Watch our recorded webinar of how PointClickCare increased website conversions using Drift + Lift AI.
Hosted by Matt Langie and Lise Reddick from Lift AI plus Jared Fuller from Drift.
The full written transcript is shown below the video.
PS: If you want to see how your company can achieve similar results, click here to request a free trial or contact us here.
Full Webinar Transcript:
Matt Langie
Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining this webinar produced by Lift AI and joined by our esteemed colleagues from Drift and Pointclickcare.
My name is actually Matt Langie. I'm delivering this webinar on behalf of Don Simpson, the CEO of Lift AI and the owner of this webinar account, so hence the name and the face mismatch. But want to welcome everyone for joining this webinar, it's about how Drift and Lift AI was able to drive 4x and conversions for a great customer at Pointclickcare, and really happy to have John join us and share his experiences with us in that context.
So I want to welcome you all, on behalf of Lift AI, this should be a great session. Our goal for this webinar is really just to share information, deliver some insights to you, so you can make better decisions as a marketer, as a salesperson, as an owner-operator of a website, really gain some learning from here. So this is not going to be a slide presentation in the traditional sense, frankly, this is going to be a discussion between Lisa, and John, and Jared, and all of us in really trying to drive some awareness and some insights around a really interesting, I would say a hero's journey for Pointclickcare and starting with some challenges that they had. And they went through their own business and John's own personal journey to get to a point where they saw some really interesting successes, and some accomplishments and achievements; so that's something we want to share as part of this webinar, so I'm happy you can join us and participate in that.
With that said, I'm really honored to introduce our speakers for this session today. We're joined by Jared fuller of drift, John Walker of point click care, and Lise Reddick of lift AI; but I'd love to have each of them introduce themselves their role at their respective companies, and then maybe share a little factoid, something we won't necessarily know about them if we went and peruse their profiles on LinkedIn. So Jared, how about you go ahead and start and share a little bit about your background.
Jared Fuller
Yeah, happy to be here; excited to hop into this topic, because I was skeptical that anyone could figure out a solution here, so excited to chat about it. I'm Jared Fuller; I have the global partner programs for Drift across our technology and agency partnerships. I also helped author our conversational marketing blueprint, the underlying methodology for how to build conversations that convert, and a guest lecturer at the University of South Florida. Fun factoid, gosh! I have a strange background. I'll give you two, I used to race motocross and was the lead singer and death metal band, and now I'm a software geek, so what would have thought? My parents, certainly not.
Matt Langie
Software attracts all types, that's what I found over the years, so that's great. Well, Jared, thanks for joining from, you said, South Florida is where you're based out of?
Jared Fuller
Sunny, St. Pete.
Mat Langie
Nice, great city. Yeah, I love St. Pete, and hopefully, you're getting some sun there, and you can send it to the rest of the country here and that fine weather. Well, great, Jared again, great to have you representing Drift; and Lift and Drift have been great partners and a lot more great things that are yet to come, so excited to see you that. John, tell us about your role, your background, and maybe something we wouldn't know otherwise.
John Walker
Alright, everyone, I'm John Walker, I also go by Johnnie Walker for the obvious drink there. I am the director of demand and customer lifecycle marketing for Pointclickcare. I have been there for about five years. I've been in a sort of marketing and analytics role for over 25 years of my career. And fun and interesting factoid is, this always shocks people, I've never had a cup of coffee in my life, and similarly, as much as I've tried, I cannot drink wine; all wine to me just tastes like vinegar. I've tried all different kinds, but unfortunately, that's just something I can't do.
Matt Langie
Maybe some good habits to have, I guess. Good. Well, John, thanks for sharing that; and Lise with Lift AI, tell us some things that we would like to know and things that we may not know.
Lise Reddick
Sure, sure. Well, hello, everybody, I'm Lise Reddick. I'm head of product over here at Lift AI. So this machine learning model is my baby, I have been working on it for a number of years. I have lots of experience been working in the chat space, I hate to date myself, for almost 20 years. I guess a fun fact, I'm going to go with Jared's musical background. I was actually once on TV with a high school band, I didn't get discovered. It was one of those, you know, tell a miracle type, fundraising things at 1 in the morning, so there's my musical history as well.
Matt Langie
Nice, that's awesome. I think we get some musicians here, so maybe we'll have to get the band back together. Great to have you guys with us, and we have a lot of really interesting things I want to cover. And I certainly don't want to get in the way of the discussion from you guys, but maybe just to set the table for the audience here; we're talking about chat. Really, I think the context today, what we're talking about is conversational marketing, and frankly, it's everywhere. I mean, if you're running a website, you're doing any kind of b2b marketing, I think you probably would have heard of Drift.
I started working with Drift a number of years ago and am really excited about the prospects and the opportunities as a marketer. As we're seeing in the market today, $102 billion, US digital marketing spends focused on driving website visitors. Over 80% of those companies are using website conversations to drive sales. So think about this context of all this traffic coming to your website, and now being able to engage with them in a new and different way, in many ways to engage those visitors through chat and through these new capabilities very, very much what drift offers.
