Chatbot Messaging and Digital Communication with David Adleman

Welcome to the September 5th, 2018 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Digital, where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and all the fun stuff we get to do here at WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. I'm re-recording today's intro because During the actual live show, I had a couple of overzealous doggies decide to make their presence known and figured I would scrub them out. Although many of you that know me know that I'm a big dog guy, so it's probably not a surprise that my dogs decided to say hello. But anyway, you'll hear them referenced a couple of times throughout today's webinar, but I wanted to just get you a clean intro and welcome you to the show. Thank you for taking some time to listen to what we have to say today regarding chatbots and the new generation of communication, customer support, whatever you want to call it. I'm pretty excited to have David joining us today on the show. If you've got questions, you can by all means reach out to David directly. He's provided his information at the end of today's webinar, or just get in touch with me, eric@poweredbywsi.com, and I am more than happy to help see how we can go ahead and put chatbot technology to work for you and your business. With that out of the way, thanks again for joining us today here on Free Webinar Wednesdays, and enjoy the show.

I am pleased to be joined by Dave Alderman, formerly of ChatPath, now part of the Digital Airstrike world. David and I got to know one another through their work with our corporate office in Toronto, implementing chatbot technology to, I guess, capture and cultivate online visitors' conversations, answer questions as part of folks interested in learning more about WSI Corporate, those that are interested in maybe purchasing a franchise. And so David has been very kind and we put together a handful of examples for a lot of our banking customers and And kind of done some demos, but I thought since I'm getting a lot of questions from folks about chatbots and how they work and why you'd want to use them, I think a lot of the conservative banking folks hear chatbot and artificial intelligence and automation, and they immediately go to when telephone systems were automated with press one for this and two for that. Those obviously are not. very user-friendly or effective ways of doing automation, and a chatbot really is something much, much different than that. So David has shared his screen. It looks like we can see your chatbot messaging. David, myself, and my 2 dogs welcome you to Free Webinar Wednesdays. Thanks for joining us.

Pleasure. Thanks, thanks for having me, Eric. Appreciate it. Thank you, dogs, too, for sitting by and listening about chat.

So, yeah.

I'm, just a quick intro, I'm David Adelman from Digital Airstrike, formerly of Path. And as Eric mentioned, we implemented chat on the WSI corporate website, which is how Eric and I got to know each other. And I'm gonna talk to you about chatbots, how chatbots are used to engage, visitors or prospects online, and a little bit how that interplays with messaging, and ultimately how chatbots can be leveraged to increase business. I have some slides here that I'll go through and talk about that whole process. So basically, the, the way people engage with each other and with businesses has changed. People no longer prioritize telephones as a primary means of communications, both with each other personally and similarly now with business as well. The typical process for a client or prospect to engage with a business digitally has been like this, where The business is found online, either through search or social networks or advertising. Those ads typically will bring the visitor to a website. That engagement on the website is typically informational, where the person just sort of looks at the website, gets some information, and then if they're interested in more They'll— there's usually an option to call on the website or a phone number or email, or there's a web form where the information will be collected. Most people are not inclined to call, so they'll get the information they want, and some will fill out a web form. If that web form is completed, that will trigger an email process for the business to engage with that prospect. They'll send emails. They'll make calls, hit or miss with whether they connect. They'll get another follow-up email will go out to the prospect. Hopefully a call will get scheduled and eventually somebody will be engaged with that business. It's kind of a broken process. So what one of the things that chat and chatbots is doing is trying to improve upon that whole experience and that process to make it more efficient and to turn that visitor from a visitor to an actual client. So the first issue is that people just really hate filling out web forms and they don't really want to play phone tag with a business. It's not the primary way that people want to communicate. People do, however, now more and more love to engage with messaging. Messaging is one of the primary ways people communicate with each other, and more and more want to do this with businesses. Most— the average consumer has multiple messaging apps on their phone. They use many different messaging apps every week, and the average consumer sends more than 2 messages per hour, which is pretty impressive. So what does messaging actually mean? So when I talk about messaging, I mean website chat. So that's chatting with a business online on their website. Messaging also, it could be text messaging. Facebook Messenger is one of the most popular messaging apps out there. And then any messaging app. There's a lot of them that people use. So messaging has become the predominant and preferred way people like to communicate. 22 billion text messages are sent each day worldwide. Facebook Messenger, as I said, is the most popular messaging app with 1.3 billion users worldwide. This—

