Author: Ori

Companies have varied sales cycles depending upon their target market and audience base. Every business team out there has one common intention of closing deals faster and one of the best ways to fast-track this is by implementing Conversational AI for your sales cycle.

CX automation entails employing tools that replicate human cognition capability such as problem-solving and logical reasoning, to reduce manual labor in support processes. It involves identifying repetitive tasks across customer engagement cycles and automating them with the help of tools such as AI-powered chatbots, voice bots, and live chat.

There’s a difference between conversational AI and mere chatbots. Conversational AI is designed in such a way that it can actually recognize the conversation flow as well as human cognition. It optimizes the entire process of lead generation and helps you better understand your existing and potential customers.

What is the Relationship Between the Sales Cycle & Conversational AI?

The sales cycle refers to a repeatable and tactical process followed by the sales teams to convert leads into customers and minimizing time-consuming repetitions falls right in the domain of automation. Conversational AI helps you acquire more customers in a shorter period of time. It substantially helps convert the leads into actual sales. 

Here are the top five ways to fast-track the sales cycle using conversation:

We’ve listed how conversational AI boosts the sales cycle and facilitates B2B and B2C communication.

1. Lead Generation:

Lead generation is a key task every business has to perform. That is the reason lead generation is highly significant when it comes to businesses. Lead generation can be done in a better way using conversational AI. Manually generating the leads involves a lengthy process ranging from cold phone calls to online forms and despite all the efforts, it doesn’t guarantee that substantial leads will be generated.

Whereas, using conversational AI lead generation is quicker, easier, and precise. A Conversational AI system communicates with customers via human-like conversations, smoothly asks them about their preferences, and allows users to self-serve contact information along with these preferences. The data is recorded in real-time and is sent to the CRM segregated.

2. Automatic Lead Scoring & Qualification:

Spending time on leads that are not interested or relevant leads is a sure shot way of slow sales cycles.

It becomes crucial that leads are scored on the basis of relevance, interest levels, product fit, demographics, budget, and other product-specific factors.

Conversational AI facilitates the automated scoring of leads as per relevance and multiple conversational triggers such as depth of conversation, sentiment, and intent.

Once the leads are qualified, conversational AI can also move them further down the sales funnel by answering any questions they may have about the product and sending them hyper-personalized offers.

In the case of high-value sales, qualified leads are handed over to sales reps with complete context – helping them close the sale.

3. Behavioural & Preference-based Retargeting:

Conversational AI uses NLP, machine learning, and AI-trained models to interact with customers and potential clients. This includes observing and learning from the behavioral and conversational patterns of customers.

This enables chatbots to retarget and nudge prospective customers who are stuck in the middle of the purchasing funnel, resulting in the creation of new opportunities without extra human effort.

Conversational AI re-engages with customers, provides context-relevant information, and guides them to closure in the most optimal manner – automated.

This saves your sales time and effort – helping them focus on the most warm leads by jumping into the conversation at the perfect time.

4. Response Time Optimization:

No customer or prospect likes to wait. As per the latest research trends – 35-50% of sales go to brands that respond first. Web leads are 9 times more likely to convert if you follow up within 5 minutes.

Conversational AI allows your brand to create instant and immediate experiences for your prospects. You can stay in touch with the audience 24/7.

Conversational AI also has the ability to handle multiple customers simultaneously through even some of the most complex use cases. This helps you be there for the audience when they need you most and when the purchase intent is at its highest.

5. Conversational Commerce:

The popularity of social media and messaging channels is increasing each passing day. This highlights the need for businesses to be readily available on their customers’ most preferred platforms. That’s where conversational AI comes into the picture.

Conversational commerce is the process of conducting business over messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and more. It enables companies to meet customers where they are and drive up to four times more conversions by creating relevant conversational experiences.

To Conclude:

The world of customer communications is evolving at a faster pace than ever before. Your business needs to be accessible to your customers at the most relevant points in their purchase journey.

A well-integrated conversational sales augmentation system like Convert AI can fast-track your sales cycle with intuitive human-like conversations and empathy. Schedule a free demo with our experts to experience it yourself.

The arrival of conversational AI to the consumer products industry opens new possibilities for the final consumers. Today, the consumer durables industry thrives because of three major innovations: advanced analytics with insights to support the decision-making process; autonomous business processes, eliminating manual processes to achieve faster time to market; and AI-powered immersive, conversational, and continuous interfaces that help deliver a ‘wow’ experience and gain more involvement from the user. 

