Intent-driven Data Critical for Sales Growth

sasha uritsky

Dec 10, 2015

One of the most central causes of missed growth opportunities and overspending is a failure on the part of businesses to create strategies that are tailored to the intent of the consumer. Recognizing and harnessing visitor intent brings increased engagement with relevant messages and calls to action.

Once a business identifies purchase intenders it can create content that aligns with their needs and desires in order to increase the likelihood of conversion. Consequently it can pick up on pre-sale signals from visitors in the research phase and drive lead-nurturing initiatives accordingly. The ability to identify this spectrum of visitor intent is key to creating relevant engagement campaigns that drive sales.

nmodes has been at the forefront of delivering consumer intent to businesses.

We sort the intents based on conversation topics, called ‘streams’.

Here is a stream of people looking for a hotel:

A stream of people who are getting married:

A stream of people thinking of going on a cruise:

Interested in reading more? Check out our other blogs:

Travel Chatbots Update

These are early days for travel bots. They mostly specialize in customer service, customer information and sometimes online booking. Advanced AI technology is good and getting better by the day, but it does not replace a person. And that's unlikely to change for a while.

In order to create a positive and enjoyable experience it is imperative to have a clear understanding of what bots do well and what they don’t.

One area where they have clear advantage over humans is response speed. Using bots makes your travel business scalable. Bot can handle mutlple user conversations simultaneously and replies instantly.

The part of the bot technology that needs significant improvement is understanding of the meaning of what customer said. The solution is to take the user off the bot when this stage of the converastion is reached. One of the popular techniques is to redirect the user from bot to the website when the questions get complicated. The majority of users are at ease with website navigation where they find themselves in the familiar environment.

This approach allows to utilize the scalability of the chatbot while maintaining the high level of customer service.

MAKING AI MAINSTREAM

We are experiencing a strong demand for conversational AI solutions. It is coming from every corner of the B2C market. It is growing by the day.

Conversational AI is becoming increasingly popular among the consumer facing business community. It is easy to see why - AI offers sales and customer service scalability and therefore is critical for the long-term success of a business.

Conversational AI solutions such as chatbots, voice bots, and virtual assistants provide much needed speed and efficiency, in an age where the rapid advancement of technology makes them virtually the only sustainable customer service solution.

Bu there is a catch - AI is complicated. Mainstream businesses do not have in house AI expertise. And it is not part of their business model to develop such expertise.

Today’s market offer several good conversational AI solutions, such as IBM Watson or Google DialogFlow. However, getting a business value out of them requires the very AI expertise that mainstream companies do not possess.

So what can be done?

Any AI solution should follow these three steps in order for the mainstream business community to fully benefit from it:

Conversational AI should come as a service,
The service should be available in natural language,
The service should be fully personalized.

In the next several posts we will explore how the AI industry, including nmodes, is moving towards achieving these goals.