What we're also seeing about 42 billion US dollars spent on live agents per year to engage with website visitors. Again, because of the opportunity, the prospect, the revenue lift that you'll ultimately be able to see. And I know both Jared, and John, and Lise will be able to share some specific examples around, how do we really engage and really identify the intent of those visitors, so we're creating that right relationship, that right customer experience. And I think that's really where I like to connect the dots is conversational marketing, really driving that ideal customer experience. Although, I think there are some challenges today and how that customer experience is currently being delivered. I think this is something that we'll learn as we go through today's session here. So getting right into it, let's talk about Pointclickcare as a business, and as some of your primary goals, John, and capitalizing on the full opportunity of your visitors, enabling personalization with highly anonymous traffic, and tell us a bit about yourself; just kind of set the table. Your business focused on home care facilities, skilled nursing, tell us about point click care and then walk us through again, your marketing goals, your marketing objectives, what you're trying to achieve.
John Walker
Right, so at Pointclickclear, we basically service the needs for everyone providing service to the LT pack community, so basically, the seniors' population, so home healthcare, Senior Living, and skilled nursing. We're also diving into the acute space too, in terms of, how that data is shared across different care settings, so just a quick overview of point clicks care. With regard to our website, we had two main goals; one is driving more and better-qualified opportunities for our sales teams. That's kind of everyone's goal for the website, and making the site more of a revenue-driving engine for us. But another one is it’s an integral part of developing our buyer enablement strategy, so that is a continuous effort for us to remove friction from the buying experience. That's incredibly important for us. So it's kind of like we're transforming how we think about buying, from selling to people, to helping buyers buy. Now, of course, in order to do this, we needed to offer a more personalized and conversational experience on the site, versus just sending them to a page, filling out a form, waiting for a callback, that type of thing; and then secondly, ensuring that we were identifying conversation or sales-ready visitors, and acting on them appropriately. And that was especially difficult for us when a large percentage of our visitors were anonymous, so we didn't have that history before in terms of their engagement profile, to know who was actually conversation-ready.
Matt Langie
Yeah, yeah, no, John, that's great. I'd love to get as we go through this, throughout the webinar, and the session today is, I'd love to hear from you and the audience. So those of you that have experienced some of those same goals and objectives of what you're trying to achieve. You'll see in your webinar interface in front of you, there's both a chat and a q&a panel, so if you look down at the bottom, if you click on chat, go ahead and chat at us. How many of you, and I like to ask the question to the audience, how many of you are challenged with really trying to understand your website visitors, and really delivering the best possible customer experience opportunity in moving from, as John mentioned, going from selling to helping buyers buy? So, I'd love to hear from you guys. So if you go click on that Chat panel, just go ahead and type something real quick. Let us know what some of your primary goals for your website have been and what you've been trying to achieve.
Jared, I'd like to turn it to you and maybe give us from your perspective at Drift, kind of the broad market view. What are you seeing with a number of your customers, and your clients, and what they're trying to achieve in utilizing conversational marketing, or at least starting with what their marketing objectives are?
Jared Fuller
Yeah, the conversational marketing blueprint uses the five W's to engage website traffic. So what page are people on? Who is there? Where did they come from? Why are they there and when to engage? And one of the hardest things about that, it's a great methodology, and there are books, there are training courses, or certifications around it. But what happens when that who is anonymous? So we don't know the account, we don't know the person; that really only leaves page personalization, right? I can have a different message on my homepage, versus a different message on my pricing page for the engage bot that pops up. This presumes of course, that you agree with me that you shouldn't have bots that ask, I'll call it a dumb question, and how can I help you?
Matt Langie
Yeah.
Jared Fuller
That is the question that I tell people to go away whenever I'm in the store, right? Someone walks with me, how can I help you? I'm just looking, right? Like, leave me alone. But conversely, if I walk into the Apple Store, and maybe I grab an apple pen, that's a specific little product, right? I had this experience, where one of the apple reps walked up to me and said, "Are you a graphic designer"? Why, because I'm holding an apple pen. It's a specific thing, and that created a conversation and I left with a frickin iPod. And it always stuck with me because that kind of context is very important, right? And that's what has been so interesting for me about this kind of conversation of engaging anonymous website visitors. The Apple rep didn't know me but was able to bring some context into the conversation. And I think that's really the focus of today's conversation, is that there's a lot of things out there for helping companies like Pointclickcare, identify accounts and like prioritize those accounts, etc., but the reality is, the data set for things like home care facilities and skilled nursing is, it pales in comparison to Tech Data, and other types of firmographics that are available. So when these accounts and these people that are coming to your website are anonymous, it's probably 98% of them. How do we really prioritize their buying experience? So that's kind of my perspective on it, that it's a difficult challenge to solve for a lot of the partners, agencies, and customers that I work with.
Mat Langie
Yeah, no, absolutely think about it, if you have a million website, visitors to your website every month, how do you deliver that personalization at scale? Clearly, you know, the Apple Store example was a one-to-one relationship of a sales rep, seeing your behavior. And I think that's something that we'll dive into, as we get into more of the content here, is being able to observe your behavior and asking the right kinds of questions. Not coming up to you and saying, "Hey, what's your email address"? Before I start talking to you, so we'll talk about that as well.
Jared Fuller
Close, you asked me for my email address right away, I'm going to close that box.
Mat Langie
Go away, I'm shopping, so can't you see my signals? And I think there's a, I probably share examples of Nordstrom as well, when you go into Nordstrom highly trained sales reps that know when to spot the behavioral signals of when someone's about, on that cusp of buying, versus I'm just browsing, I'm just shopping. Well, John, I'd love to have you, maybe go back to john and talk about kind of the engagement strategy that you were trying to put forth, using drift, integrating with Marketo, leveraging some of the tagging capabilities. Maybe, tell us a little bit about kind of your infrastructure, maybe talk a little bit about your Martech. What were you trying to achieve in first utilizing drift, and maybe even some of the history of where you came from and how you got to drift?