Conversational AI focuses on three fundamental pillars to help the consumer durables industry: employees, companies, and final customers. Conversational AI solutions create direct dialogs through convenient channels without friction, at an affordable cost, with a 24×7 service.

Consumers’ constantly demand for better, personalized experiences has led to innovation across various products. Apart from being affordable and solving day-to-day problems, Conversational AI can capture the users’ attention and provide a delightful experience.

Consumer Durables Industry in Revolutionizing

The modern-day buyers’ unique decision journeys and preferences sort into distinct consumer segments, with different characteristics of each segment. Brands must use Conversational AI as they plan marketing spending, messaging, and positioning. Conversational AI helps brands grasp online behavioral nuances of each segment’s buying patterns and the information and influencers it relies on to target segments through relevant channels and messages.

Brands need to grasp what motivates consumers to consider a purchase since the trigger point determines whether a brand makes it to the initial consideration stage. Using Conversational AI and conversational analytics to understand the preferences and sentiments of multiple demographics helps a brand position itself appropriately in the consumer’s mind.

With loyalty not guaranteed in today’s market. Consumers tended to shop around rather than automatically choosing the same brand from one purchase to another. This suggests that marketers need to fine-tune their understanding of consumers in each segment, and what triggers them to shop by employing innovative tools like Conversational AI.

It is also, during the post-purchase experience, that marketers must continue to highlight quality and service or offer rewards to the most loyal customers. It is easier to lose customers than to add new ones in today’s environment. Hence, spending disproportionate marketing money on loyalty can prove risky. Usually, the persuasive information in the durable consumer business includes brands, price, warranty, product features, after-sales service, offers or special promotions, availability, and user reviews.

Marketing in the Shopping-driven World

Before the digital era, every communication with customers included a variable media cost that usually surpassed the fixed expenses of creatives. Thus, management began focussing on ‘working media spend’, which is part of the marketing budget to what today is known as paid media. Today, marketers must also consider “owned media”-the channels they control, such as websites and “earned media,” created by customers such as communities of brand enthusiasts.

During the functional evaluation, consumer behavior is greatly influenced by past experience with the product or service. Conversational AI can boost consumer awareness of their brand’s products and services through significant media or social channels, motivating consumers to learn more about them. Conversational AI can provide creative interactions that convey a fuller picture of the brand’s value and is an excellent approach to moving beyond simple awareness to real brand consideration.

In the consumer-durables sector, buyers tend to purchase a brand in their initial consideration set. But marketers who understand customer motivation can use Conversational AI along the entire consumer decision journey to influence final purchase decisions.

6 Ways Conversational AI Can Influence the Buyer Journey

Brands increasingly focus on becoming more customer-centric and elevating customer experience to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value. Companies that supply high-value and complex consumer durables face unique challenges.

Ease of access to relevant knowledge:

Conversational AI offers easy access to an integrated knowledge base with support that will help reduce the cost of information delivery and help customers find faster, and more relevant products and answers round the clock.

Modern-day customers want seamless and unified integration, rather than being passed off to different departments. Centralized access to all knowledge sources, including registrations, product configuration, service plan entitlements, support queries, inspections, warranty & warranty claims, service orders, and service campaigns, will help customers solve their issues in no time. It will help reduce the cost of support systems and provide a complete picture of all customer support needs. It will also leverage enterprise-wide resources to provide a consistent and seamless customer service experience.

In instances where the customer demand is too complex for the Conversational AI to solve. In that case, it can escalate the issue to human agents with complete context of previous conversations – who can resolve the issue and add a new technical solution to the knowledge library, making it an invaluable asset over time.

Go Omnichannel & Digital:

Calling to wait in line and navigate the maze of multiple IVR options. In today’s world, brands must provide consistent support and service across multiple channels, including the web, mobile, messaging channels, and email.

Conversational AI lowers the overall costs for companies to create an omnichannel digital experience and is preferred by most customers because of ease of access, time savings, and convenience.

Use of Conversational AI to Improve Online Sales Performance

Conversational AI can help by analyzing customer support data to improve product quality and operational performance. 

Through customer conversations, brands can gain a deep insight into softer customer aspects such as color preferences, evaluation criteria, other brands etc and reposition and realign their product offerings in real time. These insights are called conversational analytics – and you can view more about these here.  

Further – brands can use insights gained from support data to improve their products and services by helping to fix the problems at the source. Repeat issues can be prevented by using support data to identify emerging quality concerns early and implement necessary actions. 

