As face-to-face meetings grind to a halt, finding ways to engage visitors to your website is essential. And chat is a feature that we are seeing more and more. ChatFunnels, co-founder and VP of operations, Billy Bateman shares best practices on using chat bots to increase engagement with prospects.
Chat and chatbots are augmenting the customer journey. Not only are they able to help prospects get answers to their questions, they also help companies qualify opportunities more accurately. The data proves that chat and chatbots are a great way to increase engagement and conversion rates.
Connect:
Connect with Billy on LinkedIn and check out his Chatfunnel’s website.
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter
Greg Dickinson: Billy, thanks for joining us today on the convenience economy podcast great to have you.
Billy Bateman: Awesome to be here Greg. I'm truly honored to be a guest
Greg Dickinson: Ah, cut it out cut it out Hey, so before we get started into the into the convenience economy and talk about that let's talk about Billy and your business. Give me a quick intro of what you what you've been up to what your what your business is all about.
Billy Bateman: Yes. So I'm one of the founders of chat funnels, and chat funnels is a conversational engagement platform. We've got live chat chat bots, use it to pretty much like engage with your customers on your website right away and get them to the right people in your company so that people get the answers. Now like, especially in the environment we're living in now where more and more the only touchpoint you may have with customers initially is is your website.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, yeah, that's why that's why, you know, you're not known each other for a while. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, because you're kind of on that, you know, on that on that edge where you've really got first hand knowledge of that what we call here is the convenience economy, right? where people want to be digitally on demand, and they want to do you know, things self service. So, you know, but help the audience understand, right? How do you sell to your, you know, kind of customers? What's your model of sales? That'll be pretty interesting.
Billy Bateman: Yes. So, I mean, we're still fairly new. We're two years into this. So it's always in flux, and we're always changing and tweaking things, but right now, if we actually get a lot of referrals from our customers, and you know, we just get right on the phone or a zoom call with them. But if you know you're coming in finding chat funnels for the first time on our website, we use our chat bot and our live chats. So, we use the bot to qualify people and book demos, and we try to get engaged with them right away. And we also have the sales team, anytime the bots, you know, chatting with somebody that that looks like they might be a qualified prospect. We use our own software to alert the sales team, let them know, hey, they haven't booked that demo yet. But it's looking good. If you're available, like hop on and just take over and start chatting with them. And we see a lot of success with that. We've actually, you know, we had forums on our site and using the using the bot, we have a 50% higher engagement rate where we actually talk to that person have some type of conversation using the bot as opposed to just regular forms to contact us.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, if you think about it, do what you're saying is that, you know, whether it's your customers I know you guys do consulting work as well whether it's your customers or people coming to you that want to buy people are very comfortable, right? opening up a chat window and beginning to, you know, ask you some questions or ask your site some questions, right? Because they're, they're autonomous, they're on their own. They're, you know, they're learning on their own. And that's what we see
Billy Bateman: A lot more of that
Greg Dickinson: Kind of happening in the world today. And I think you're on the cutting edge of that what we call self service, right? Your your buyers are saying, hey, I want to learn more about chat. Let me do it. And then you've you've given them an avenue as opposed to Hey, you know, I got to opt in I got to schedule this I'm going to schedule that are gonna give you my details. Just download a white paper, right? Nope, that stuff is working in that direction. So and you're seeing good success. You're saying?
Billy Bateman: Yeah, no, we're seeing we're seeing really good success with it. Our customers are seeing great success. You know, where our focus is sales and marketing but we also offer a feature set for for customer service. And you know, like getting People the answers they need right away using our FAQ bot. Our customers, they're using it love it. And then, you know, they go back to what you're saying with, hey, you know, it's the convenience economy. One of the great things about the bot is, it's not a level of commitment to where, you know, I'm gonna even chat with somebody on the website. Like, if I decide, like, I'm done, I'm gonna bail on the pot as an end user. It's a lot easier for me even even easier than you know, if a sales rep, I'm chatting with them and I'm like, okay, you know, Tanner, tell me about this and that, and then I'm like, I'm not really interested. I'm going to move on. You know, it's it's not as easy to do that. There's a there's a little more commitment. Once I've said, Yes, I want to talk to somebody. But it's a great way to just engage them initially. let them choose what they want to do, and help them find find the information they need.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, that's the key, right? I mean, what you guys have come up with is the fact that when you use The word convenience right if you make it convenient right for that prospect that suspect that buyer to your point right even down to support right if if someone you know no one goes to work every day and wakes up says I can't wait to enter some tickets today right that they're using a product they want answers right that right that second and what you're providing them as a convenient way to get it you know I read this article the other day that that blew my mind it was someone else's quote and he said McDonald's is putting kiosks in the lobby of their in their in the lobby of their restaurants as if fast food wasn't convenient enough right? I mean it it really is right driving that behavior seeing which is the the idea of I wanted to get things on my own. I don't want to opt in right now. I want things on demand if I want to know, you know, does chat funnels do x or do y i want to get that you get that answer so and really so within that prop within that that realm of the convenience right you guys don't really have a lot of forms, then it sounds like there are a lot of opt ins, you're just letting that you know your product drive, the inquisitive, you know, suspect or prospect or buyer to get the information they want, right on your website.
