9 Commandments for Using Chatbots to Deliver Great Content Experience

In a world overwhelmed with content, marketers can ensure their story stands out, writes, Sairam Vedam, CMO, Kore.ai. 

Customer-centricity is a buzzword marketers love. To produce content that’s relevant to customers and serves their needs is an overwhelming concern for any marketer.

But most marketers fail in their quest.

Because, in the name of marketing what they end up doing is brag about their product development, advertising campaign or sales strategy.

If you want to produce customer-centric content, you need to know customers well enough and anticipate what interests them. Apparently, that’s not the case. A vast majority of customers believe the marketing they receive is irrelevant (with only 3% confirming that advertising is useful to them).

In an age where conversational experiences are determining customer success, this could be a major disability. Today’s customers demand highly interactive, personalized moments and more humanized experiences to stay engaged with a product, service or brand.

Learn More: Move Over Chatbots, Conversational AI Is Here

So, how do you bring customers to the center of your narrative when your focus is about your product, service or brand?

Many examples abound, but let’s look at a typical case Hubspot’s Ian Byrne highlighted sometime back. Explaining the power of narratives in driving business, Byrne pointed out that some companies succeed enormously better than others not because they have better technology or other natural advantages compared to their competition, but rather they have a better story that connects with their audience.

Byrne picked on the famed rivalry that electrified the video rentals industry in the US at the turn of millennium, in a typical David versus Goliath fashion. How did Netflix, which came in as a novice into market monopolized by the reigning giant, Blockbuster, not just outsmart it but drove it into oblivion all within a span of a decade?

When Netflix launched in 1997, Blockbuster was a household name in the home entertainment category. It ran an extremely efficient network of video rental stores across 2,800 locations globally, which catered to the demands of the local population. People craved great entertainment, and Blockbuster figured out how to make it most accessible to them. There was something novel in the concept that people can watch their favorite movies from the comfort of their drawing rooms, at the time of their choice, in the manner that was most comfortable to them. Though video rentals were not new, Blockbuster built a retail empire out of it that became a brand in itself. People relied on the fact that Blockbuster would never turn away its customers without their choice of movies, any given day.

Starting from a single store in 1985, it grew into a retail giant with network across thousands of locations because it executed well: a well-oiled operational machine that sourced a vast repository of movies and vetted the tastes of the local audience.

No wonder it became the commonplace that people thronged to. Long weekends, holidays or even forecasts of snowstorms (which meant isolation from the outside world) inevitably led people to queue up at Blockbuster stores for stocking up on their favorite movies. As the Walmart of the entertainment world, Blockbuster prided itself on operational efficiency. It focused on increasing the number of customers storming its stores and the revenues that came in the form of rentals and penalties (for defaulting on returning the videos).

Blockbuster perfected a model that was here to stay, or so it seemed.

Netflix saw the game differently. The Internet was just about spreading, and dotcoms were booming everywhere. Surely, there were better ways of distributing entertainment. Should a customer travel all the way to a brick-and-mortar store for physical hard disk of a movie when he can access the same content through a simple mail?

The online model, Nextflix discerned early on, not just gave a better means to disseminate content, it helped discover a whole new way of connecting with the customer. The direct streaming — and billing — relationship with customers was a game-changer. You could track online behavior of a customer and garner insights on his entertainment needs (both stated and unstated), preferences and consumption patterns, and it leverage to deliver a truly personalized service for future. Over the next few years, Netflix went ahead to innovate a model that proved formidable – with customer and his entertainment needs at the center of its universe.

Pray, how personalized is this experience?

Each person experiences his own Netflix moment.

• When we browse through its website today, no two subscribers see the same home screen. It’s customized based on our browsing history.
• So are movie recommendations; what you get to see is specific to your tastes, and different from those of mine, your spouse, mother or friend.
• Every little experience is driven by data. Netflix already knows enough about the kind of stuff that excites you based on your viewing history. So next time you scroll over a movie on the home screen, it will tease out the storyline relevant to you. You will get see pictures of thrilling fight sequences if you are an action movie buff; erotic episodes if you are a ‘romantic persona’; or epic dramas that vet your interest for historical narratives, and more. 
   

In effect, there’s no single Netflix, but multitudes of Netflixes, as many as the number of subscribers they have.

Personalization and an immersive customer experience backed by strong analytics are then at the core of Netflix’s success as a brand, leaving marketers with important implications for content creation.

Why Are Conversations Important for a Better Content Experience

Marketing is moving from transactional to experiential. Often, the challenge is not just about creating great content, but making sure the right person sees that content at the right time on the right channel.

“To create a memorable brand experience for the customer, each piece of content must fit into a larger conversation, contextualized to the individual. For each message, Marketers should consider the environment in which it will live; how it will drive engagement; the most appropriate channels to deliver it; and where it should appear in the customer journey. For maximum impact, everything must come together to create a seamless end-to-end content experience.”