The study of customer complaints and their feedback also helps identify and fix operational performance issues within the company or channel partners.

Boost Customer Engagement:

Brands can leverage Conversational AI for push notifications across multiple popular consumer-facing channels to provide proactive alerts, announcements, and timely information.

Conversational AI can be made available on multiple channels, such as mobile phones, web, IVR, smart speakers, or even smartwatches, making it device/technology-agnostic. This will keep your customers engaged and improve their perceptions of responsiveness.

Additional revenue generation options can be generated by maintaining customer contact information accurately, registering their products, and offering related services, accessories, and other complementary products.

Customer loyalty, referrals, and advocacy arise from engaged customers.

Enable Self-Service for Customers:

Conversational AI enables customers to find answers to support inquiries fast and anytime by providing accessible and intuitive self-service options on various channels. As most customers prefer self-service, companies have the opportunity to minimize their call volume.

As mobile devices have become the primary communication channel, having a Conversational AI-powered mobile application or a mobile-friendly responsive website allows your customers to access the information they require on any device quickly, with the help of an intuitive conversational experience.

Convert Conversations into Revenue:

The Conversational AI interface uses a machine-learning algorithm and Natural language processing to make sense of buyer queries.

It then uses metas and API calls to pull up the right product that suits the customer, helping turn automated chats into new revenue. A revenue acceleration sales agent like Convert AI, constantly nudges the customer towards purchase by proactively prompting and guiding the user on the most optimal path along the buyer journey.

The Bottom Line:

Incorporating Conversational AI with consumer goods enables simpler and more direct shopping for producers and consumers. This allows consumers to spend more time doing (and finding) what they want, as they want.

Companies can leverage these innovations to contend with increasingly value-conscious and tech-savvy consumers. As increasing numbers of consumers depend on using digital and mobile devices to shop, many consumer goods companies invest in existing and emerging technologies to better understand, connect, and engage with consumers.

Schedule a demo with our experts to know how we can help you leverage Gen-AI, offering you a competitive advantage in this crowded market.

Organizations are constantly looking to optimize and augment their sales processes to drive better results, conversions, and productivity.

The best way to augment your sales process is to keep in touch with existing and potential customers whenever and wherever they need. However, with today’s multifaceted channels across social and dark social it seems humanly impossible to effectively do so. There is a silver lining here though. Conversational AI is what will help you here by enabling instant, relevant and persistent communication with your prospects helping you augment your sales process and drive conversions.

Here is how augmenting your sales using conversational AI can help you drive improved conversions:

1. Engage Cold visitors through contextual and human-like conversations using AI:
   Your website has different types of visitors depending on preferences and behaviours. Some of them actively engage in the website and others are aimlessly browsing. Which can be categorized as cold visitors. But with conversational AI like Convert AI there is an additional lever that you can use to engage them.
   
   Conversational AI interacts with visitors the way a human does. It greets the visitors and asks them questions to generate interest, and intent which are then converted into prospects. With the presence of a virtual AI agent or a smart chatbot, they are more likely to engage with your website and give you some information about their preferences.
2. Replicate offline agent-to-customer relationships to online customer journeys:
   With conversational AI it is super easy to build rapid and long-lasting relationships with customers. It can also act as a guiding light when customers are trying to buy something. Convert by ORI ensures that the entire buying process is smooth and adheres to all queries of customers.
   
   That makes it as good as an offline agent helping buyers throughout the buyer journey. Imagine a customer is trying to buy a product on your website and there is nothing to guide him through the process wouldn’t that be irritating for the customer you might even lose the customer base that you have built working so hard.
3. Use conversational analytics and Insights to upsell and cross-sell at scale:
   Conversational AI can be a great help when it comes to automating upselling and cross-selling. The user preferences, insights, and conversational analytics that you get using a conversational AI tool like Convert AI –  can be used for upselling and cross-selling at scale. The best thing about this whole process is that the analytics are auto-generated. And can be used to get deeper insights into your business.
4. Enrich your CRM with context-rich user personas and insights with a layer of AI:
   Conversational AI is increasingly being used as a sales enablement tool across industries and teams. It helps the sales teams to generate leads and helps them sell better and at a faster pace. It acts as a crucial factor to enrich your CRM with conversational insights and when your CRM is updated, your sales are ought to shine.
5. Get complete visibility across your sales & marketing teams:
   Visibility across the sales and marketing teams is undeniably the most important factor. Conversational AI systems like Convert AI – enable sales and marketing leaders to get complete insight across their teams, dealerships as well as other offline touchpoints and regions.

