Why you shouldn’t be afraid of letting robots talk to your customers

Artificial Intelligence will not surprise you… That’s because it’s incremental.

In the past 18 months I have seen an incremental 266 orders resulting in over £7m pound of revenue generated by virtual assistants via an automotive AI platform. How? Well, it’s pretty obvious. You know those overdue enquiries and lost sale prospects you have sitting in your enquiry management platform that are dormant or not being touched because your sales force is stretched? They are there waiting for a human engagement and follow-up. Not a ‘Don Draper’ marketing campaign with distressed offers in.

Virtual assistants work, and we should not be afraid to explore this. They do not replace humans, they only add a new dimension of trust and authenticity. We need humans to find new tasks, human tasks. We can still add value, but we need to do it differently. In world where we don’t have enough time and there is too much choice, AI can talk to the minimal viable audience on your Enquiry Management System, re-engage and give your sales force (and service teams) time back to do what they should be focused on – selling cars and hours.

Solving an age-old problem?

It feels like déjà vu writing about overdue enquiries and customers not being followed up. It happens, and it happens every day. Let’s not be afraid to admit it – we must learn the consequence of negligence. It’s not just what we do, it’s what we don’t do that is important as well. We are guilty by omission.

So, we have virtual assistants that are set-up to target enquiries with no future action date or they have been left dormant for a period we set. They then take the customer data and use the script we have set-up to converse with the customer. They then write a contact against the record, and when the customer engages with a response, the virtual assistant will respond and take the correct action for next engagement. For example, handing over to a sales manager or sales executive to follow up with the customer.

Then watch the AI learn and the follow-up scripts even more personal and powerful with authenticity. Vuja de! The strange feeling that this has never happened before!

I admit, every new trend or tool that appears in the world of marketing, I want to know about it and I want to have it. The mistake that can be made here is that I forget a major tenant of marketing – understanding the consumer.

Thinking now, not next

For any marketer, our thought process should not be about ‘What’s next?’ in marketing. What’s next? is not important. What is important, is right now. Right now, we can connect and see what consumers are doing, and this is what we must understand and contextualise. Marketing hasn’t changed. The fundamentals will always be the same. We must not lose our creativity.

Big Data is now crossing the chasm on the idea diffusion curve, and as marketers we now have the opportunity to be a cleverer creative marketer by combining creativity and data. With the data available today we can very quickly and creatively – through consumer personalisation – acquire, enlist and engage with the consumer throughout the entire journey. From the ‘discover’ stage right the way through to the ‘purchase’ stage. And this is exactly what the power of AI and virtual assistants can do.

Fact, current engagement rates with AI are 91% plus. The human conversation is creating better conversations and the results are astonishing.

Don’t be afraid of AI and ask yourself what would you want it to achieve for your business? I would love to know your thoughts. If this is an avenue you wish to explore, then ensure you do your due-diligence and look for a partner who understands automotive – the sales process and the service process.

YOUR ACTION PLAN

• Use staff to do find tasks only humans can do
• Choose AI targets carefully
• Think now, not into the future
• Look for a partner that understands automotive

By Jonathan Robbins, CRM manager