational history to drive personalized experiences and improve how your assistants understand and respond to future user requests.

Using AI chatbots to boost conversions

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, IBM customer, Camping World, a leading retailer of recreational vehicles globally, experienced a surge in website volume. Customers who flooded Camping World’s call center were often met with long wait times or were dropped accidentally. Additionally, website visitors could not reach human agents during call center off hours, leaving customer queries unanswered and losing potential new leads. With its current infrastructure, Camping World’s sales team had no visibility into the number of qualified leads accumulated in the off hours.

Powered by Watson Assistant, Camping World employed Arvee, a messenger chatbot available around the clock to assist sales and customer service teams. Having its own chatbot platform allowed live agents to respond to more complex conversations, improving response times and agent efficiency. With less human-to-human contact, live agents were able to provide higher-quality customer interactions. Arvee’s functionality includes gathering customer engagement stats and keeping track of leads after hours, amplifying the visibility that the sales team previously lacked. With additional features such as SMS capabilities, the messenger bot quickly addressed customer queries in real time.

As a result, the number of dropped conversations has decreased, customer engagement increased by 40%, and overall efficiency increased by 33%. Implementing Watson Assistant stimulates valuable revenue-generating conversations, contributing to its long-term success.

Automating messaging with chatbot marketing

Deltic Group, the UK’s largest operator of late-night bars and clubs, relied on social media channels to communicate with their customer base. Receiving 350,000 messages on Facebook Messenger each year, only 10 percent are answered adequately. As most notifications arrive later in the night, the customer support team is too busy to respond when people are deciding where to go. Another valuable opportunity is converting inquiries into bookings for private parties or booths, where guests are more inclined to attend if they already paid and tend to spend more. That instant follow-up is the difference between attracting guests or losing them to another competitor.

Deltic Group recognized that each message represents a potential customer, so it supplemented human agents with chatbot technology to streamline the customer journey. Starting at the club’s Facebook page, the virtual assistant, running on Watson Assistant, personalizes responses based on the customer’s location and chosen venue. After the chatbots help with customer questions, it follows with prompts about bookings, parties, and booths, directing the customers to a human agent or online booking site if they decide to purchase. This chatbot marketing strategy maximizes the reply rate on messaging apps and overall conversion rates.

Transform marketing strategy with Watson Assistant

Every unique interaction between a customer and a company is essential to the overall customer experience. Introducing conversational AI as the initial touch-point with customers enables rapid responses to questions and for human agents to prioritize meaningful conversations. Without having to write a single line of code, marketing teams use Watson Assistant to optimize their digital marketing strategy and achieve higher customer satisfaction end-to-end.

Transform your marketing with Watson Assistant