Billy Bateman: Yeah, we, we use use our own product. For most things on the site. Now, we still have a couple of forums in certain places because, you know, like, hey, if you want to sign up for the newsletter, all we need is your email, like, there's no need to chat with the by like, just throw your email in the form. There are some places because some people, they would rather fill out a form then talk to the bot like we were believers in the bot. We think it works better most of the time, but also like, we're more so believers in science and data. And there is a group though, that likes using the forum. So we still use a couple forms on our site. And we still get a few submissions, but the bulk of our traffic comes through the bot.
Greg Dickinson: Yep. And so what you've done is you've you've created For them the path of convenience depending on what they want to do, they like water, they pick the path of least resistance and you've you've you've reduced the friction is what you're saying. Exactly. Okay. Okay. Now what about so what about let's move it a little bit further down funnel right in the in the air, the area of you've got someone that's, you know, on the on the line, right? Or you're selling to them, or you've sold to them. Right. Have you seen, right? Have you seen a difference in the way you onboard? Have you seen more, you're using more digital or on demand stuff, even onboarding? Because if you think about, you know, it wasn't too long ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, you'd settle a company and they were allowed to have like one or two designated contacts, right. And it sounds like you're because you're using technology, you're saying, Yeah, well, we'll support those users across that base, and we'll continue to use our tools.
Billy Bateman: For sure. So, you know, when we onboard, we've got one or two main contacts for you know, getting it set up and all of the boring stuff to make Make it work on their site or in their product. But honestly, we we support everyone, sales teams end up using our product quite a bit. And so whenever we onboard a customer, we do a training with their whole sales team. And we're available to them via our bot in the product, they just, you know, click the Help button, and if they want to chat with somebody, we're there, ready to help them out and hop on a zoom call even to to you know, help them learn how to use a feature or troubleshoot something. Make sure it's working for them.
Greg Dickinson: That's fantastic. I'm Jackie so so it sounds like the old you know, you writing 30 pages or 3000 pages of quote unquote documentation that someone quote unquote supposed to read. Those days are over for you.
Billy Bateman: Yeah, I mean, we we still write that up. I wish it wasn't it. I wish it was over cuz, right. Nobody likes writing those. What we do actually is we make a lot of videos. So if you want to, you know, search our Help Help Center, and then you know, say, oh, how do I make a new bot? Well, we've, we've got a video, and it's gonna be, you know, one to five minutes for something more complex. walking you through, you know, okay, here are the steps, here's how I can test it. Here's how I can deploy it and get it on the site.
Greg Dickinson: You know, again, right? You've gone to that, you know, listen, you know, obviously Omedym right we're, we're I'm from that we're big, huge believers in video. It's a way for you to leverage you guys can you know when someone wants to learn how to do something, you know that they said the statistic is that 68% of all searches on YouTube are how tos right you when you want to learn something, gosh, reading a book, it you know, you could love to read but that's not how you learn software and how to how to build a chatbot like you just explained, right, that video. So again, right, it looks like chat funnels have said hey, when you're a suspect. Here's how you engage with us when you're a prospect. Here's how you engage with giving us options now that you're a customer, we can help you, you know, at any time via chat, you're trying to do something real quick, don't enter a ticket, jump on the chat and ask us a question. And we'll get to that question. Or we've also provided a series of libraries of videos that someone can can look at and learn.
Billy Bateman: Exactly, yeah. So if you're, if you're a customer, we we use our FAQ bot, you know, the first thing you're gonna, we're gonna the bots gonna ask is like, first, you know, like, Okay, do you have a, like a usability issue? Or do you want to submit a feature request? And if they've got a usability issue, we're going to use that FAQ bot to try and see if it can solve their problem. It does a pretty good job. But if they still, you know, maybe they need something more detailed. We give them that option to say, hey, do you want to chat with a member of the team and we'll just, we'll just jump right in and see if we can help them out.