Conclusion: 

Who doesn’t want augmented sales and substantial conversions? Businesses strive for It day and night. The sales team works tirelessly but many times all the hard work you put into that doesn’t pay back. This is because there is this underlying factor of communication and keeping in touch 24/7.

Here you could use a little support from Gen-AI Agents to augment your sales process and drive 8 times more conversions. Schedule a demo with our experts to know how.

The automotive industry has undergone rapid transformation in recent years because market forces have induced a radical shift in both manufacturing and digital practices.

Automotive manufacturers started adopting new ways and innovative technologies to connect and communicate with buyers online.

One such strategy has been the adoption of Conversational Customer Experience through a combination of AI and Virtual Assistants. The Conversational AI assistant strategy considered by marketing teams of automotive companies is driving greater personalization, increasing revenue opportunities, and helping automotive organizations to expand and scale across new international territories.

In an increasingly digital world, customers want information easily accessible and questions answered at any time of day or night. Conversational AI can immediately engage visitors to the website because capturing potential customers in a virtual environment is all about compelling, sustained engagement. The deployment of virtual agents promises to create an experience where customers can engage 24/7, when, where, and how they want.

Importance of Conversational AI in the Auto Buyer Journey

With the rise of artificial intelligence, virtual assistants and conversational AI emulating a human mind are gaining popularity in the automotive industry. A conversational AI is an attempt to enable a computer to mimic and carry out the same experience as a human. The technology modernizes interactions between customers and organizations to enhance customer experience, customer engagement, and overall operations with increased efficiency at a reduced cost. Conversational AI can also efficiently carry out lead generation, lead conversion, operations, and customer support, surpassing human intelligence to add value to digital experiences.

Conversational AI platforms and virtual assistants are becoming a comprehensive avenue for customers to save time and yet involve themselves to know or explore more.

Let’s take a look at the benefits that conversational AI assistants provide in an auto buyer’s journey –  

1. Awareness:
   The concept of walking into a car dealership showroom is alluring and loved by many. However, the zeal of the car enthusiast has been capped due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, businesses are increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence to deliver comprehensive and provide more inclusive services to all of their customers. Automobile dealers are using Virtual assistants and Conversational AI-powered bots to engage customers and help them relive the good old times. Thereby, assisting in driving increased revenue, decreasing churn, and eliminating frustration. Additionally, the deployment of Conversational AI technology with voice assistance allows businesses to create an enhanced and innovative digital experience that mimics a dealership and test drive visit.

For instance, a global 2-wheeler brand improved visitors to lead conversions by 33% through the use of human-like virtual sales assistants. The full case study is here.

2. Customer Engagement:
   Consumers expect an individual approach and personalized content. Conversational AI can reach out to customers proactively at crucial touchpoints along the customer journey based on behavior signals to provide information at the precise moment of relevance. After a short get-to-know-you interaction, the user can be guided unnoticed through predefined questions to receive a customized product offer according to the conversation.

The personalized content increases interest, builds trust, and convinces the undecided user to share his preferences and details with the Conversational AI assistant.

3. Boosts Lead Generation:
   Using conversational AI, customers can interact with the company via the website or through a range of popular messaging apps. Facebook offers many social marketing tools, and a conversational AI tool can utilize the data and insights collected from conversations to create substantial leads for a car dealership and accelerate the process for your sales team. It is often observed that customers prefer to communicate with an automated chatbot rather than with a human agent, where they have to undergo repeated conversations each time they connect with a new agent.

4. Automate common FAQs resolution 24/7:
   It is important to create an experience that enables customers to engage 24/7, wherever they want, whenever they want. Businesses typically have 5-7 different types of customer service questions that account for more than half of the total inquiries. A powerful AI can comprehend the multiple ways people might ask the same query.

Conversational AI offers round-the-clock assistance to customers and answers their frequently asked questions. This may be quite beneficial to automotive businesses in terms of improving customer satisfaction.

5. Scheduling Test Drives for Interested Customers:
   Several potential customers want to test drive the vehicle they are interested in before making a final purchase. Acknowledging and scheduling these requests can be hectic for the staff. The conversational AI assistants take the requests for test drives and schedule them without any human interference.