the point of this slide is really to drive home the fact that the primary means of communication and what people prefer is messaging, and businesses that aren't using it should Yeah, one of the things, if I can just kind of add my 2 cents there, myself and one of our team members attended the Social Media Marketing World out in San Diego earlier this year, put on by Social Media Examiner, and many of the social media experts there, when they were talking about where social media is headed, of course everybody was talking about live video and the importance of understanding things like digital advertising because organic visibility is starting to get throttled. But the one topic that I think took most attention there was chatbot technology, and a lot of people predict that within the next couple of years, chat and messaging-type applications on your mobile device are actually going to become more popular and exceed usability for just general social networking apps or other types of services because of the desire of consumers to interact directly with one another and to be able to talk right to to another business. And I can tell you from my own personal experience, if I go to a website that has chat, I'm almost more apt to use the chat functionality on that website than even trying to navigate through the menu structure or using the search function to find what I'm looking for. Call me lazy, but I like to have somebody on the other end just find what I'm looking for and point me in the right direction. So Another big reason why I really am trying to beat the drum on this, because I think this is gonna be something that a lot of different industries are gonna have to start paying serious attention to.

That's a good point, Eric. So, I mean, we actually do have a lot of clients that one of the primary ways they're using chat or chatbots is not necessarily to engage visitors or to convert leads, but actually to improve upon the navigability of their website, because it just makes— it's a much more intuitive way to present information and allow somebody to get sort of where they want to go. So the issue with not implementing some sort of messaging or even chat on your site or in your business is the low visitor-to-lead conversion rate, which that caused— you would have a slower than really necessary response time for leads coming in or for people coming in. You get a lot of people that aren't qualified. So one of the things that chat can do is qualify visitors on the website. And it presents itself, if you don't have messaging, as sort of reflecting poorly on your business being an outdated business. People are doing messaging with each other, business should be doing the same thing. So the main problem with just business implementing messaging is that there are many messaging channels. You want to have responsiveness 24/7, but it's very time-consuming and expensive to do that. There's a— the experience today with chat typically is live chat or chat on sort of hosted chat services, and it's not a very good experience because agents typically are not focused on the chat. They're doing multitasking, doing many different things. They can't provide answers to basic questions because it's, it's a third-party service that doesn't really know the business, doesn't really know how to answer the questions. Agents are not always attentive, and there's really high drop-off rates with this type of chat experience that's used today. So the solution to this is having some sort of intelligent messaging solution. That intelligent messaging solution really is something that combines power of artificial intelligence, such as using chatbots, with human intelligence. So you're able to engage people 24/7. Bots are one way that, and a primary way that intelligent messaging can function and function well. And how bots can help, they can do things like, as I mentioned before, qualify leads. There's ability to route conversations, so when you get somebody in communicating with chat, you can route that specific visitor to different people or to different information, is the ability to provide quotes with chatbots. Chatbots also allow you to implement a 24/7 service without actually having to man it. You can also book appointments through chatbots. You can answer frequently asked questions through chatbots. Chatbots can really do a lot. One of the things, sort of the side effect of having a chatbot, is you're empowering the individuals within the organization to do more. So that could be anybody from a sales rep to somebody marketing, finance department, etc. So every individual in the organization can leverage chatbots to improve upon their efficiency of their work. So the old way to engage with businesses and typically engage with clients, what I mentioned before, is a sort of roundabout way of sort of web form, phone call tag, email tag. The new way cuts a lot of that middle part out and drives visitors through the intelligent messaging platform directly to somebody that can help them right away, whether that's sales or customer support, HR. The path is made much more direct through using chatbots and intelligent messaging. It's also something that can scale very well since you don't necessarily have to have staff for every visitor that comes or every 10 visitors that comes. You can scale this with the automation of chatbots. Most people across all generations, which is somewhat surprising, but prefer messaging 3 times than face-to-face or phone communication. 