For B2C marketers, one of the most promising trends of the past 12 months has been the emergence of the chatbot. And now these chatbots may be making their way to the B2B marketing world. They offer a way for brands and companies to have 1-on-1 interactions with their customers. If you’ve never encountered chatbots in the wild, think of them as simple AI systems that you interact with via text messages.
Marketers have already experimented with these sales chatbots in an extraordinary number of ways. They have built bots to answer questions, make purchase recommendations, help to process orders, send shipping updates and hold engaging conversations with customers. The White House has experimented with bots, and so has Uber. On many e-commerce sites, it’s almost expected that some cheery bot will pop up and offer to help you with your purchase decision.
In terms of the B2B world, though, where do chatbots fit in?
Here are just a few of the ways that B2B marketers might be able to integrate them into a broader strategy:
1 – Use them to answer basic questions about your company
2 – Turn them into knowledge base bots for VIP customers
3 – Use them as “product wizard” bots
4 – Deploy them as customer service bots
5 – Use them to make purchase recommendations
6 – Use them to help process orders
You can immediately see how bots might be able to help move prospects through the sales funnel. Bots might be able to help members of the marketing team qualify leads. In some cases, bots might be able to nudge customers to make a purchase – all without the need for a human sales representative!
In a base case scenario, a chatbot could just answer the FAQ found on your website. In a more advanced scenario, a chatbot might learn over time how to deliver more and more relevant responses, depending on who is asking the questions. Building on a stable core of questions, it would then be possible to add in more and more functionality. That’s how you transform a basic customer service bot into a product wizard bot or a knowledge base bot.
And, as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more and more powerful, you’d start to see some powerful AI-powered bots, each with a specific brand personality and capable of coming up with original responses, not just a bunch of canned answers. You might even give your bot a name, so that prospects and customers feel like they are conversing with a real person.
Instead of tweeting at brands on Twitter, you’d be interacting with bots. Instead of asking Siri questions on your iPhone, you’d be conversing with bots. And, instead of giving voice commands to Amazon’s Alexa, you’d be asking bots for advice or to fulfill certain commands. That’s the big picture view of how chatbots might eventually cross over into the B2B marketing world. There’s some thought that chatbots might take over digital marketing in 2017, so it’s important to stay one step ahead of this trend over the remainder of the year.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.