This can go a level deeper where scheduled test drives are seamlessly mapped to the closest dealership creating a swift customer to dealership to HQ sync. Here is how Bajaj Auto used conversational AI to accelerate their test drive conversions by 14X!

6. Quick Loan Calculations:
   If a customer chooses to obtain loans to purchase the vehicle, the virtual assistance offers assistance in associated calculations. The virtual assistance will mention the loan amount, term, and interest rate to the customers. Thus, generating a personalized report. It captures the customer’s personal contact information to send these reports and figures to send them directly. Additionally, the feature can be integrated with the virtual assistant for a fixed loan type and amount.

7. Seamless After-sales services:
   Automotive businesses must offer after-sales services to their customers. Conversational AI assistants integrated with Messaging Apps can alleviate these requirements easily by reminding customers of their upcoming vehicle service requirements or insurance renewal dates and creating a streamlined post-sales experience for the customer. Customers can schedule maintenance on time while dealers get repeat business. Thus, creating a healthy customer-business relationship.

Reinventing Auto Buyer Journey with Conversational AI & Virtual Assistants 

Today, the most meaningful experiences are those that are tailored to each individual and are connected to their individual needs. Nowadays, people demand such experiences across all of their brand interactions, whether it’s ordering groceries online, paying for coffee, booking travel, enrolling for insurance, or buying a car. The way people shop for cars has changed remarkably, as digital customer experience is the new battlefield for competitive advantage.

Almost all consumers prefer interacting with a chatbot over waiting in a queue for a human agent. Undoubtedly, Conversational AI-based virtual agents allow businesses to scale and can help manage a spike in demand. They also have the potential to enhance and standardize the quality of services provided in the automobile industry. 

Future of Conversational AI in the Auto Buyer Journey 

Many automotive manufacturers and dealers globally are making significant investments in a variety of consumer-focused digital technologies. These technologies range from tablet-based product guides to virtual reality (VR)-enabled applications to increase customer engagement. The deployment of technology through digital investments by manufacturers is to drive overall mobility strategies aimed at reshaping the way consumers engage with their brands.

Dealers, on the other hand, are often aiming for immediate digital solutions to drive operational efficiencies, empower sales staff, reduce overhead, and increase transparency in the sales process. The focus is on tactical solutions that integrate disparate data systems to ease information flow across the dealership.

The lack of mutual understanding causes disagreements between manufacturers and dealers on the best approach to digital implementation. However, both parties could benefit from thinking more collectively about digital transformation. 

The future of conversational AI in the auto buyer journey is very bright, with the rising demands of the customers. All leading automobile brands throughout the world are deploying virtual agents because it helps in the selling and buying process. This reduces the overall time to reach the customers. Also, customers receive good and quick responses to their queries, which successfully increases their satisfaction rate.

However, the most crucial task is to select the right conversational AI platform for your business. Although you have a lot of alternatives, meeting your business needs might be daunting. And this is where we at ORI have introduced Convert AI. 

Benefits of Adopting Convert AI in the Auto Buyer Journey 

Convert offers all the features and customization options to help gain your customer satisfaction and engagement rates. The following are notable features of the platform that promise to help you simplify your business with a wonderful client experience:

1. Omnichannel: Wherever your prospects and customers are, be it on social media or instant messaging platforms, our omnichannel automotive bot helps you connect with your prospects and customers in real-time. Available on 70+ channels, we nudge the customers in the most optimized way, when they are most likely to respond.
2. Vernacular language support: Be it engaging customers belonging to a specific region or globally as an automotive brand, use our multilingual model. We offer Convert in 117+ native languages. It’s easy to set up and deploy once you’re ready to interact with your customers across channels in their preferred language.
3. Customer Analytics: Derive precise insights from conversations and provide value to the customer. Convert AI offers the insights required to improve customer experience and sales by benefiting from the conversations from consumers and recognizing triggers to engage consumers. Get to know your customers better.
4. Easy Integration: Hassle-free connection with 100+ CRMs, marketing automation stacks, CDPs, and several other important apps. 

Convert efficiently captures and engages with contacts and helps with product discovery while being fully automated at scale. All of this is possible due to Convert’s Key intervention in the auto buyer journey, leading to accelerated results.

If you want to take your business growth to the next level, schedule a free demo with our experts right away. We’ll help you with a detailed guide to conversational AI along with its benefits, implementation, demo, and more.

Today’s auto buyer journey is extremely complex with multiple touch points. But today’s buyers want this experience to be convenient, quick, and simple, while at the same time needing it to be unique and personalized to their specific needs.