John Walker
Okay, yeah, we'll start with the history because it was a fun story. A few years ago, we started on the chat journey, and I think we went about it all wrong, so we were with a different provider at the time. And we basically just picked up a live agent model, purely live agent, so no chatbots at all. And what we did was, we actually gave an account to all of our sales development reps, essentially, and it was kind of a round-robin in terms of chat. Now, they definitely were not engaged, nor did we find out after the fact that they were really qualified to have these conversations with customers online. Apart of the problem was, we were sending a lot of support requests to salespeople. And as soon as you do that, salespeople get pretty disengaged pretty quickly in terms of not wanting to be able to handle and rewrote those support calls. So essentially, we weren't ready for that strategy, so we ended up taking a break off chat, we removed the chat off the site altogether, and we regrouped. So we ended up going with drift for a second attempt, so that we could take a more automated approach.
Now, the second lesson we learned was, we swung the pendulum all the way to the other side, and went purely chatbot, without really any support at all, from a live person. So the one thing that was good, is we did start sending some of those support calls to the right company, sorry, the right department, and then basically directing people to form fields to contact us, but that wasn't giving us what we wanted, either. It wasn't giving us really as good of an experience as we wanted to, but we also weren't handling those, identifying or handling those high opportunity people that were coming in through the site. And we weren't also experts at creating these playbooks to meet our objectives as well, so that's when we started working with Drift a little bit more, and we also brought in Lift AI. So by employing the help of some of these experts, we were able to very, very quickly after implementation, which also didn't take that long, we were able to identify those high-value visitors, and then, in conjunction with optimizing our playbooks, we added an inbound lead specialist to interact with them. So optimizer playbooks, we added Lift AI, so that we could identify those conversation-ready people, and then send them over to a human when it was appropriate, and then they were able to qualify, and send them directly off to our field sales reps. The analogy I kind of use, when I think about this, is when we first got Drift, and we're trying to do it on our own, it was like we bought a supercar, but it didn't have an engine. So when we added Lift AI to the mix, it was like now we had that engine and now we could drive that supercar, so it was super exciting for us.
Mat Langie
Yeah, no, that's a great analogy, and maybe at Lise starting with you and directing some questions to you, because john mentioned, you have visitors hitting the website, and how are you able to tell who's there for I need to help with a product or service versus, I'm here because I'm shopping, I'm looking to buy? Maybe Lise, talk a little bit about what you're seeing across a number of your clients as far as, how you're identifying or helping them drive the right kind of engagement for those website visitors?
Lise Reddick
Sure, yeah, and I think maybe a little bit of background to help everybody understand how Lift AI came about. I used to do a lot of this work manually, a team of people at a parent company market link. We did outsource BPO for a number of different global organizations for years and years. And so we used to have this, it was our agents, we are staffing the chats, we are trying to make sure they are getting the best engagements, and we spent hours combing through data, right. Looking at page-based journeys, looking at 20:56[Inaudible], trying to pull all of this stuff together to say, "Okay, here's who your best visitors are to target". And we were always kind of a step behind because of that process of analytics, so we took machine learning. And I think that's one of the great changes over the last five, six years in this space is machine learning has really opened up the world of possibilities. So now all of that data that we've looked through; poured through, the billions of visitor profiles are now been poured into that machine model, which has now learned and understands what buying behaviors look like. So armed with that, with Pointclickcare, we're able to take that model right out of the gate, so it's democratized; we'd have to retrain it entirely on their site, basically, it comes on looks at it; and right away, we're able to identify that they had a very good percentage of visitors on their site where high intent. We normally see around the average of 9%, they actually had 14, so it's a really good opportunity right out of the gates, with their Chat program. It's just figuring out where those visitors are, and not having to kind of do it that manually, with all that analysis. So putting that on right away, we're able to use it, a simple sort of targeting tag, hey, here's your score, target visitors with the score, and align the experiences in the best possible way.
Matt Langie
Yeah, well, that leads me to kind of some of the key challenges for Pointclickcare; and maybe actually, before we go to John, Jared, I like to start with you. Maybe you give us a broad perspective, Jared, around the key challenges you're seeing across the marketplace, and why customers and your clients are coming to drift to solve some of these problems. Maybe speak at a broad level, and then in the John, if you can kind of book in that with some of the specific issues that you saw, as we see on the slide here, Jared?
Jared Fuller
Yeah, so I mean, if you think about it, I referenced the Apple Store, kind of experience that I had, like a best in the class retail experience. I mean, so much so that Microsoft's copied them. A lot of retail companies have copied that Apple Store experience, but in business to business, what have we really done to emulate that? I mean, we don't have b2b retail stores, especially not after last year. So that is the website, which is our virtual storefront, and we're not staffing our virtual storefront.