Greg Dickinson: All right. Fantastic. Hey. So tell me a little bit about your, your experience. Right? One of the things I love about your company is you guys, you guys, really, you said this earlier science and data. So one of the areas, Billy, I think would be helpful to the audience has to understand some of the stats and some of the data you have, because you've, you've done a lot of implementations across, you know, not just your own bot, but other you know, other bots out in the leading and, and kind of tell us some things you've learned over the last two to two years doing what you're doing about, you know, the statistics or companies that have engaged in this, you know, the spot bots, and then and then follow that up with kind of what you you how you use data to help organizations to not make some of the mistakes that were made, you know, a year ago, right. I think that's another thing that you really bring to the table is, is the data that says, hey, you know, this is what you should do it and we know why. Here's the AB test that we did. We ran that's what you You brought us on board with that kind of knowledge. It was very helpful.
Billy Bateman: Yeah. So So we start started about a little over two years ago. And, you know, our goal was always to be a software company. But what we started out doing was was realizing, you know, a lot of software companies, they start out building product not knowing yet if that's going to be a fit. And there's nothing wrong with that approach. But, you know, we haven't raised any venture capital money. So we're bootstrapping this and we said, you know, let's take a more deliberate approach and work as consultants for it maybe three months, six months a year ended up we have a whole consulting business still as part of our as part of the business. But we started working with companies using drift and intercom mainly for their sales and marketing. And we realized working with them that the technology is good, it can work really well, especially for engaging people getting them engaged with the sales team for Live Chat or qualifying and booking demos in a lot of places, but nobody really knew how to use it well. And so, and we were still figuring it out. And we decided the best way to figure out what the right answer is, is just start running test. So we started running split tests on qualifying processes for our clients. And okay, you know, what's the question order for qualifying people? Should we be asking for the email first, third, last, you know, when should we ask them how big the company is? Or how should we ask them how big their team is or what integrations they're using that might matter to that client? So we just started running split tests and figuring out okay, how can we do a good job using this spot to qualify people and, and get the meetings that the sales team want because usually when when we would come in to any client, the sales Team is not a fan of the bot is is typically what we found almost across the board, especially if it's implemented poorly right off the bat and getting that sales team on on aligned with marketing so that they are also a fan of the bot and everyone's invested in like this really makes it better for us is is a key to being successful. So with one of our first customers inside sales now now is that they were using the bot to try and book meetings for one of their sales teams. And they were getting about 20 meetings a month that the team did not want. They they like when I came in. They and started meeting with them. They're like yeah, good luck trying to make the spot work because it just books crap meetings for me that no show or they're nowhere near qualified. We need to go back to fill out the form, have the SDRs column and qualify them Then put it on my calendar. And I was like, Great. Let's see if we can make this work. You know, like, I'm not, I'm not hired to, to make that process work. My job is to try and make this process work for you. And if it doesn't work, then yeah, go back to the old way. So within three months by running those tests, we were able to go from about the 20 meetings that nobody wanted to over 90 meetings a month that the team wanted, were pretty well qualified. And the nice thing that actually one of the sales reps said to us is they're like, you know, the bot doesn't have a quota to fill, like the SDRs. So either they're qualified, or they're not, and they're not gonna, like lean into it and be like, and I got to hit my quota. So I'm gonna let this one slide and let's put it on calendar, you know, yeah, the old,
Greg Dickinson: The old, the department's wrong, but the titles right, what's counted, right?
