Rapidly advancing generative AI models promise to help scale marketing and sales functions by automating customer conversations. Are brands willing to trust digital assistants to take over the reigns for a part of the client journey?
Information management and storage company Iron Mountain adopted a gradual and surefooted approach to adopting digital assistants and making conversational AI a driver of engagement and revenue growth. As a result, the corporate improved customer engagement leading to revenue growth.
Digital assistants integrated with MAP
The latest digital assistants utilized by Iron Mountain aren’t a superficial or limited test. The company implemented Conversica conversational AI tools integrated with Iron Mountain’s marketing automation platform (MAP), Oracle Eloqua. This means the engagements with the digital assistants advance customers within the journey.
“We use the appliance in early stage conversations or initial engagement with an lively visitor to the web site,” John Hansen, senior director, field marketing at Iron Mountain, told MarTech. “Our objective is to handle the quantity of communications to redirect a visitor to the proper support team, or to qualify them for a sales opportunity.”
That means the conversational AI identifies intent based on what customers say. It uses this comprehension to respond intelligently to the prospect and to pass the prospect onto the correct human agent further down the funnel.
“We route visitors and potential sales leads to relevant conversation tracts, based on intent scoring, persona identification and product interest,” said Hansen.
Expanding conversational AI
Iron Mountain has taken a deliberate approach to expanding conversational AI capabilities for the reason that initial implementation with Eloqua in 2021.
“We added several skill sets in 2022 and 2023 to expand our usages of the platform,” Hansen said.
He added, “With a recent change to our website, we added Conversica’s chat features as a test in several European countries. Previously, we utilized chat functions only on our North America sites.”
Iron Mountain measures engagement scores for performance on the brand new chat features. The business has seen the digital assistants improve engagement with scores which can be eight to 15 percent higher than previous methods, leading to increased pipeline and revenue performance.
“The Conversica platform has rather a lot to offer, and in some ways we are only entering into the total capabilities,” said Hansen. “We have added assistants across marketing, sales and customer care, and added skill sets to construct an extended conversation that follows the total buyer journey, not only the early product interest where we began in 2021.”
Dig deeper: How CMOs should respond to ChatGPT’s marketing impact
More engaging two-way conversations
Conversica continues to develop its AI-powered communications to improve on and replace lots of the standard one-way engagements that marketers automate through MAP. Conversica was founded in 2007 under the name AutoFerret — as a CRM and lead validation tool for auto dealers. It began selling automated digital assistants in 2010, still with a concentrate on the automotive industry. (Under the brand new name, Conversica, the corporate expanded to other industries in 2015.)
As digital assistants take customers further into the client journey with more relevant, two-way conversations, the necessity for one-way emails and other messages lessens. The aim is to provide a relevant, useful experience so customers engage with the digital assistant as an alternative of trying to respond to an automatic email and receiving a chilly “no reply” as a response.
The secret’s to have AI conversational technology that may absorb the unique language of a brand voice and use it consistently so marketers can trust that the tool is on-brand on a regular basis. Jim Kaskade, Conversica’s CEO, believes that moment has arrived.
“If you take a look at Coke versus Pepsi, or Adidas versus Nike, all of them have a very different approach — they’re all very particular,” said Kaskade. “So now you possibly can take those particular things which can be really necessary and scale them. Absolutely scale them for each individual, so you possibly can guarantee that the brand voice is consistent. I’m excited for marketers. Literally, that is game-changing. And it really works, so this isn’t the long run, it’s now.”
Recently announced integrations for Conversica include Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketo, HubSpot Marketing Hub and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, as well as to Eloqua.
“Marketing automation is powerful,” said Kaskade. “It’s email, it’s SMS, it’s even search marketing. It’s got all these capabilities with landing pages. There’s powerful campaign management involved. And quite a lot of MAPs have incorporated social messaging as well. And it’s dynamic, changing the content.”
He added: “If you’re taking all that and say that’s marketing automation 2.0 — now add AI to that in such a way that you simply’re now not blasting to many, you’re targeting one, and that one seems like that is personal — and they’ll respond. Instead of talking at, you’re talking with the tip user. I’ll respond more (as a consumer) to that in my inbox, needless to say.”
For Iron Mountain, success for one team leads to broader adoption across the organization.
“Currently, our marketing teams are the heaviest users, and our roadmap includes eventual usage by sales and customer care,” said Hansen. “Very early stages, we’re options for accounting and collections.”
The post How Iron Mountain implements conversational AI to drive engagement and revenue appeared first on MarTech.
Read the total article here