Steve Taylor, CEO, BlueRush
 

To create a great content experience, three elements are important:

• Focus on customer: Content is the ‘voice of the brand’, and it leaves an imprint on the Brand Experience you create for at every stage of your customer’s journey. So, instead of just telling just the marketer’s story, try to understand customer expectations and provide content that helps them move purposefully deeper into their journey
• Focus on context: Most of customers now prefer to consume content at their pace; so create a content experience that is always on, real-time, flexible and agile in response to their evolving needs during the course of their journey with you
• Focus on technology: Deploy the right technology to leverage right data and tools to know your customers well, provide relevant content to them, and deliver wholesome experiences
   

Chatbots Constitute the Glue That Brings All These Things Together

• Facilitate two-way communications: People crave genuine conversations. Chatbots offer exactly that – back and forth communication along with highly personalized content based on understanding user intent. It reduces barriers for communication between brands and customers

• Deliver tailored content: Businesses agonize a lot on understanding what kind of content appeals to their audience. Getting an inkling into the customer’s mind is a prized insight for any marketer. What better asset than a bot to achieve that. For when a bot gets people to chat, it allows customers to directly ask questions in their own words, giving brands insight into the key terms they should be using and content they should be creating. You can focus on creating the content you know your customer wants by paying attention to the way they interact with your bot.
• Available always, on any channel: Also, bots can be integrated with your website, CRMs, email and social media allowing you to gain better insights into customer needs and behavior.
• Provide immersive brand experience: Bots can serve customers in amazing ways, beyond just holding conversations with them. When clubbed with AI, chatbots can analyze images and provide additional information. For example, a customer who wants gather better intelligence about a product he is looking to buy just needs to upload its photo; the bot will analyze, list out similar such products, recommend a few others, and help with useful information.
   

So, is chatbot the perfect tool to personalize marketing outreach? It should be obvious by now. But there are caveats that apply when it comes to leveraging chatbots.

Golden Rules for Conversational AI-powered Content Experience

1. Personalize your message: Have you ever wondered why emails that address the recipient by name have a much higher open rate and CTR? Because personalization matters. Modern users are so spoilt with choices that they pick only those companies providing personalized contentOpens a new window . Chatbots are a blessing for those planning to implement personalization. As intelligent assistants they work even more effectively than emails and can reply to the clients’ messages instantly.
2. Distribute your content in a new way: Modern customers are digital natives who have a strong propensity to be hooked on to social platforms. Typically, they are also multi-taskers and have short attention spans. So if you want to grab their attention, promote your content via Facebook Messenger, Instagram or Snapchat or multiple other channels of content distributionOpens a new window .
3. Make bot your brand ambassador: A nice way to increase brand awareness is to add a chatbot to your corporate website. A well-trained smart bot can get your target audience thinking about your brand; it can even change attitudes toward your company, give them an opportunity to learn more about your business.
4. Make your chatbots act like a human: Chatbots that work effectively are those that have a personality about them. They should act and sound more humanOpens a new window . Your customers should feel like they interact with a real person, not a robot.                                                                                         
5. Improve newsletter engagement rate: Email is an indispensable tool for content dissemination. But for the next issue of your newsletter, think about chatbot also as a handy tool for distribution. In fact, you can use your Facebook-based chatbot to send your newsletter right into Messenger instead of using emails. Your subscribers will directly get a notification on their screens.
6. Take your ideas directly from leads/customers: Generating new content ideas is always a challenge for marketers. A great example of brands using chatbots for content is a beauty brand Sephora and their Kik . These bots tap customers for insights on product performance, preferences, other industry products, suggestions and tips through short quizzes, which could be a great source for new stories.
7. But don’t use bot to broker sensitive personal data: Don’t ever break a customer’s trust in you. When your customer base is giving away their data to you, it comes with an expectation of securing its privacy. Make chatbots secure channels for sensitive data. Data breaches are a tricky affair, and can happen in the most innocuous ways. So be on guard, anticipate these breaches and take steps to avoid them. If you get to the point of requiring personal data from your customers, one good practice is to have the bot link them to a secure channel, or even a human representative.
8. Don’t use chatbots exclusively, seek human help: Marketing automation is to supplement good marketers, not supplant them. However sophisticated the bot might be, it cannot replace genuine human connect, especially when it comes to delicate situations. Bots should be able to detect changes in the customer’s tone and transfer them to a live representative when the conversation starts to go bad. If a bot remains online with an agitated customer for too long, it can worsen the situation even further. There is no substitute for human touch.
9. Don’t compromise on quality: Devote a lot of time into developing a bot to make sure it’s as close to human interaction as possible. Customers will appreciate you, even if they realize there’s a computer at the other end of the conversation. Do it wrong, and you may alienate the users forever.
    

Learn More: 8 Ways to Turn Up Customer Satisfaction with Conversational AI

Integrating chatbots into your content experience strategy enables you to interact with your target audience while collecting valuable data and insights along the way. While the technologies associated with conversational AI are becoming mainstream, there are always novel ways to use it, and content marketingOpens a new window is definitely one of them.

So jump in and become an early adopter.