Summary
Customer Experience in the new world. The Tata Communications’ chatbot gives a new spin to conversational marketing and helps the customer understand and solve their doubts while evaluating the portfolios most suited to them. Result, ironically, is 50% increase in leads. And more importantly, the quality of leads has improved by 45%.
Challenge
As an enterprise B2B player, Tata Communications has a vast portfolio offering personalised solutions to multiple industries and regions. Our website caters not only to customers but also other primary and secondary stakeholders. Moreover, the pandemic reduced the possibility of in-person interactions and moved audiences online. As 70% of the content is sourced from the vendor and analyst websites’ (Forrester), it was important to come up with a solution that not only helps the user find content easily, but also to provide users with most relevant content, helping them move them ahead in the journey without disturbing the entire website’s dynamics for other stakeholders.
Objective
Easy discoverability - 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. We wanted to bring in the relevant content pieces for these varied customers during different stages of their website journey. Personalised content recommendations - For our known customers, we wanted to provide them personalised content based on their current stage in the sales cycle. Discovered content - For our new or anonymous customers, we want to first understand their content needs and then provide them with tailored content recommendations instantly.
Strategy
We segmented the audiences in a pyramid structure so as to cover the entire audience group and to narrow them down to ‘segment of 1’. The parameters for segmentations were region as the broadest parameter (Americas, India Mecca, APAC and Europe) followed by industry (such as ITITES, Manufacturing etc) and then by the organisation. The permutations of these parameters provided us with our segment. For example, A CXO/CTO from an IT company “x” based out of Americas becomes a ‘segment of 1’ for us as Americas - ITIES - x. This ‘segment of 1’ is then mapped to the portfolio most suited for their needs. The three pronged distribution strategy then followed this segmentation structure. The chatbot followed the person across the website in a non intrusive manner providing relevant information answering the question the user might have to understand the portfolio thoroughly. This not only helped in increasing the engagement of the visitor, but also helped us nudge the customer ahead from the consideration/evaluation stage. The success of the strategy was not only how niche can we get with segment of 1 but also how can we scale this segment of 1 to a larger audience group. Our backend integration helped us make this entire process automated and seamless. The numbers backed our process and it was a success.
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. We also observed that chances of conversion increases when a person accesses a resource. 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%