So I've done large-scale chat staffing initiatives, I was head of sales at a company called PandaDoc. We had about 2 million monthly unique visitors to the site, and that's a challenge to staff your virtual storefront. It's expensive, you have a global business, and there are a lot of problems there. So what drift has done, we took that challenge of actually creating a great experience for would-be buyers, and we built it for the purpose of not deflecting conversations, which is what most chat, it was built for support, open a ticket, close a ticket, like get that person out of the queue. But to drive conversations, right, I wanted more people to chat in, to be engaged, and I wanted more people to get qualified, right? And when I say qualified, I mean, not just from the sales perspective, but from their buyer perspective. So that's really what drifts been here to do, is to help drive that better buyer experience, and to treat the website as the virtual storefront that it is because everyone today is online, so distracted. I mean, I have 47 chrome tabs open. I bet everyone in the audience, I have 1,2,3,4,5,6 notifications on my phone since I've been on this webinar. I bet you have 40 slacks, some of you are probably checking it right now, and that's my point. Whenever you have someone's attention, they're on your site.
Mat Langie
Yeah.
Jared fuller
That is the best time to engage them. It's not an ad to serve up to them a week from now, or an email that goes in their inbox when they're not thinking about you, it's when you have their attention. And that's why I think Drift is so important and has had such a great impact on customers, which go down the funnel, we can do amazing things with target accounts that we've identified, or people in Marketo, known contacts, and all the rich data that we have, when we have it. A majority of the time the traffic's anonymous, you don't have that data. So that's kind of where I think the challenge, the Pointclickclear identified and brought Lift AI, we've kind of speak towards that more.
Mat Langie
Yeah, John, please, maybe illuminates us and some of the key challenges that we're seeing here, and maybe give us some color here.
John Fuller
Exactly, and I love what Jared was talking about, because I probably mentioned this a little bit later. But that buyer enablement, that creating that friction-free buying experience, that Apple experience online is something that is very important, it's a very high priority for us, and we're continuing down that road. And obviously, it's very hard to do when a lot of your site visitors, as was in our case, are anonymous, so we had no way of knowing how strong their intent was, where they were in their buying cycle, so what type of information we should be delivered to them based on what they're focusing on at that point, and what topics they were interested in. And as Lise said, like 14% of our visitors had high intent, but we didn't know that. We did know that we were losing an opportunity by not identifying and interacting with these high intent visitors, but we didn't know how much, right?
So the other thing was, we did have a lot of existing customers coming to the site looking for support. And without that proper chat solution in place, a lot of the customers were going to our contact us forms, or even our demo request forms just to get in touch with someone, and those were going to sales. And again, as I said before, the more sales get those, the more they start losing their enthusiasm for the right leads that are coming in, and then we just had that sort of sales marketing struggle all over again. So those were kind of our main challenges that we were going into this engagement with.
Mat Langie
Yeah, and maybe Lise if you want to touch on some of these challenges, how are you seeing this with some of the other Lift AI clients? Is this a fairly common set of challenges that you're seeing with businesses and having this large amount of anonymous traffic and not being able to kind of deliver the right experience, whether it's let's send them, or direct them to support, versus sales?
Lise Reddick
Yeah, it's the biggest problem, right? The first thing we always hear from people is, "I have this drift, I think it's awesome. I know, I should be getting more from it. I just don't know how, right"? A part of it, so you dig up under the hood and say, "Well, what's really going on"? You know what, people are getting by the bot, they're figuring out how to get to somebody, you know, my sales teams getting all those support; or they're filling out forms, to John's point. Conversely, I mean, there are people that are there for careers, people are there for partner opportunities, there's a wide range of intense right, which people are coming with.
So what they're struggling with is, how do I design a bot that can manage all of these different priorities, and intense and things that people are struggling through? And when they're anonymous, it's really hard to think through, "Okay, how do I design a one size fits all bot that can handle all of these different situations"? So really, being able to look at and take a step back and say, "Okay, how does intent help me understand how best to design these experiences"? So really, what we did there is we said, "Hey, well, if they're high intent, what is the nature of a high intent visitor, what type of questions do they have, who should they be engaging with, should they be engaging with a bot at all"? Typically, when people are very far down the buying process, they have very sort of specific use case scenarios, right? "I want to know how this would work in this particular, example, in my business"? That's a conversation that's best suited for a human being right, not necessarily a chatbot. However, somebody with lower intent is coming in with support, bots are great. There is automation that bots kind of deliver to be able to say, "Hey, you know what, I have this support question, here's the answer, here's the answer. Here's the answer".
Also nurturing, right, being able to take those people that have made the very, very top of funnel and nurture them with some really great experience, driving them to specific content, lining to the buyer journey that John and his team, were trying to build over a point click care. It's a great way to use that automation for good.
Mat Langie
Yeah, and Jared, I like to turn to you because I know we had Kevin, bring up a point about currently excluding chat from the support site, plus with drift AI, any sort of support keywords kicking off support routing, so we don't really have to deal with that issue too often, but with someone using drift, and also leveraging sixth sense for incorporating data enrichment, how would lift AI play into it? Jared, I think you've got it probably a good answer on this.
Jared Fuller
Yes, absolutely, good call-out on AI. I think that's what's changed a lot from like decision tree and bot building. So our AI does have the capabilities of being able to take someone that's come in, and then put them down a support path if they are talking support speak through the chat bot. But I think this is what's worth calling out, is that our AI is not a targeting engine. Our AI is a conversation engine, meaning whenever someone's jumped into a conversation, we can get them what they want. They asked a question, our AI is going to answer Whoa, helpful real time like, "Hey, do you integrate with this? Do you offer this? I'm looking for this solution"? Our AI can answer those questions, and it's a phenomenal customer experience, right? Like, "I need support, this thing is broken, great", open up a ticket in Zendesk.
