As a Conversational Commerce as a Service company, our founders at MarketLinc help global clients maximize site conversions and revenue through a combination of AI, chatbots, and live sales agents.
For the last 15 years, they have been selling online on behalf of some of the world’s top brands. To succeed, they have influenced over 650 million web visitors, profiled 1 billion web visitors, and engaged with over 14 million customers in Live sales engagements.
In that time, they learned what it takes to make Conversational Commerce a resounding success - both for clients and their customers. They also built a treasure trove of data-driven intelligence and insights.
The truth about Conversational Commerce
The promise of conversational commerce is that it makes it easy for prospects and customers to engage with brands without the need for human intervention. Fueled by this promise, the experts at Business Insider expect that in 2020, 80% of enterprises will use chatbots.
Chat is steadily becoming more lucrative than other options. In a current study by E-tailing Group, the amount of US consumers using live chat to interact with sellers showed an increase to 59% compared to 54% last year. The study revealed that customers believed queries were answered satisfactorily immediately (77%) and the efficiency of live chat as a communication method is excellent and effortless (52%).
But how satisfied are the users of chatbots? The short answer: It depends.
According to usabilla.com survey, 46% of Internet users in the US would rather receive online support from a live person, even if the chatbot can save them a lot of time. As a result, the research showed that 58% of respondents believe that chatbots alone were not as effective as expected.
What about Chats and chatbots for online selling?
The challenge is truly more pronounced when it comes to sales. Online shoppers who want information about purchasing are much more demanding and much less patient than someone looking for customer support. Prospective buyers are just one click away from going to the competition.
The scary part: Forbes recently reported that the simple disclosure of chatbot identity at the start of the machine–customer conversation reduces purchase rates by more than 79.7% - when consumers know the conversational partner is not a human, they are curt and purchase less because they perceive the bot as less knowledgeable and less empathetic.
The solution: deploy Live chat intelligently to improve conversion rates and increases sales.
A study by Marketing Power revealed that customers who used ‘live chat’, i.e. chat with a human, are 3X more likely to buy the products because of the experience created by a direct and effective method involving the human touch. Similarly, a study by emarketer.com found that more than 60% of consumers would return to a website offering live chat.
And results get better over time: the same study found that online buyers who had used live chat with a human were more likely to make online purchases at least once a week (40%) than buyers who had never chatted (22%). Respondents who hadn’t used live chat were likely to be infrequent online buyers, with 36% making a purchase less than once per month compared with 18% of chatters.
After 15 years, the team at MarketLinc know all of this to be true. But at scale, there is a big catch.
MarketLinc used chatbots extensively and have pushed their capabilities in a sales environment to their limit.
But here is the catch: when faced with hundreds of thousands of web visitors simultaneously on a website, how can marketers make sense of all this data and put it into action? They can’t hope to connect every web visitor with a high-converting live agent.
Specifically, how can marketers…
- Identify a good Chat prospect from a bad one in real-time?
- Know which anonymous website visitor should interact with a live agent, which one should interact with a chat bot, and which one should be directed to Support?
Until now, without a way to proactively predict in real-time the sales potential locked in each and every online chat, Live sales agents have been thrown all Live chats, leading to lots of unhappiness: wasted time, low sales conversions, and lots of revenue left on the table.
To solve this problem at scale, our founders added a layer of intelligence to chat, and together we developed a machine-learning algorithm called Lift AI.
Right out-of-the box, Lift AI is able to:
- Score all anonymous web visitors in real-time (even if they're known to your ABM tool!)
- Immediately surface high buyer intent scores to Sales agents
- Instantly filter out low buyer intent scores to bots/self-serve (totally bypassing Sales team)
- Predict what treatment of bot, live chat and self serve will work best for each visitor
Lift AI, PointClickCare were able to increase the leads through their website by 168% in just one month:
“We chose Lift AI based on their proven machine learning model and extensive experience in sales chat optimization. The combination of Lift AI’s targeting model and chatbot optimization enabled PointClickCare to realize a 168% increase in qualified leads from chat in the first month!
- John Walker, Director Demand Marketing at PointClickCare
Bonus: Lift AI integrates in minutes with all major chatbots in the market today.
Today, Lift AI’s expertise is open to all digital marketers who need to improve the performance of their chat solutions and generate significant incremental revenue from the traffic already on their site.
