3 Reasons Why Knowing Intent is Essential for Your Business

sasha uritsky

Jun 18, 2014

What is intent? It is the reason behind the sentences we say. Behind posts and messages, as they appear on social networks. For instance, the intent of the tweet ‘I am going to buy a new car soon, my old car is entirely broken’ is buying a new car. The intent of this one however ‘ Need to buy me a car, got things to do lol’ could be anything from killing time by posting randomly to impressing friends, but not buying a car.

During the time when most customer activities online happened on search engines (e.g. Google) understanding of intent was predominantly the task of these search engines. So when I type ‘typical menu of Chinese restaurant’ and the search engine displays the list of local Chinese restaurants clearly in this case it did not understand my intent.

Nowadays, when an ever growing part of the consumer related activities is happening on social networks the task of understanding the customer intent becomes responsibility of a business.

Here are three reasons why this task is essential:

1. Marketing is personalized. Email blasts are a thing from the past. Today to stay completive your business should be able to target individually. And that means knowing what each of your potential customers needs in real time. The best way to know this is to understand customer intent. The numerous analytical and measurement tools available today exist only because until recently we didn’t know how to capture customer intent properly.

2. Knowing intent allows efficient and timely service across your company’s departments: those interested in the product belong to marketing department, purchase intent goes to sales, unhappy customers go to customer service, and so on.

3. Knowing intent offers long-term sustainability to your business because it reduces the noise. Unlike the previous generations, when the problem was a lack of information, today’s problem is the abundance of information. Business can function efficiently and be sustainable only when a competent model of finding the right information is in place. Understanding of intent is the best model available

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NMODES at Collision 2019

While Toronto is charged with hosting the Collision - "North America's fastest-growing tech conference" this year, nmodes is excited to make its first appearance among designated start-ups who have been selected to demo their products to conference visitors, potential investors, tech-enthusiasts and business executives.

nmodes, a year and a half in the market, offers a conversational product that uses AI to provide its customers with a scalable solution to execute 24/7/365 marketing acquisition and customer experience programs. While nmodes has already garnered its global presence with 40+ clients, North American market continues to be most enterprising for AI Chatbots and Voicebots. Collision Tech Event offers an exciting opportunity for nmodes team to take its networking game a notch higher and pitch it to businesses looking to catch-up with the AI space and be early adopters of hottest AI products available in the market.

How nmodes is different than other chatbots?

AI space is nothing new to the tech world as chatbots, virtual assistants and voice bots are finding their commercial contribution toward improving the customer experience of brands. nmodes continues to work closely with the businesses focusing on helping brands drive double digit growth in lead conversions and engagement rates.

Three key market differentiators for nmodes:

1. Interlacing marketing and customer experience

nmodes chatbots are custom built for the brands. nmodes solutions support full customer lifecycle from lead generation to marketing campaigns to scheduling demos, to gathering feedback and understanding engagement patterns of existing customers.

2. Lifetime AI training

nmodes solutions promise to work with progressive AI capabilities that are built to recognize old and new communication patterns and form a sensible response template that is malleable and fulfills the intent of desired conversation for the customers.

Nmodes solutions work on three principles while conversing with the customers.

A) Keep business context

nmodes solutions remember the customer’s history and their presence in the sales cycle and hence conversations are based upon the context of customer for the brand.

B) Data personalization

personalization of conversations focuses on collecting different data points from all internal and external data sources, helping brands deliver tailored and one-on-one predictive interactions.

C) Easy to use analytics

nmodes advanced dashboards uncover detailed analytics and insights on customer conversion rates, engagement rates and listen upon most common conversations to help brands better align their marketing communications and customer experience strategies.

CHATBOT PLATFORMS. How to choose the right one?

Chatbot platforms are essential tools if you need to build and run a chatbot.
There are many available on the market, big and small, popular and not so much.

Here are some useful thoughts that should help you navigate the complex world of chatbots and conversational AI solutions.

All chatbot platforms can be split into two categories: those that let you create chatbots without any programming, and those that require programming. Now, the idea that you don’t need to possess technical knowledge to build a chatbot seems appealing but the reality is not so rosy. In fact, I have yet to see a professional chatbot created without coding.
Chatbots rely on sophisticated algorithms and advanced knowledge of linguistics. These technologies are so complex that at the moment there are no plug-and-play solutions available. The companies like Chatfuel, Manychat, Flow XO and many others are attempting to fill that void and offer chatbot platforms that are simple in use. The best way to make the chatbot creation simpler is by dropping the need to code them. However this simplicity comes at a price: chatbots made without coding are limited, rigid and in general, primitive.
So to summarize: if you want to impress your girlfriend use Chatfuel. If you need a professional chatbot that delivers on your business goals and provides customer satisfaction use advanced chatbot platforms with programming capabilities.

One of the main, if not the main, tasks of the chatbot platforms is to connect your chatbot to the user interfaces. There are many ways for your chatbot to interface with the world: on Facebook messenger, on the website, on the mobile app, via SMS, on Twitter , on Skype, on Slack, on Telegram, and more. A good chatbot platform should seamlessly connect the chatbot to most of these channels. Chatbot platforms do not make your chatbot smarter. For this you need AI Engines (brief disucssion on AI Engines: http://nmodes.com/entry/2018/03/29/what-are-ai-engines-and-how-choose-one/).

For best results create your chatbot on a chatbot platform, then connect it to AI engine.

One of the top chatbot platforms on the market is Microsoft Bot Framework. It is robust, powerful, with a wide variety of useful functionality built-in. Another good chatbot platform is DialogFlow. DialogFlow has a slightly different architecture in the sense that it is a chatbot platform and an AI Engine all in one interface.

Chatbot platforms can be used to create conversation flow for your chatbot. There are several schools of thought here: some prefer to delegate conversation flow to AI engines. Chatfuel and other tools with the emphasis on simplicity (build your chatbot in minutes, no coding necessary) offer easy graphical interfaces for conversation flow creation. And there is always a reliable option to create conversation flow in an old-fashioned way, programmatically.

Which option to choose? Depends on your chatbot requirements and the business needs the chatbot is expected to address.And if you have questions feel free to ask: http://http://nmodes.com/contact-us/