With growing data access and smartphone usage there is an unprecedented number of people coming online who are searching for cars. Customer research that was traditionally done in person by visiting dealerships is now taking place primarily on smartphones and online, flipping the traditional route to car buying on its head.

An Auto Gearshift Study 2017 by Google-Kantar TNS surveyed consumers who were interested in buying a car in India and found that 89% of all car purchases in India were digitally influenced—up 14% from last year.

Friction occurs in the auto buyer journey whenever a buyer is faced with an additional step, incremental process, or inconvenience that causes them to abandon their purchase journey.

Impact of Friction on the Auto Buyer Journey

Friction can occur online and offline, causing buyers to dawdle due to unnecessary waiting, typing, clicking, queuing, and form filling. This can adversely impact their experience with the manufacturers, which, in turn, could affect the auto buyer’s journey.

Auto buyers prefer to follow the path of the least resistance and avoid anything that makes it challenging for them to move to the next step or make a purchase. This is due to the high cost of purchasing a car and auto buyers investing in a service that will last at least ten years. As a result, a seamless auto buyer journey is critical in instilling faith in car manufacturer services and efficiency to make the final purchase decision.

According to multiple studies, auto consumer pain points cause friction across three main stages of the auto buyer journey: awareness, consideration, and intent, as listed below. Unconsciously, car manufacturers may be introducing friction into the consumer experience, further extending to the auto buyer journey.

1. Awareness Friction: Every touchpoint, whether present or missing, compels a potential auto buyer to make an effort to discover a brand.
2. Consideration Friction: Every touchpoint, whether present or missing, necessitates a potential auto buyer to make an effort to examine a brand.
3. Intent Friction: Every touchpoint, whether present or missing, urges the potential auto buyer to make an effort to purchase a car from a brand.

Customer Touch-points Along the Auto Buyer Journey

Every interaction an auto buyer has with the car dealer or manufacturer on their way to buying their dream car, no matter how small or large, is a touchpoint. This ranges from an advert that the customer sees about the vehicle to the checkout process and a car arriving at the customer’s door.

Each stage of the auto buyer’s journey has its variety of touchpoints, and the level of friction around them will ultimately determine whether the auto buyer buys the car.

Although touch-points form an experience, they are not static, one-way channels. The data collected from auto buyer behaviour through each touchpoint informs how the customer interacts with the brand during the purchase journey.

Today’s automotive marketplace requires superior technology and an unmatched ability to understand human behaviour. Every day, thousands of consumers purchase automobiles. Automotive brands are learning to fill this gap by introducing intelligent and efficient conversational AI tools like Convert to meet the growing demands of their customers.

Ensuring Friction-Free Auto Buyer Journey with Conversational AI

Marketers are beginning to recognize the importance of having meaningful connections with customers. The marketers of auto manufacturers and dealers have realized that they need to understand, hear directly from customers, and take all the possible measures to get the necessary data. However, the journey involves several manual listening or combing through transcripts. Therefore, reducing friction in the auto buyer journey is not easy, but if done correctly, can significantly increase the buyer experience, their brand preference, and ultimately brand favourability.

The marketers of auto manufacturers are making efforts to attain first-party data to automate processes that will allow them to serve a wider audience without possibly listening to tens of thousands of calls. They also face challenges connecting this to all the digital identifiers and optimizing their marketing. Therefore, they take a spot-check approach instead, leaving a lot of potential revenue tied up in the call center.

The rising customer expectations are pushing change at an unprecedented rate. So innovative car manufacturers are turning to Conversational AI to beat challenges and surpass competitors.

Here’s how AI is making an unforgettable auto buyer journey not only possible but also a competitive imperative:

1. Improved Visibility Into Customer Sentiment
   Marketers of auto manufacturers need to focus on the most effective channels at different stages, reasons for buyers’ frustration, and reasons for buyers’ falling off completely to create a compelling auto buyer journey.
   
   While sentiment analysis is nothing new, conversational AI tools do it more accurately and in real-time for deeper, more meaningful insights into buyer attitudes throughout the vehicle lifecycle. Brands can capture and analyze data on customer sentiment at the moment, unraveling values and motivations that impact buying decisions.
   
   Improved visibility into opinions along the auto buyer journey can highlight what’s working, what’s not, and why, making it easier to anticipate auto buyer needs and meet demands as they unfold.
2. Right Content, Right Time
   It’s easier to match your consumers with the correct content after you’ve figured out how they behave online. Your decisions about the type of content, messaging, and service offerings you present to them along their journeys determine whether you build happy, informed advocates. Get your content wrong, and the journey ends there.
   