But the challenge that I typically see with our AI customers is not the support issue per se, because you can have it on your website, and if someone comes into your homepage that can get deflected. It's, how do I drive a different bot-message, that targeting layer? So that way, I'm not asking that question, "How can I help you"? Right? We want to engage visitors with different intent, with different messaging. So past the conversational marketing blueprint, the five W's there is the conversational framework and the conversational framework is how to design a specific conversation. There are three steps to that, engage, understand, recommend. The engage, is that bot message that pops up and you can kind of think of that as an email subject line, right? Email subject lines, like, make or break email, open rates, and that's very similar here. So that's how I would think about Drift AI, and even Sixth Sense is when you don't have that data, we haven't had a conversation yet. What should that email subject line be to create the highest engagement? And if you put that across 100,000, 500,000, millions of website visits, I mean, we're talking significant impacts to funnel metrics, so that's how I would think about lift AI playing is really that targeting engine.
Mat Langie
Yeah.
Jared Fuller
Versus like a support engine.
Lise Reddick
And I would add to that too, Jared because I think it's a really good point. And looking at the question, excluding drift from certain pages of the site can sometimes be to your detriment, right? But we see this all the time, it's very difficult sometimes to say, "I'm going to put chat across the site because the concern is, I'm not dealing with good quality engagements", but with Lift AI, you're targeting a visitor, right? And what we do find, which, I think is normal, people behave in ways that you don't expect them to. So very often, we'll actually see people with high sales intent going to support pages, because support is where they think there's going to be somebody they can talk to. And so, you may be missing a fairly significant number of high intent visitors that are actually on those pages that you're not targeting at all, just based on their journey. So with Lift AI, you can actually get up, you know, over to those really quickly. And I think one neat thing about it is you can decide what score range you want to target. So you could say, "Hey, on spar pages, I only want to target people with a score of 80%, or more probability that they're going to convert", whatever that may be, so it really helps with coverage. And that's one of the biggest things, I think, learning that we've seen since we've been deploying Lift AI, across a lot of different sites. Typically, what we see when we get started is most people are targeting maybe 20% of their high intent 10 visitors, because they're taking this selective approach, page based approach, Jared was talking about earlier, and they're trying to guess where they think those those high intent visitors are based on pages that should be high converting, but the reality is, that they're everywhere. They're navigating in all sorts of strange ways that you wouldn't expect, and that's kind of one other sort of great way that Lift AI sort of complements at drift strategy as well.
Mat Langie
Yeah, so Lise you're saying humans are unpredictable, I think is what you're saying.
Lise Reddick
Yes, they are.
Mat Reddick
As a marketer, how do I design the ideal experience for unpredictability? It's well, that's where I would say machines, and machine learning and AI can come into play, but I'd love to keep this moving forward. And john, have you speak to kind of what the plan was for Pointclickcare but before we double click into this, I'd love to address one of the questions that came from one of the attendees that said, John for you to answer, "Are people coming to Pointclickcare looking for a select number of things, or is there a customer experience you're trying to that differs from visitor to visitor"?
John Walker
The answer is yes to both. So we have a really interesting business because, in the skilled nursing business, which we started in the year 2000, we're kind of very well known in that space, but then we started going into other markets, so we went into senior living, we weren't as well known, we went into home health care, we weren't as well known. So we started had to build our brand, again, going into the acute space, nobody knows this right now, and even we're sort of building a new category. So you get a combination of people coming to the site, they know what they want, they may be an existing customer, they may even know the product that they want to buy right away, then you have other people coming to the site saying, "I heard about this Pointclickclear; what are they all about"? So it's a varying degree of people, which is, one of the things that chat helps us with quite a bit, is identifying who those people are, so we can provide the right message to them at the right time, determining who is high intent, and then delivering them to human. So yeah, we're a bit all over the map right now, so it poses a very interesting marketing challenge when you're trying to do everything on one site.
Matt Langie
Well, think, maybe coming back to Jared, you had introduced this idea of the conversational framework, and I think this is a great way of, where do I start, right? I mean, it's always good to have a blueprint of what do I do as a marketing organization for my website, implementing a solution like Drift and bringing in Lift AI? Tell us maybe, double clicking is a little bit more about designing the right kind of playbooks, leveraging the design best practices, what you guys are seeing a Drift, and then Lise we'd love to have you weigh in on that after Jared?
Jared Fuller
Yes, I was teeing up the transition with that teaser. So the way to think about the engage, like I said, is the subject line of an email, so that's the bot message that pops up. The more personalized and relevant that is, the more likely that you are going to get engagement. I think what Lise can probably comment on is the timing of that as well is also very important of like, where it's at, and the buyers kind of journey and the time on your website.
