Website Chat Automation - Overhyped Or A Game-changer?

Website chats are one of the best lead generation channels for many B2B businesses today. But there is often a debate among B2B marketers as to whether it makes sense to automate chat workflows on their websites. In this edition of the Elevate Your Marketing newsletter, I attempt to answer this question.

Types of website chat tools

Before we dive deep into chat automation, let us look at some of the popular types of chat tools - and examples - available in the market today.

Website chat tools come predominantly in two variants. The first category includes tools that offer an interface for manual & semi-automated interactions and the analytics associated with them (let's call them ordinary chat tools). The second type is the more advanced ones that are AI-enabled and come with many automation features (let's call them advanced chat tools).

Ordinary chat tools

Don't take 'ordinary' in a literal sense. Many live chat tools today come with a wide set of features such as intelligent routing, easy team collaboration, automated action-based triggers, and many such. In addition, some of these tools are integrated customer support systems with the ability to manage, track, and resolve tickets across multiple channels such as chat, phone, email, etc.

Here are some of my favorite examples of chat tools that belong to this category:

1. LiveChat
2. Zendesk
3. Podium
4. HubSpot LiveChat
5. Freshchat
6. Zoho SalesIQ

You can easily add more to the list. Most of these tools come with similar features and functionalities with minor differences. Make sure to do a thorough evaluation in case you are considering to implement one.

Advanced chat tools

There is sometimes a thin line between what I am calling ordinary and advanced chat tools. The key difference when it comes to the advanced tools is their ability to use artificial intelligence and automation to make more out of chat interactions and data. They are often referred to as conversational AI chatbots.

Some of the popular examples in this category are:

1. Drift
2. Liveperson
3. Chatbot
4. Intercom
5. Botsify
6. Chatfuel

If you are interested in learning how these tools work and knowing more about how conversational AI in general is changing marketing, please give the below article a read:

How conversational AI is transforming marketing (and sales)

What do I mean by website chat automation?

Chat automation broadly means automating any chat-related activities. And website chat automation refers to doing that for your website chat engine and associated activities. This could involve:

• Triggering automated chat popups.
• Redirecting chats to the right team or SDRs (referred to as intelligent routing).
• Automated questions and responses.
• Automatically scheduling a call (by integrating with a scheduling tool like Calendly or your email service provider).
• Passing the data collected on the chat window directly to your CRM or marketing automation tool.
• Analyzing the interactions and sharing useful insights like the number of chats, reviews/CSAT scores, support personnel performance, etc.

In their most advanced form, website chat automation tools can also help with the following (look at the examples I gave in the advanced chat tools section):

• Leverage ML (Machine Learning) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) to learn to respond to user queries intelligently as the tool collects more and more data.
• Analyze chat interactions to do text and sentiment analysis and form word clouds of positive phrases, negative words, most frequent words, etc.

Depending on the tool you use, the complexity of automation may vary. But when I say chat automation, I am referring to automating any chat-related task - thereby reducing manual intervention and time required. In that sense, even a canned response configured in a chat tool is an example of automation.

Let me explain this further using an example.

Consider Livechat. It is one of the most popular chat tools out there. But, it comes with limited features with respect to automation. However, you can use a tool like Chatbot.com to build a chatbot and integrate it easily with LiveChat using 1 or 2 clicks. This makes it possible to convert a basic chat tool into a chatbot.

For the context of this discussion, any form of chat automation that can be directly or indirectly configured (like in the case of the above example) is considered website chat automation. It would mean that we are excluding the rest (basic chat interfaces or chat widgets).

Is investing in website chat automation worth it?

Now that we understand the fundamentals of website chat automation and its difference from ordinary chat configurations, let us come to the key question of the day - is website chat automation overhyped, or can it make a significant difference to your business?

Let me answer this by considering the following factors:

1. Maturity of the business
2. Industry/niche
3. Geographies served
4. Website traffic
5. Volume of inbound queries
6. Internal resources/bandwidth
7. Ease of operation

What we need to understand here is that a lot of these factors are intertwined. Not all of them are mutually exclusive. One might depend on the other. You will understand this better as you read ahead.