89% of consumers prefer messaging versus phone and email. And most consumers, 90+% are satisfied when they're using a high-quality web chat. So this is just an example sort of path that somebody comes to, comes to website, gets serviced by a bot. Which basically partitions the person, gives them some choices, allows the person to ask some questions, and directs them directly to what they're interested in if that's readily available. Or alternatively, it can direct them to a person to help them. So it can do this sort of routing mechanism. You can also do not only web chat, but texting is another messaging capability where you can automate with chatbot. So you don't necessarily have to be on somebody's website. You could actually text the business, and that business response could be handled in an automated way through bots. So intelligent messaging platform, what I'm talking about here is something that incorporates all these features in terms of the different ways to communicate with website chat, text messaging, Facebook Messenger, etc. Allows routing of leads, routing of conversations, whether that's automated routing or direct to an individual, has that capability. And have that bot capability built in. The main thrust is engaging visitors and getting them into a conversation, providing some information, being able to qualify that individual, automating that whole process of qualification, and then capturing that person's lead by Either directly capturing the information through the bot or passing them through to a live person to capture that individual's information. And then the ability to integrate with different CRM systems that business may be using is also very valuable to directly sort of put that lead or that person into the system, into the CRM, and have that As a new fixed lead that you— that can be acted upon in the traditional way that business operates. So, with the engagement of this— engagement of the individual on the site, or whether it's through Facebook Messenger, it's important to make the availability of those different communication channels, whatever the visitor prefers, those should be available. When those visitors are engaged by the business, there should be some sort of guide in place where you're directing the visitor through the experience, not leaving it open-ended where they may not know the types of services or the types of solutions that are available. But there should be some information provided. Some sort of 2-way communication where you can provide some information and the visitor could provide some input as well. That makes it more engaging. This is just an example of a car purchase. So somebody comes on, an automated message will come up. Are you looking for a new car, used vehicle, look for a new car? Great, we have a ton of options. What's your name? So this All this sort of give and take, that actually, just that fact that there's this limited minimal engagement makes it far likelier that the person will go to the next step with either leaving the contact information or stay engaged and talk to an individual. We've seen anywhere from 25% up to 80% improvement in lead engagement or lead conversion by using this, even just this simple automated conversation flow over just having like a form fill on a website. So the other thing that can happen in this engagement is that when you can do this lead qualification at different points in the conversation where you can have notifications sent At different points, if the bot can't answer the question directly, you can send that over to— can also send that inquiry over to some information source like another webpage or another website to gather that information. And ultimately, you can direct that person to provide their contact information or even schedule an appointment through that system. So a little bit of a few other sort of chat stats. Chat on average improves conversions by 20%. So across board, this is a study by the American Marketing Association, which actually is a client of ours as well. Users of chat are 3 times more likely to purchase and make a make a buying decision through chat. 17% to 30% less expensive than using phone, so it's a fair bit of cost savings using chat over not having it. Follow-up emails sent after an interactive experience such as chat are 6 times more likely to be opened by the recipient. So Even if you don't collect that person's contact information, all the contact information, but that chat results in just an email communication, that raises that conversion rate even higher because the person is more likely to engage in that email conversation. So, in terms of why use chat, the engagement of prospects. More qualified leads can be captured, and then ultimately more sales are made through using chat, increasing your revenue. Cost goes down when you're using chat and chatbots. The automation it brings greatly reduces tasks, low-value tasks that are required. There's ability to filter unqualified leads, which reduces time required to process those. And then the whole workflow can be streamlined by using this chat and intelligent messaging platform. So I'm going to give you a couple of examples here and show you what it looks like. I'm just going to switch my screen for a second. Here's one example. This is a client of ours called FSB Lending. So they're implementing chat on their site. We've implemented this customized conversation flow here. They have just a couple of options here. We can customize this to be as many as of interest or of need by the client. But they have personal loan programs or other options or 2 selections. So if somebody comes to the chat, they click on personal loan programs. And they say, we'd be happy to help, name, email. So they ask for a little bit of information up front. Let's say David. Put in my name and email. Thank you. For more questions, you can customize your solution. How much do you want to borrow? So, this is— these are questions about personal loans. So, they give a couple of options. Is this to consolidate debt? I'll say no. Submit.

