Podcast: Conversational AI with a human-first approach

A few days back, I got a chance to be on a Podcast presented by Ryan Lester who is the Director of Customer Engagement Technologies at LogMeIn. In this episode of their podcast series, I talked about data, conversational marketing and AI.

You can listen to the podcast here.

I’m also providing a quick rundown of our conversation in case you’re in a hurry.

Approach for leveraging your data

The amount of data that marketers or salespeople have at their fingertips to play around has exponentially increased.

There is so much data that is coming into the marketing automation platforms and CRM tools that getting insights out of it has become the need of the hour.

And there are a few technologies which are trying to make sense out of all this data by getting it together and play around lead scoring and then work on something that is easier for the sales and marketing team to engage with their prospects and customers.

All these technologies that can layer on top of the data is all dependent on how good the underlying data is.

So if you ask me, where should a company start with their AI or customer engagement experiences, then I will say the first thing that you should look at is — How can I make my data better?

On an average, 2 to 3 percent of the data in a CRM get outdated every month; which is 25% of all your CRM data is getting outdated every year!

New ways companies are engaging with their prospects and customers with conversational experiences

The world has already moved ahead with real-time conversations. But the B2B market is kind of stuck at asynchronous conversations, which means all conversations happen on emails.

So you go to a website, you sign up on the signup form, they put you into a nurturing campaign, and then they bombard you with emails. That is the common pattern almost everywhere.

You spend tons of money to push people on your website. And when they are on your website, you push them away with sign up forms.

This is like telling somebody who walks into your store — ‘We don’t have time for you now so why don’t you provide your information on that form and we really get in touch with you on a call 2 days later’. How ridiculous?

But I think the reason for this is if everybody starts talking to you 1:1, there is no way in which a sales or marketing team could manage that kind of conversation volume.

That is why people wanted everybody to get pushed into emails so that they can respond when they can, which is where I believe that AI is going to play a very strong role.

What AI gonna do here is assess, understand and qualify the prospect. That could be totally based on internal data and third party data. Or it could be by leveraging a conversational marketing platform like Insent.ai

Implementing a human-first approach

Most of the bots are still rules-based engines with very minimal use of AI. And there is a reason for that.

The problem with AI is even if it works 99% of the time, there would still be a small possibility where the bot could give stupid responses like below.

B2B companies wouldn’t want to take this chance because of large ACV associated with the account.

So people would rather have a rule-based engine, which absolutely behaves the way you want it to behave.

The way folks at Insent.ai are handling this problem is to adopt a human-first approach.

We assess the prospects when they are on your website based on a lot of the signals that we have including your internal systems, reverse IP, and browsing patterns.

We then qualify the prospect based on the prospect score and send an alert to the sales and marketing team like — ‘Hey, Amy from SAP is browsing on your website, and she just jumped on the pricing page, you might want to start a proactive conversation.’

And if the sales executives are not available at that time, then the bot takes over and set up a meeting with the prospect making sure that conversation keeps moving down the funnel.

And that’s a great example of a continuous handoff between AI and humans.

So I think in the next two to three years, we are going to see a big change in the B2B marketing space where people will adopt the human first conversational marketing strategy which is completely assisted and powered by conversational chatbots.