Let us look at each of the factors in detail next.

1. Maturity of the business

In most cases, breaking your head on implementing a chat engine on your website early on in your business is not a good idea. This could have multiple reasons like not having enough budget to subscribe to one, lack of skilled customer support professionals, wanting to prioritize core business activities, and so on.

This factor also overlaps with a few others that we are going to discuss below - like website traffic, the volume of queries, and internal resources.

2. Industry or niche

For most B2B businesses, it makes sense to have an automated chat workflow, provided the other factors are favorable. But there might be specific niches where things like the product/service you sell or the nature of your customers might not attract a lot of inbound inquiries through the website.

An example could be housing community management apps. Companies that build these apps usually rely on field marketing (and sales) and network groups (and of course some online marketing) to generate leads. And since their support system is usually built into the app, a website chat automation might be an overkill.

3. Geographies served

This is more of a cultural thing. There are certain regions or countries in the world where people are not comfortable coming on a direct conversation even if it's on a chat window. Take Japan for example. The Japanese usually prefer to understand what you offer thoroughly before they even get in touch. And when they do, they usually prefer email as a channel, or an introduction through someone they already know or trust.

So if a country like Japan is your only target market, it might be a good idea to not invest too many dollars in building a beautifully configured chat automation system.

Note: The topic of discussion here specifically is website chat automation. However, being on a platform of your customers' choice is something always worth trying. For instance, Line is a commonly used app in Japan and many business conversations happen on the platform.

4. Website traffic

I consider website traffic to be one of the most important metrics based on which you can take a decision on implementing chat automation.

The reason is quite straightforward. The higher the traffic, the higher the probability of getting inbound queries. You wouldn't want to lose any prospects because they were finding it difficult to connect with you. Hence, using an automated chat platform could be a game-changer if you have significantly high traffic to your website.

In addition to this, automating chat interactions - in case of high website traffic - helps you in the following ways:

• Cater to a large volume of queries.
• Save a ton of time for your customer support professionals or SDRs.
• Eliminate manual errors and streamline the whole chat experience.

On the other hand, if your website traffic hasn't started picking up yet, you shouldn't ideally worry much about chat automation.

5. Volume of inbound queries

The volume of inbound queries you get is closely knit with elements like website traffic, your business's brand awareness, the CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) measures you have implemented on your website, etc.

Simply put, if the volume of chat inquiries is high, consider implementing automation. Otherwise, have a basic chat window - powered by your people - in place.

6. Internal resources/bandwidth

Automation can lead to productivity improvements and save a considerable amount of time and effort. If you are on a bandwidth crunch and do not have enough people to sit behind the curtains of a chat window to respond to user queries, you should consider automating your chat workflows.

Of course, you need to spend some dollars here. But you still have affordable plans offered by many of the platforms I mentioned before. For instance, Chatfuel's pricing starts at $15 per month.

7. Ease of operation

I had to call this out separately. Even if you don't have a positive reason in any of the other 6 factors, maybe you just want to automate chat because you love the convenience of doing it. After all, who doesn't like to make life easier?

For example, the tool Drift comes with many advanced automation features like saved responses, conversational analysis, automated scheduling, data integrations, and many more. So if ease of operation is your number one priority, you should definitely evaluate a chat automation platform.

Note: I have intentionally ignored user experience as a factor since there are two schools of thought on it. While some think that chat automation enhances user experience, there are many others who think that it leads to poor interactions.

Conclusion

Every business is different. And sometimes you might encounter situations that I have not covered today. But the 7 factors I discussed will act as the foundation for making a decision in almost every scenario. Use your judgement and make sure you will be able to generate enough ROI from the investment you make - especially given that a lot of these tools come with a heavy price tag.

Hope today's content was useful and gave you enough practical input on a topic that is not so often discussed in B2B marketing.

If you have any feedback for me, please feel free to leave a comment or shoot me a DM. And do not forget to subscribe to the newsletter if you haven't already.

As always, until we meet next time, happy learning.