And as you're walking through this collection process, this is all customized at the client level. So this could be any question that the client would want to ask. Obviously, this is a lending solution, so we're asking a little bit of detail around loans and how much you want to borrow. But before you got into that area, if this were a bank, for example, you could ask some higher-in-the-funnel questions that like what sorts of services are you interested in? And somebody might be interested, you could give them technology and security, you could say loans, you could say deposits. And then as you get to the point in the loan tree, you could then be implementing these types of questions. But the backend, I think it's important to note, the backend is totally customizable based off of the conversation that you want to have with visitors either to your site or through text message or through Facebook Messenger. I think the other thing that I, I also believe is important, because I know a lot of senior bank executives have expressed the concern, at any point in this process you can also interject, I want to talk to a person, and be able to give them a quick exit. And then if it's during regular business hours, that can trigger somebody within your organization to be able to then take on that conversation and provide personal service. But over time, I think—

So each one of those steps could be a qualifier to maybe jump, have an individual jump into the conversation. And I'll actually show you that here, for example. So I go here. This is actually the backend. This is where we create the conversation flows. I have a lot of different ones in here. Let's see, a financial one. I'm gonna make myself available here. So you can actually set individual users of the system to be available or not and change the conversation flow depending on availability. So if I look at how this conversation We'll look on a website. Somebody goes into personal wealth, for example, in this specific case. It says, how can we help you today? Then put in a question. Looking for investment options. Great, let me go on a team member to assist you. One moment, please. Now you can see I have this popup here. So me being a— working in this institution, I get this notification. I click on the notification and it will take me directly to my backend. And it takes me to that conversation that's online. So I can see this conversation is happening. This person is looking for investment options. How much would you like to invest? So this conversation happens to be going when somebody's available to jump in. And so I can go back and look. And so that person on the website has seen David join the conversation. And then you can have this live conversation with that individual exactly at a moment when you wanna be able to jump in and have that live conversation with you. with that individual on the site. You can also set this up, the system up, in a way that doesn't leave the person hanging. So, for example, this is the way we structured the conversation. So, if somebody's available, go down this path. These are the— this is the conversation that happens. We trigger this notification, and then we have this wait time that will happen So that the person is not waiting on the site forever. So if the person that is going to jump in, or the agent, is available, they'll jump in. If they don't within, in this case, 60 seconds, the person will see on the website some message. This is also customizable to whatever you want it to be. So it looks like everybody's tied up at the moment. Please leave your contact details below. Back to you as soon as possible. And they were just prompting for contact information. You could also prompt here for book an appointment or book a call. So there's different calls to action that you could have and give different options for the person to either enter their information or book a specific day and time to have a conversation offline. So these— and these paths are really customizable. You can have as many sort of layers deep as you want. So for example, in this case, Somebody selects personal wealth. If nobody's available, it will then ask for another question. Which type of financial need do you have? Investment management, money management, et cetera. And these, we would, as part of the service, create these on behalf of the client. So it's all very simple for us to set up for you. We can also monitor the conversations. You can see the history of each person that's come in and the conversation that they've had. You can see maybe where somebody has left the conversation, and then based on that, we can update and modify the conversation to be even more engaging. We also track different information about the individual, keep track of where they are located, which conversation they're having, how many times they've been to the, been to the site. We can also keep track of what kind of individual they are, what kind of inquiry they are, whether it's a specific sales or prospect, whether they're existing customer, what kind of solution they're looking for, or what kind of service looking for. These can also be classified and trigger different notifications or be tied to different individuals to handle those specific inquiry types. So there's a lot of flexibility built into the system. You can do things like show different conversations to different audiences. So depending on where the person's located or how many times they've been to the site, you can show different conversations to them and make them specific. You can also make them specific for different pages on your site or different products. So there's a lot of flexibility built in to make it as engaging as it needs to be to convert those people coming to your site or those people that will engage with your business with SMS messaging or Facebook Messenger. So that's the majority of the overview there. I'm gonna leave it there for now.

Yep. We did, we did have one question that come through and— or that came through that I know the answer to, I believe, but I want you to answer that.

Okay.

There was a question about if, if it's after hours— how does it say— if it's after hours and nobody is available, can you still provide support through a mobile device?

If it's after hours, nobody's available. So, okay, so the short answer is yes. If by support you mean that if you want somebody to be able to respond from a mobile device to the conversation when it's after hours, you can actually respond from a mobile device whenever you want. So those notifications that are received by those individuals, agents, or personnel within the company, they can respond. They don't have to be actually on their website or on a computer. They can actually respond directly from a cell phone.

Yep, and that was one of my questions to tee up to make sure that we talked about. But given the fact that chat is such a mobile experience for most people these days, and a lot of our clients are now having somebody monitoring social media on their mobile device, yeah, because social media never sleeps, That very same individual could also be monitoring, and they might already be doing that for things like Facebook messages directly to the business's Facebook page. But now you could roll in the chat capability, and if somebody happens to get on the website or send a text message, you can provide that sort of service as long as you're comfortable doing that and you've got employees that are available.