I think the other thing to understand about the engage message is that it should always be framed in a question. So we're trying to engage someone with something that's personalized, and we're trying to get them to hop in and respond. Again, drive a conversation, the Apple Store, let's go back there. "Hey, are you a graphic designer"? Upward inflection and voice, right? Like, that's a question, but it's contextual, “Now, how can I help you"? So that's the engage component. The understanding is a follow on to those questions, right? Based on the response to the first engagement message, then we can kind of branch out and try to understand really the challenge, the problem, the thing that they're looking for. And we have to do that, we have to understand and understand our visitors in order to recommend kind of that next step, then that could be a marketing step. You know, more information, nurture, subscribing to something, registration for an event, to support, opening a support ticket, driving them to a community site for questions, or a sales step, connecting them live with an agent, and routing the right agent in, you know, an SDR, BDR SDR. An account executive, in some cases, when they're very high profile accounts, or booking a meeting with the seller, requesting a callback, video call. There are a whole bunch of different recommends steps as well. So this kind of gives you the framework on best practices to walk through, that conversational experience that you should be providing for your visitors. And this in my humble opinion, I've seen a lot of Drift implementations. This is where most things go wrong, is that people go in and they start building bots based on the technology, because our tech can do whatever you want it to do. It really matters how you implement it, right? It's all about the brand voice and the experience that you're creating, so this framework is very powerful when followed.
Matt Langie
Yeah, and Lise, if you could riff off this kind of using John's analogy of advantage of Drift through this conversational framework.
Lise Reddick
Yeah, Drift has got some great, great tools. You know, it's so easy to technically build a bot. You know, but to Jared's point, the trick is the soft skills that go into building that bot, right? So really coming up with that, the thinking through what that compelling engagement statement, what's that question going to be? And then, you know, taking things like, "Hey, we know the intent, you know, how close are they to buying"? We know, some maybe we have some identity information about them. We know what pages they're on. So taking all of that information and saying, "Hey, you know what, let's really put a good hook out there that's going to get people engaged, drive those responses rates, especially with those high intent visitors", right? So what you don't want to have is high intent visitors that are getting the same hook, as somebody that's on low intent, that has a very different reason for being on your site. So, you know, it really gives you that guidance to be able to figure out how best to engage them. But then even once you get into the experience, we see lots of different experiences out there when we get started; some like Pointclickclear when we started, the pendulum had swung, and they were focused mostly on complete automation.
So people that had sales intent, had to wait to get engaged with a salesperson, and then there's probably cycles in behind there going on, waiting for that salesperson to get in touch with that person or that person being unreachable, you know, all that kind of goes into it. So being able to make sure that the end result is, and Clint Andrus got this really great tool that shows you how people are flowing through the bots, where they're abandoning where they're continuing on through. So it's a really good insight to understand how best to continue to refine and make sure that we're getting to the outcomes that we want and we're not seeing people kind of dropping off through the flow. And, you know, iteration, right, it's not, I think Johnny said, we're sort of prepping for this call is that it's not a, you know, set it and forget it, right? There's on-going work to continually optimize, understand new behaviors, new questions, new things that are coming in, and making sure that you're constantly working on that.
Mat Langie
Yeah, and Lise, I keep hearing intent and when I hear intent, I'm hearing behavior. I'd love to have you, maybe start here on building these journeys based on intent, and then John, have you weigh in on that, and how it impacted Pointclickclear ?
Lise Reddick
Sure, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first thing that we did is, actually, I'm going to take one step back before I talk about the actual journey. Once we had the business case, right, it was a lot easier for John to go and say, "Hey, you know, let's secure an inbound agent to do this". Because we went through, we scored all their visitors; we've got all this historical benchmark data for chats. Were able to say, "Here's how much you can get out of this chat program, once you have it fully optimized and implemented".
So the first thing that we did with those high intent visitors as we took them and said, "Hey, let's make sure that these people are getting to a sales agent quickly, right"? So the rep that we put on in place was able to engage with those high intent visitors. There was no delay in the process, they were able to engage with her right away, she was able to manage that flow into the sales organization and get things moving along quickly. So you see some benefit, not just in the initial conversion rates that you're getting from that experience, but also, what's it doing to the sales cycle duration, and just that overall compression.
On the low end, we took two approaches, right? One is, there's a support flow that needs to kind of come out of the automated experiences, and the second is nurture, right? And we're actually in the process, we've been talking with John and his team quite a bit about some very specific marketing journeys that they have for different divisions of their organization, which we'll be able to get to marry that marketing, nurturing, and capabilities into those low intent visitors and move them along, right? So get them from top of funnel, in to mid, and into high, and then and the great thing is with Lift AI, is that as the visitors journey continues, it's always updating in real time. So let's say you push them some content, they go read it, now they're a little bit more informed, now their score might change. So, as they navigate, you can start to move them from low to high as well, which is, I think a really great thing, it's of always treating them as low or always treating them as medium.
Mat Langie
Well, I think, John, I'd love to get to the punch line, because I think may be speaking for the audience, what was the win here for Pointclickcare? So now we've gone through this journey. You had some challenges with chat, you brought in drift, you implemented lift AI, this sports car is really running and humming, and you're racing down the track. Tell us about what the win was for Pointclickcare.
John Walker
Well, the interesting part is, excuse me, when we started this, I was expecting as kind of most projects, that there's going to be a slow ramp up. We're going to implement this, and I was just like, I hope we can deliver something to our newly hired inbound rep and they stay busy. But the start of the project was more like a rocket ship in terms of the curve that we were seeing. Like right out of the gates, we were seeing increasing conversion, like, right away, we were delivering high intent visitors, before the AI engine even had a chance to learn a lot, and I was like, "Well, this is fantastic". But within the first 90 days, it kept going up, and up until like, after that three month mark, as you see on the slide, we saw four times the conversion rates that we were seeing prior to the implementation, so it definitely went beyond our expectations.