   The excellent news is that ORI has designed Convert AI to help auto manufacturers develop better customer journey maps and storyboards for improved targeting and customized messaging based on where customers are and how likely they are to buy. A global two-wheeler brand – Bajaj Auto, used Convert AI to lift their conversions by 14X. You can view the case study here.
   
   Conversational AI algorithms recalculate in real-time, allowing marketers to instantly place the best offers before customers, even as they change their minds. It creates a single, integrated customer profile using offline and online data, allowing you to personalize campaigns across channels and target customers with precision, based on their preferences, sentiment, and first-party conversational insights.
3. Increasingly Smarter Bots
   Gartner predicts that, more than 50% of enterprises will spend more per annum on chatbot creation than traditional mobile app development.
   
   More intelligent and sophisticated virtual assistants anticipate auto buyer needs and build relationships that drive outstanding experiences. Today, they’re not only handling auto buyer inquiries and placing orders but also engaging auto buyers throughout the entire lifecycle — from awareness to purchase and maintenance.
   
   ORI created Convert AI – a conversational AI platform – to simplify the process of lead capture, assist in buyer and dealership sync, and provide in-depth insights. It engages with auto buyers, helps with product discovery, and convinces them for a test drive, all of this being fully automated. Hence, providing room for the sales team to focus on improving the post-test drive conversions. Here is how Royal Enfield used Convert AI to improve test drive conversions for a new bike launch. 
4. Personalized Dynamic Pricing
   The right price is often the deciding factor in a purchase, and ORI’s Convert AI drives real-time pricing — only personalized. Moving beyond yesterday’s dynamic pricing, this conversational AI tool allows unique offers on an individualized level. As customer preferences change, so will the pricing and comparison benchmarks, resulting in one in-store price and one personalized price for the auto buyer.
   
   Personalized dynamic pricing allows extracting the correct information about buying behaviors as they occur, so you can present the best products to your customers at the correct prices and on the fly.
5. AI facilitates the buyer journey from product identification to decision
   Convert AI by ORI, which can identify trends by analyzing search history and social media to provide better car recommendations. It can help car dealers and manufacturers increase their profits by optimizing their retail strategy by continuously assessing market performance via data mined from millions of high-quality customers and other sources. It plays a significant role by assisting brands in identifying cars that are selling well but have descriptions that are hard to understand.
6. AI enhances customer support
   The sheer volume and complexity of orders, queries, and services make a personalized auto buyer experience expensive. Customer Support Agents cannot respond to every issue that the auto buyer seeks in their buyer journey.
   
   Using AI-driven solutions, repetitive queries and issues are automatically resolved without sacrificing the personal experience many businesses are desperate to maintain. Conversational AI solutions are becoming more popular as a result of the large number of tickets that can be automated, relieving critical resources to be used on more complicated issues.
7. Post-sales is just as crucial as pre-sales:
   Making sure the auto buyer enjoys their purchase, maintains it, and potentially makes further purchases has become as important as the initial sale process. Auto buyers now expect a holistic experience, and post-sales and servicing are part of that journey.
   
   Ensuring a frictionless experience after the purchase is one of the essential parts of the buyer’s journey. It’s also vital to make sure issues are resolved and a frictionless post-sales service experience is created for the buyer.
   
   Conversational AI helps auto manufacturers create a closer connection to their customers and automate the entire post-sale process to create scheduled service updates, share best vehicle care practices, and also possibly help build a community around the brand. 

Final Thoughts:

Due to the higher and ever-increasing levels of complexity in the auto buyer journey, there are many more touchpoints between the customer and the business. This means there is more opportunity for things to go wrong and a higher level of attention to detail and care is needed than ever before.

Not addressing this complexity risks loss of potential customers reduced customer loyalty, and fewer repeat sales. However, this also means more opportunities for companies and dealers that use AI to bolster their offerings.

As mentioned above, Conversational AI can help improve workflow and increase efficiencies while enhancing the auto buyer journey. It is also important to bridge the gap between online and offline experiences, as customers want a consistent holistic approach to their purchases. Businesses need to ensure that the consumer experience is as friction-less as possible. And if you too want to achieve the same, schedule a free demo with our experts today.