So yeah, they can be from wherever they are. Exactly. So, so wherever they are, they could, they could monitor or receive messages on their mobile phone saying somebody's online or somebody's submitted this Facebook message to the business or sent this text to the business. So you can actually manage text conversations to the business from a central location using this platform. So you don't need to give out individual cell phone numbers of employees, the platform will handle that. So texts going into the business would all be sent through this platform and can be managed and responded to through a mobile device through the platform, not necessarily being a direct message.

Yep. One other thing that I wanted to make sure we talked about was the ability for the platform to send a proactive message out to people that have expressed interest? So I'm a small business owner and I'm interested in getting security updates because wire fraud or corporate account takeover issues are becoming a concern to me. As the bank discovers new issues or wants to send alerts, is the system able to then send those out through Facebook Messenger or SMS text updates or some other ways to communicate proactively out to the audience?

Yeah, so there's a way to send notifications through to the— not only to the individuals in the business to respond, but also to the people that have come, the prospects or the clients that have come to the site or have come or messaged the business to send them messages. So all that is basically all the information, their contact information, their cell phone or their Facebook message account or their email address, that's all tracked and kept in the system and can be used. to also proactively message them with whatever notifications you want.

Cool. Good. Well, those were the handful of questions that I had, and we did have one from the audience. So unless there's other questions that you typically get that maybe we didn't ask, and I don't know, like, but most, most of the time we get asked this question, and And I don't know whether one of those jumps into your head or not, but—

No, so the biggest question we do get generally is, well, I'd love to have chat, but I don't really have somebody to man the chat. I don't want somebody to be sitting there and use their time to— I want to pay for somebody to actually have to dedicate their time to this chat. And the answer is obvious to me and us in the that are offering the solution, but not obvious to everybody, is that the beauty of this is that you don't need an individual monitoring chat all the time. So it's basically a person to jump in when you want them to be able to jump in and only as needed to jump in. So you can structure the solution to be as automated as you need it to be. And only have somebody jump in or be able or need to be engaged live when you want it or when you need it.

Yeah, that's a good point. So a clarifying question. So let's say you and I both work at a company that has this and we have been logged in as customer service people and we get the notifications. So you don't have to actively monitor, but when somebody on our website wants to chat with us, You and I both get an alert on our screens that says, hey, somebody wants to talk to us. If I jump into that conversation and start taking it over, will you then know that Eric is part of the conversation so that we don't step on each other's toes?

Yep, I'll know, yep. So I'll get, those 2 things. I'll both get an alert, okay, Eric's jumped in, I don't need to worry about it. Or if I actually go to jump in, I'll see the conversation, With you already in it, and I won't jump in. So there's sort of a safety mechanism there.

Yeah, I know that's one of the concerns a lot of businesses have if they've got like an info@digitalairstrike.com that might go into a number of different individuals within the organization, and then they have to have some sort of an internal process to determine, okay, who's going to respond to this? Is it you?

Is it me?

And I don't know if you're already typing up the email to go back and I type something up, and then you potentially have Different information, hopefully not, but different people responding. So the fact that the platform's backend lets you know who's in there is also, I think, a really good tool. So that's a good point.

Yep, very good point. We, yeah, we accounted for that.

Cool. Good. Well, I think the question queue is clean. There's no other comments from the audience, so I will If there's anything else that you want to say in closing, we've got all of your contact information here. If you do get in touch with David, be sure to mention that you saw him on Free Webinar Wednesdays so he can connect the dots and know where you came from. We'd certainly appreciate that. And, uh, but anything else in closing on your part before we go ahead and end the show?

I just want to thank, thank you, Eric, for the opportunity to present on your, uh, Webinar Wednesdays and be happy to— I've enjoyed working with you and I've been happy that we've been able to help some WSI clients and know we can help a lot more going forward. And any questions, feel free to contact me directly and certainly let me know that you've been in touch with Eric or you found out about about Digital Airstrike through Eric.

Excellent. Good deal. Well, thanks again for joining us on the show. I will get the recording posted up and make it available for anybody else that wants to share it. And yeah, we'll look forward to seeing everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world on an upcoming show. Join us live, 1:00 PM Wednesdays Eastern Time. Until then, have a great week, everybody. Bye-bye.