In the first year, so I was hoping that we would get maybe 50 to 100,000 in annual recurring revenue. In the first year, we were able to attribute over a million dollars in incremental recurring revenue, strictly to Drift, Lift AI and delivering the right leads to salesperson. And as Lise already said, "There was a big impact from a sales perspective too"; because, you know, without that person being able to take these high intent leads, someone would go on to the site, they would fill out a form, that form would be delivered, then to a sales rep, the sales rep would then try to call them back. That could be days or weeks before you actually get a connection there, then they're doing they're discovering their qualification calls, then sending it to an AE. Now, we were capturing them while they on the site, while the questions were fresh in their mind. The inband agent was able to pick those up right away, qualify them in real time, and then book a meeting with the AE; so you know, we talked about compression of the sales cycle, it boasted that, but it also improved our conversion rate when it was in the hands of the AE.
Matt Langie
Yeah, so kind of rifting off of Jared's example, the customers in the Apple Store, if you will, and your agents, and drift in AI combined, we're able to spot that behavior, "Okay, that person's got the Apple Pencil in their hand, let's go engage them in the right way". And so really identifying that intent, and then leveraging that intent, and then delivering the right experience. Whether they're there for support, or whether they're to buy you are able to ultimately drive those. I mean, amazing 400% increase in conversion rate, just in the first 90 days. It almost seems impossible achieve that, but then, as you think about machine learning and AI, and being able to do that at scale, kind of driving that website visitor to the right experiences. I think it's estimated that that's the win.
Jared Fuller
Now, when you think about what we did, it actually, it ends up making sense, like the opportunity was there, we just weren't being able to capture that opportunity.
Matt Langie
You had your blinders on in a way that you couldn't see it and Drift and Lift AI enabled you to see who's here to buy, and who's here for help, and be able to direct them to the right experience. That's awesome.
Jared Fuller
Well, for us, I'll just close on this, the one thing that we find that works the best for us, and it's a very simple concept, but sometimes hard to execute on is listening to your buyers, listening to your audience, right? And this gave us the ability to listen in real time, being able to respond to what we were hearing, and then be able to meet their needs right away.
Mat Langie
Yeah, and I think that's a key point, that real time aspect of, if someone's walking into your store, if you will, with a credit card in hand saying, "I'm here to buy". If you can remove those blinders and identify those people, clearly, you're going to have some great success behind that. John, we actually had a couple of questions, and maybe Lise or Jared, you as well, John, the first one was, "Do you optimize your drift chat within your organization? Did you use a an outside implementation team"? How did that work, I guess just technically, mechanically, and relationship wise?
John Walker
So we work with lift AI, so they've been through us all the way through. So we now have an ongoing service agreement with them, because we're not chat experts. We don't pretend to be chat experts, so we do rely on their expertise, and it is paying off for us. So we started with weekly meetings after implementation just to go over the metrics, listened to what those behaviors were, how can we adjust our playbooks? How can we adjust the initial questions? We're asking how to flow those through? What adjustments do we need to make in terms of high intent versus medium, and then based on doing that, we've pretty much seen week over week improvement since the beginning of the program.
Mat Langie
Yeah, so lift is both a technology solution and a service offering on top of that, to really get the most out of your Drift investment?
John walker
Yeah, it has everything we needed.
Mat Langie
Awesome, I there is another question around, "Doe intend to correlate to MQL or SQL? Essentially, John, what are your thoughts on that, or Jared and Lise as well?
John walker
I have thoughts that would probably take another hour, so I'll try to summarize. Just in terms of the MQL, SQL model is something that we're trying to get away from, because what we're trying to do with sales is to create that singular journey that would go from marketing, to sales, back to marketing to sales, kind of all the way through the buyer journey and create a better experience for the customer. But it is translating in terms of, when we get a high intent person delivered to our inbound lead Rep, they qualify them. We know that it is a valid opportunity, and we're then able to create that opportunity within Sales force and that writes down MQL to mark out.
Matt Langie
Yeah, okay, that's awesome. Jared, do you want to weigh in on some of these questions as well?
Jared Fuller
Yeah, so intent is a pacts term and b2b today; because intent can mean things like in market accounts. Intent can also mean things like behavioral intent, right? The intent that someone's demonstrating on the website, through their actions, through what content they're engaging with. Intent though, I think is what is really important, it is a signal that should inform how you take the next best action or recommend the next best action. So then an MQL-SQL is typically like a handoff point, the intent is kind of like a predecessor to that. Whenever we think about intent, and the interface between drift and lift AI, we're thinking about, how do we design conversations based on where they're at. And the point at which someone is having a conversation and they're qualified by whatever term you know, want to use, that's where there's kind of like a bifurcation. Intense is about, how do we prioritize this buyers experience, and then whether it's an MQL, SQL., MQA, whatever, that's at the point where someone's already engaged in a conversation and qualified themselves to the next step of the process.
Mat Langie
Yeah, no, I love to continue this dialogue and q&a, because I know we have a number of other questions from the audience. Before we jump into the audience q&a, I did want to let you guys know that because you're attending this webinar, and spending your valuable time with us today, Lift AI is making an exclusive offer to you if you visit, lift AI dot com forward slash revenue, there's a free revenue assessment where the lifted it will come in and identify what some of these opportunities. Maybe you have a 400% conversion rate improvement you have, you could identify for your chat. So I just want to offer that to you guys before we jump into the audience Q&A, and I'm seeing some questions here. I'd love to direct with some of you guys. I think one of the ones that seem to be a common question, maybe Lise we'll start with you is, "How does Lift AI integrate with Drift? How do you guys work together both technically, and then maybe even from a service level"?
