Jendrik Höft
Co-Founder @ Spectrm
75% of businesses say artificial intelligence allows them to move into new channels and ventures. Conversational marketing chatbots are one of the best ways for businesses to adopt AI and use it to drive growth.
AI-powered marketing bots enable brands to leverage automation to talk directly with customers at scale and connect in a more human and conversational way.
Many brands make the mistake of using basic chatbots. These can guide customers through decision-trees but often don’t increase ROI because they result in poor experiences when customers diverge from the scripted path. They don’t collect declared data about your customer preferences and intents that can be used to improve your chatbot. In the end, this means they don’t delight customers with personalized experiences that drive conversions.
Only marketing chatbots that are driven by machine learning and natural language processing can do that.
Machine learning is an application of AI that uses algorithms to parse data, learn from it, and make predictions. Natural language processing is a subset of machine learning which makes sense of human language to structure and organize it.
General natural language processing is useful for generic intents such as telling you the weather or helping to find a city. Not for specific customer questions. Using it can negatively impact the customer experience, marketing ROI, and your bottom line.
Domain-specific NLP for marketing bots learns how your specific brand’s customers speak. It’s unique to your brand, customers, and goals. This is critical because each business has distinct customer intents and buying journeys. Niche data is hard to come by, and you may not have a lot of message data to train the bot initially.
Out-of-the-box NLP solutions aren’t good enough when it comes to automating one to one conversations with your customers. Better customer experiences and marketing performance relies on domain-specific NLP.
Advanced machine learning and conversational intelligence tools are how you can get there easily. This article outlines three reasons that your brand needs a chatbot with better machine learning and NLP technology.
1. Your customer intent data is not generic
Every customer segment is different. Extremely different. That means marketers must be able to accurately understand specific customer intents in order to automate one to one conversations that get results. Unfortunately many chatbot platforms use generic approaches to NLP, if they even have NLP at all. These simply can’t be used to significantly improve conversational marketing efficiency, acquire new customers, and delight people with accurate and tailored conversations.
Your customers have unique intents when they engage with your brand. How are you to make sense of this? Regular chatbots only go so far.
NLP-powered chatbots are capable of identifying specific intents and understanding customers in different contexts. They can be trained to continually make more accurate predictions and match appropriate responses. This is essential as 59% of customers say that personalization influences their shopping decision.
Spectrm conversational chatbots focus on purchase intent and guide customers through a conversion journey. They extract entities from the conversation to achieve this. Entities such as “sneakers” and “Adidas.” These entities can even be filtered down by size, colour, and other attributes to suggest the most relevant products from a catalogue to the customer. The chatbot is capable of following up with missing information such as a sizing guide and asking if they’d like to keep browsing.
NLP-powered chatbots help identify the most important things your customers are saying. They enable you to match the intent in those messages with product catalogues and content feeds to recommend things in real-time. Or provide the most relevant information to customers when they need it most.
Every brand is different. It’s essential that you have a chatbot capable of mapping customer intents to conversations that generate value for your brand specifically.
2. Better intent classification generates more conversions
RedBull wouldn’t use the same intent data as Monster or Unity 3d. They require domain-specific intent. Intent developed for their niche market and customers. Intent that is classified by analyzing very specific scenarios and conversations.
The problem for many businesses when they launch a marketing chatbot is a lack of data. You have very little messaging data to start with. How can you possibly know all the various ways customers will essentially ask for the same thing?
“Show me some shoes.”
“I want to see your sneakers.”
“Got any kicks?”
“Where are your shoes?” 👟
You get the idea. There are hundreds of ways to say the same thing. If you don’t have data on these variations, it’s hard to create a chatbot that can understand how your customers actually speak.
Generating variations with machine learning solves this by better classifying intents and creating more accurate data much faster. At Spectrm, we do this specifically for your brand. So you get domain-specific NLP capabilities quickly.
This is achieved through a type of machine learning called generative adversarial networks. Systems of machines designed to train each other. It is capable of taking a brand’s limited data to predict over one million variants and match it to relevant responses. It’s a way of generating a lot of data from very little. Very fast.
It means you can accurately respond to customers. You can give customers the best suggestions. You guide them from discovery to conversion. Marketers who personalize web experiences see a 19% uplift in sales on average. When it comes to marketing chatbots, that uplift can be even more significant.
3. You don’t touch a single line of code to train your chatbot to get smarter with Spectrm
Creating an NLP-powered marketing chatbot in-house is extremely resource-intensive. In fact, 40% of executives say the biggest obstacle to AI is that it’s too expensive. It requires large amounts of engineering resources to train the models and continually iterate. It can also take up to one year to complete. And your models are likely to be outdated by the time you reach the market.
We have taken a holistic approach at Spectrm. Our conversational marketing chatbots collect data and are paired with an easy to use interface and assistant. Generative adversarial networks are capable of taking limited data to predict over one million variants and match them to relevant responses to lift conversions and improve customer experiences.
It’s an ongoing process. The more data you get in. The more variations we are able to train with the approach. The more accurately you respond to customers in automated real-time conversation.
Marketers can easily optimize their chatbot and understand customer intent without needing to code. Our tools are designed for anyone on a marketing team to easily log in and train their bot in a few clicks.
It’s the best way for marketers to use NLP-powered chatbots for driving conversions, gaining better insights than competitors, and responding to evolving consumer behaviour.
Final thoughts on advanced NLP-powered chatbots
Regular chatbots try to extract basic information from customers or they just push them through a simple decision-tree. That might be sufficient when it comes to limited customer service. When it comes to marketing, you risk alienating your audience before they become a customer.
Chatbots driven by proprietary machine learning and NLP like Spectrm’s focus on exceeding customer expectations and driving conversions at scale.
Our conversational marketing platform helps marketers collect domain-specific customer intent data. And a ton of data on their unique needs and preferences that is actionable from right within the platform. Spectrm bots are trained to continually make more accurate predictions which results in better customer experience and increased revenue.
Creating a truly conversationally intelligent chatbot used to be a resource and time-intensive mountain for marketers to climb. At Spectrm, we’re making that technology accessible to marketing teams so they can quickly launch and optimize chatbots that have a big impact on their marketing ROI. You don’t touch a single line of code and our chatbots get smarter the more you use them.
Get in touch with one of our experts today to see how Spectrm can help your brand scale with marketing bots and understand customers better than ever.
