On Wednesday April 4, we attended Marketing for Business, a day of conferences and workshops organized byAdetem and hosted by Microsoft. Whether we're talking about artificial intelligence, chatbots or connected commerce, the watchword of the day was "conversational".
The chatbot, a top priority for commerce BtoC
For the past two years, chatbots have been flourishing on e-commerce sites and in instant messaging services on social networks: Lara for Meetic, SoBot for Société Générale and Ouibot for Oui.sncf are all examples of the conversational link between a brand and its customers.
Simplifying customer relations even further is the first objective of these chatbots: for example, you can ask your bank's chatbot how much you've spent with a particular brand over the past month, a question that no native functionality can answer. Another is to be present where customers are: social networks are the primary destination for the vast majority of Internet users, especially millennials. Last but not least, chatbots can significantly improve conversion at sensitive stages, as Meetic has found with Lara, who assists members in completing the registration form.
The main pitfall? These chatbots' ability to understand! The specialists' findings are clear: the majority of questions are asked in more than approximate French!
The salesperson, key to conversational commerce
Although it may seem natural in a physical store, reinvesting in the link between the retailer and its customers is a priority for the speakers at the round table on connected commerce. After all, customers are multi-faceted, and while they look for speed and convenience on the Internet, their needs are quite different when they visit a store. They want a pleasant, memorable experience. According to Régine Vanheems, the store becomes a memory box.
This evolution is not self-evident, however, and requires giving salespeople the means to invest in the relationship with the customer, and to recreate or maintain this conversational link. Technological tools can help salespeople, but they must be designed to provide real assistance. The employee experience is crucial to improving the customer experience. Having a tablet is great, but knowing how to dialogue with your customer and learn to "co-navigate" with them is even better. Training and change management are necessary to achieve this.
Even BtoB becomes conversational!
The volatility of our attention exists as much in our daily lives as in our professional lives: succeeding in attracting our attention is a real challenge for sales teams BtoB. The Bypath startup proposes an original approach for starting sales prospecting along this same conversational path. It collects the traces left on the Internet by companies and their managers, and makes them available to sales teams. It seems much more relevant to contact a company by talking about its news and the need that this news may generate, than to maintain a mechanical sales pressure with programmed contacts that come up empty.
As a final example, we've come full circle: chatbots are used to enhance the employee experience by exploiting the often well-hidden richness of intranet networks.
In conclusion, it was a very rewarding day of conferences: while there's no shortage of business projects, it's important to keep a very pragmatic eye on them, and never forget the human aspect behind the technology.