Lise Reddick
Yeah, sure, I think we've got a great relationship with Drift. We're always happy to be working with them. So from a services perspective, we'll definitely come in and help people with their implementation, redo playbooks, and a number of different things. For the Lift AI product itself and the machine learning is actually a really simple integration. So there's JavaScript that we put on your site, and with Drift, it's simply read a cookie. Drifts got some really great targeting capabilities inside their playbooks, so you can read a cookie; you can set the values that you want. That's one really quick, easy way. The API's will also if we if you want to write them into a contact record, so both technologies are very open from an API perspective. So probably you're talking five-minute implementations, right, from an integration perspective, yeah.
Mat Langie
Very cool, and again, I think the key takeaway that I'm hearing is that, in real time, we can identify intent of an anonymous visitor. I don't have to know who they are. I don't have to do lookups and zoominfo data, parsing or what have you. But based on the existing website behavior, this kind of machine in Lift AI can identify that intent in real time of the anonymous visitor, and then direct them to the right experience, indirect whether it's let's send them to a sales rep, a live person or somebody, send them to a chat bot through a support request, possibly.
Lise Reddick
Yeah.
Mat Reddick
Is that a good summary?
Lisa Reddick
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Mat Reddick
Awesome, I think, looking at some other questions here. Again, maybe Lise we'll start with you, and I'd love to turn to Jared and John, even. How do you do it as a business? How do you decide what high intent is like? How do you develop what that character looks like, particularly, if you're using Drift and Lift AI in a business that may be new to both of you, or a vertical segment, for example?
Lise Reddick
Yes, that's a really good question. We get this question a lot, and I think what people are used to in the market, there are a lot of different intent tools out there. What they're doing is, there's a group of marketers that are coming together, understanding their business, and then looking at certain behaviors and assigning a weight to them, right? Somebody looks at this content, or that content, or reads the white paper, does this thing, we'll assign different weights, and at the end, we get a score, and that's what that we think a high intent visitor is based on those behaviors.
What's different about machine learning is machine learning has been fed, billions of profiles in its history, and it's learnt. What that looks like? So it's not anybody's opinion, first of all, and second of all, it handles all the one-offs, right? So one of the things we were doing some work with Norton, a while back, and we're doing this analysis of how people were navigating through their site, and there's like, 77,000 unique journeys through their website, and that was just pages. So never mind, you start looking at how long did they consume certain content? Where did they come from? What campaigns were they exposed to? Do we have any identity information? So you start throwing all of those variables in there become really unruly to manage. So the way we're looking at, first of all, it's behavioral intent, right? Jared was talking about different types of intent. The intent that we're using is behavioral, but it's machine learning-driven. It understands what all these one-off scenarios look like, and be able to say, this looks like a buyer, right?
And, when somebody was asking the question about, "Is intent to MQL"? It's a signal to whether or not what probability do we think that person is going to likely become at MQL and SQL? And so, you know, that's really how we've approached intent; I think companies approach it in a lot of different ways, but that's the approach that we've taken. That's left to add.
Mat Langie
Yeah, Jared, I'm seeing a question from Kevin again. So within drift, you would set the targeting for various ranges of intent score, utilizing lift AI, and then they'd be shown specific playbooks based on their score. Maybe tell us a little bit about how you see it working?
Jared Fuller
Yeah, I think actually, that's probably a pretty good way of thinking about that. Kevin, it is to some degree a playbook prioritization model and engine based on that visitor intent. So the simple way of thinking about this, and kind of like the Drift old world is like, maybe it's someone that's a returning visitor to the pricing page, right? So that behavior kind of compounds, pricing is obviously high intent. You're further along in your buyer's journey, or you at least have some expressed intent, because you're thinking about how can I pay for this thing, but a return visitor to the pricing page, that's expressed intent, times two. So you can start to think about this in terms of people coming to your pricing page, you don't want to flood them with a sales heavy message right away, because you might scare them off. They think, "Oh, gosh, they're going to try to sell me right now", but perhaps, return visitors on the pricing page that might have clicked into certain plans, etc., have a different level of intent. They're probably getting too specific questions around pricing or something that's not clear. So you might want to actually have, and think about how you can take their journey and deliver a different message. I might say something like, "Hey, welcome back to the pricing page", so that, "Hey, welcome back", things must be getting serious or something's not clear. Quick question, I can engage them kind of a little bit differently than someone I might, who had just been there for the first time. So I think that's a fair way of thinking about intent.
Matt Langie
That's great, that's awesome. I know, we've got probably about a minute left. So again, I want to invite you in the audience, you can use the chat function or the Q&A function here in the webinar panel, so feel free if you have other questions. I am seeing a couple more here. Jared, back to you, what's the difference between, bots, chat bots, and conversational AI? Maybe help distinguish that a little bit for our audience here.
Jared Fuller
Yes, chat bots are decision trees, in the simplest level. So we think of this in terms of workflow, and then conversational AI is natural language. It's actual artificial intelligence; and maybe the simplest way of thinking about this is, decision tree bots are for people that don't know what they want. Do you see what I'm saying? They don't know what they want. They come in and you're kind of helping guide them generally on these wider paths to the thing that they might actually need, whereas, conversational AI is really about getting people the answer.