Privacy is the key concern of platforms across the board. Be it Apple, Facebook, or Google, they all build their communication to convince users that their data is in safe hands, protected and that the ultimate control lies with the user.

For example, Apple’s April 2021 iOS update 14.5 has employed a consent protocol, App Tracking Transparency (ATT), that governs and restricts how advertisers and apps use tools for data collection and then target and optimize their ad campaigns. Even Google plans to stop supporting third-party cookies on its browser by 2023, putting an end to an era dominated by data and giving way to consent-based advertising.

For marketers and advertisers alike, this implies a disruption of digital marketing as they know it. Measurements, KPIs, and playbooks would be drastically different if data could not be accessed. In a cookieless world, they’d have to adapt just as quickly as the cookie crumbles.

But how? Marketers should invest in building direct relationships with their consumers, invest in first-party data personalization, explore innovative targeting strategies, and allow customers to self-serve.

Building Direct Relationships:

In a brick-and-mortar format, customer satisfaction is key to driving sales. When salespeople are pleasant, helpful, and provide correct information, the buyer is easily convinced to purchase. Similarly, if brands can converse and solve problems, answer queries, and assist users online, the conversion rate would be much higher. Building a direct relationship with consumers online by conversation powers conversion.

First-Party Data:

With third-party data threatening users’ privacy, first-party data, i.e., information collected from the targeted audience or consumers, is the way to go. The data collection is on the brand website or app, subscription data, data from CRM, and social data. In the world of data, first-party is the most preferred type of data marketers hope for as it is collected directly from the source, usually at no or minimal cost. The quality of this data is far more excellent than second or third-party data, making it more effective for marketers to use. It helps them learn, grow, monetize, scale audiences, deepen engagement, and improve the overall ROI across marketing activities.

Innovative Targeting Strategies:

Innovative targeting strategies are crucial to building effective alternatives to acquire, and re-engage consumers independent of conversion events and conversion tracking. It would imply leveraging platform features to maximize reach, visibility, and conversing with the audience. It isn’t easy to pull the target audience to where the brand is, and it needs to be where the consumers are.

Allow Customers to Self-Serve:

Give the customers the power. The power to reach the brand, interact with it conveniently, and comfortably share their data creates a more valuable and memorable experience.

A more personal and involved approach to marketing is using messaging and messaging platforms. Customers increasingly prefer this due to the personalization of the interaction. 91% of the customers respond better to personalized service as they instantly create an immersive experience. Messaging plays a significant role in driving discovery and sales. 75% of consumers prefer to engage with brands through private messaging channels: Instagram DMs, Google My Business, or Facebook Messenger. It is the simplest way for them to pose their questions and get instant responses. They also allow brands to present well-curated answers and convert potential customers before they change their minds.

Messaging replaces tedious steps such as visiting a landing page, filling out a form, and qualifying for a call. While this long loop could take up to 3 days to complete, conversing with them instantly on a messaging channel gets them the information they require to decide while providing marketers and the brand the data they can use to optimize their marketing efforts. The drastically shortened turnaround time is vital in holding their attention and making a conversion from the conversation. The numbers match this thought. 72% of people would complete an online sale if they could ask real-time questions. For the most part, people genuinely keen on the product or service would make an effort to message. Almost 76% of the consumers are interested in purchasing using a chat or messaging service.

Messaging channels offer marketers and advertisers multiple solutions. From giving direct access to their audience to solving numerous pain points, platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Google My Business all provide advertisers with the opportunity to make a memorable and lasting impression with a personalized experience.

The real-time, two-way conversation aids product discovery, purchase, and affinity.

How do marketers implement this? They can adopt the following ways to start with:

• Ads can click out directly to messaging channels instead of landing pages, away with the form filling and additional steps consumers need to get through before reaching the brand.
• Opt for AdSter, making Google Search ads conversational. Giving marketers the ability to capture customer intent and the Zero Moment of Truth. 

• Effectively re-engage users with context-relevant communication that eases their buyer journey after the first interaction with the customers.
• Google Maps can redirect visitors straight to Google Business Messaging, allowing them to ask questions in real-time and get qualified responses.

These messaging channels enable demand generation and conversion whilst building a relationship with new and existing users. In a world where the rules are constantly evolving, it helps when the customers, brands, and marketers are on the same side of the conversation.

With customers in charge of the data they share, data personalization generates conversations that enable brands and marketers to seize the zero moments of truth. In one instant, marketers empower the customers to go from click and chat to checkout. Schedule a demo with our experts to know more.