Billy Bateman: Yeah, so the bot has no quota, as long as We know what we need to qualify things. It's gonna you know, either it's qualified or it's not. And maybe there's like a gray area where you do just, instead of booking a meeting within a IE, say, hey, let's book a call with an SDR and actually have them dig in because they've been kind of do fall into this, this gray area. Um, some of the things we've learned just, I mean, I want to share as much as I can, is, you know, I wouldn't if you're qualifying people with the bot, I wouldn't go much past four or five questions. Ideally, like three to four questions in a qualifying process is great for booking sales meetings. If you know it takes a lot more than that. Maybe the bots not a great fit. But what uh, what it is a good fit for is if you do have a long, you know, a lot of things. You know, there's a point where you're like, hey, let's actually start bringing in the sales team. Now. And We've found that with our consulting customers that some customers there's a lot of information you need to know before booking with an A. But there's not as much that you need to know before it's worth having an SDR chat with them. So by using the bot 24 seven it could book meetings with Navy. But by putting flags into any of any of the bots where you're alerting those, that SDR team like, hey, this might be a qualified prospect prospect, chat with them. They've been able to up their contact rates and we're just having more conversations they're getting to people quickly, and then shortening their sales cycle as well. Right to where they're closing those deals faster than they traditionally have been doing. And just, you know, you've got to get to people right now. You've, you've said this, Greg, like, people want answers now. I'm a firm believer in it. Your product is great at helping people getting answers right away. I think the bob is another great way to just get people engaged on their terms and then you guys can strategically engage your sales people with those people as well. Yeah,
Greg Dickinson: I mean that's what it's all about. I mean it we live in a we're inundated with you know with technology in our personal lives from you know having having meals delivered that are you know that are cooked having meals delivered that need to be your laundry service your Amazon effect the Ubers Right. I mean, we just when you want a car you don't like call Yellow Cab anymore, you pick up your phone, right? If you want to book you go to Amazon and get it you don't go to you know, Barnes No, if you want to rent a movie, what do you mean rent, you just download it there, you're not going to you know, blockbuster and all that over the last, you know, 10 years that that technology that's really you know, made it more convenient. I you know, a CEO a friend of mine told me a story the other day, and he said Greg, I used to go to this last little shop to buy my ice cream before the you know the movies at night. He said locking up the ice cream, I guess they had a lot of shoplifting. But he said, Now I had to go get a clerk and get unlock it, it was no longer convenient, I went to a different store further away more expensive because it was convenient. And that's, you know, what your, what your business is all about is if someone is gone to taking the time to go someplace, it's because they had that 10 minutes or 30 minutes they want to get a few questions answered. And and then you know, for a lot of purposes the bot works and then when I'm at them does is kind of fault after that when you want to actually see the answer, not read the answer. But I think those two things all fit into the convenience economy and then what your you know that the data you your company has learned from Billy really puts you in a unique, you know, kind of position to to help people and I think what I like most about what you just walk through is the fact that what you're saying to the audience is Listen, you can go buy a lot of technology, but that's not going to solve your problem. What solves your problem is the proper use of technology. There's no silver bullet. I go by, you know a bye And all of a sudden now I'm going to get more extra why you got to do it. So I think that's, that's what's valuable. You're saying as we've gone through the pain of knowing AB order of the questions Who would have thought of that? I never would have. But you've thought through the fact that, hey, if you ask for certain information in a certain order, people are, you know, human beings are much more likely to to engage. So, hey, billion in closing here, right? What are give me a couple things that you think your the audience could, you know, should think about? And then, you know, and then where do they find you?
Billy Bateman: Yeah. So, if you're thinking about, you know, hey, how do I increase my website conversion rate or engagement rate, look at a bot. I mean, hopefully, it's us, you pick, go to chat funnels comm you can get a demo. But if we're not the best fit, I would look at getting live chat or chat bot on your site right away. And even if you don't have a big sales team, the great thing about the barley is you can automate them. You can set them up so that, hey, I may only have like one or two sales guys. I can't have them taking chats all day. Well, if you set it up the right way, they are only taking the real high intent chats and the bots doing the rest of it for ya. level. Yep, yep. And if if you're already using a bot, our consulting team works with the web. They're platform agnostic. And they work with everybody on best practices for for using bots for sales, marketing and customer success. If you want to continue the conversation with me directly, I'm really active on LinkedIn. So just shoot me a message on LinkedIn and I will get back to you. All right.
Greg Dickinson: Well, Billy, listen, I think this is valuable to the audience right? We're all about how can companies really start to embrace right if not all of them have this idea that you know, get it to your kids sooner or later that the the today's suspect prospect buyer customer, right is you know, the research shows that convenience is five times more Important in price and product. So this is where companies that adapt what you're talking about and have really been able to get out there in front and say, you know, maybe it's not going to close a deal day one, but it gives you that value that you now answered those questions for them. They asked a question you answer, they ask a question you answer. And when the day comes, they want to buy, they're gonna go to you first. That's what the research shows. And I think you're helping companies and you kind of backed all that up today. So thanks for being a guest here today. And for everyone, you know, you guys should reach out to Billy and we've been a customer of theirs and we know you know what, what they're all about and they deliver value. So, you know, our reference to billion is team for helping in this area that we call the convenience of accountability. Thanks a lot, man. Have a great day.
Billy Bateman: Thank you, Greg. Have a good one.
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