Summary
Sales adds, Sales accelerates and the quality of leads. The trifecta of challenges for any website owners of a B2B enterprise company. But with a new spin to conversational marketing, Tata Communications' chat bot solves for all three by cutting through the clutter while providing relevant and personalised content helping the customer understand the portfolio most suited to them more effectively without actually pushing for leads without knowledge of the portfolio.
Challenge
The pandemic has heightened the importance of digital for every sector, especially B2B enterprises such as Tata Communications. This provided us with a unique opportunity disguised as a challenge. 1) How do we capture new leads in an organised manner without knowing the customer for an enterprise brand that has a vast portfolio offering personalised solutions to multiple industries and regions and a corporate website that caters to not only the customers but also other primary and secondary stakeholders. And, 2) How do we nurture an existing lead coming on our website so as to move them ahead in their journey. A parallel focus was also on the quality of leads. Moreover, a prominent user behaviour that has been the achilles heel for marketers was the consumer need for a conversational, "non-salesy'' and 1:1 personal communication and touch.
Objective
Sales additions (new leads) - Our customers evaluate different virtues of our portfolio differently. Some may value customer service more, while some may value the scale of our preposition more. And since Tata Communications values the personalised solution for each problem and proudly does not provide a standard one - size fit all solution, our lead capture needs to follow the pattern. Sales acceleration.(moving the existing leads ahead in the journey) - The spectrum we operate in has a huge lead cycle, some going on to almost more than a year. This requires constant nurture and regular top of mind activities. It is imperative for us to therefore understand what stage of the sales journey the customer is at and provide them impetus to move ahead in the journey.
Strategy
For sales addition (new customers) - A non- intrusive chatbot followed the customer across the website. The structure of the chatbot was detailed yet simple to navigate for the user. We started by understanding what they are there for, and provided answers instead of harping on getting their details. The answers that the customers received intrigued them more about the product, and raised a few more questions. Once we answered a couple of their questions, we asked them for their details if they required more detailed information. This lead was further nurtured with content relevant to their needs. The nurture process continued till the time they were ready to speak to our representatives or had clearly showed disinterest (in which case, they were purged.) For sales acceleration - We segmented our audiences based on the stage of their sales cycle and created chat bots with content mapped to those stages. The chat bots were strategically placed across the website with maximum visibility and most probable interventions. For our High priority targets (ABM) - We also built chatbots for our high priority accounts in a similar fashion, and created a separate downstream for them to alert the sales team of their behaviour.
Data
More than 80% of our visitors land on our home page, where they see a wide spectrum of services and solutions. But when they were shown the portfolio they are interested in on the home page, their engagement and consequently the conversion rate increased. The quality of the leads has not been up to the mark, in terms of the enrichment of the leads as well as the quality of the leads with conversion rate to becoming a customer was 2%. We also observed that chances of conversion increased by around 20% when a person accesses a resource. Furthermore, there is proof of concept that the conversational communication that answers the questions rather than fetching for leads also improves the quality of the leads. Chat bot is the easiest and most effective way to have a 1:1 real time communication with the customers. And the customer is already fully adapted chat bot as a technology. Infact, 9/10 people have used chatbot in 2021 atleast once. (source - tidio).
Solution
We integrated 5 separate and complex softwares/tools into one to create a data pool which allowed us to make the ‘segment of 1' a reality (drift, clearbit, salesforce,marketo and analytics). The reason why this was critical to our idea was because our audiences are divided into known and unknown visitors (known - who are in our database, were 35% and unknown were 65%). The known visitor data enrichment was done through marketo and the unknown visitor data enrichment was from clearbit. We used salesforce to enrich both the segments with sales funnel insights. The outcome data from drift was subsequently passed to all the tools again to repopulate and optimise the data. The lead capture was also segmented based on the importance of the lead. For example : CQL 1 were emails only for nurture programs. CQL 2 were phone numbers who needed consultation and sales enquiries. The leads were further segmented based on the importance of the lead, helping the sales team to understand the urgency and importance of the lead, hence breaking the clutter and prioritising the leads.
Results
2K people have conversations with our chatbot every month. This is 2.4% of all our users. The chances of conversion increases increases drastically when a visitor interacts with our chat bot (2%) as opposed to their usual website journey (0.2%) An average of 2.4k content peices were accessed by our visitors on a monthly basis through chatbots. 6% of all our conversations were for various personalised chatbots for various industries region and companies, which contributed to 10% of overall chat leads. This validates the importance of personalised 1:1 communications. 24% of visitors returned to the website when they had a conversation with chatbot as opposed to avg 12% of returning customers the website usually receives. This shows that our conversational chat bots have made the website experience seamless for our visitors encouraging them to keep visiting our website. We have captured 50% increased leads, and last year alone almost 20% of all digital leads have come through chat. Our quality of leads has also improved since we took a conversational approach. Increasing our lead to customer ratio by almost 35%
