How marketers are using Custom Bots to drive more engagement

We believe that conversational bot technology will be transformative for the businesses that embrace it today. Bots have the power to improve the customer experience at every stage of the lifecycle, from acquisition right through to retention.

Earlier this year, we announced the release of Custom Bots, allowing you to create completely customizable chatbots to automate all sorts of user journeys on your website in minutes.

Our customers are already seeing value from implementing Custom Bots on their website by personally engaging new visitors with video, automatically qualifying leads and nurturing new trial users to paid plans.

Here’s a deeper look at how some of customers are using Custom Bots to grow their businesses:

OutSystems is using Custom Bots to drive 50% more engagement during onboarding

Paulo Tavares leads the product onboarding team at OutSystems where his main goal is to help new customers make the most of their product during the trial phase and drive them towards purchase. Onboarding is especially important at OutSystems because it’s a technical product so new users may be unfamiliar with how to take full advantage of what they have to offer.

Prior to using Custom Bots, supporting these new customers and providing them with a personalized onboarding experience took a lot of time for Paulo’s team. They were using targeted auto-messages to prompt user interaction, but the volume of responses quickly became too much for the team to handle on their own.

“There’s a different expectation of response time and quality of response per channel. In this day and age, having live chat is both a very effective and straightforward manner for us to interact with our users. But people also expect quick and high quality responses. As a result, we were experiencing issues of scale as we didn’t have 24 hour coverage,” notes Paulo.

Paulo and his team needed an automated way for users to help themselves quickly and get the resources they needed to get started. At the same time, it was also important to find a way to identify potential high value customers in order to provide them a more tailored experience, with a human touch.

For these reasons, OutSystems decided on using Custom Bots to greet customers during the initial user experience where the main goal for the bot is to ask some early qualification questions to help better define the customer.

“In three weeks, we’ve seen a 50% growth in engagement with the Messenger.”

The two main questions that guide the type of onboarding experience and resources users will receive are:

1. What is your use case?
2. Are you working with a team or by yourself?

Depending on the use case, the bot can then automatically send the most relevant product tutorials. And by looking at the team sizes, Paulo and his team can prioritize who they speak with and offer more premium onboarding support to potential high value customers in order to progress them down the purchasing funnel.

Most importantly for OutSystems, setting up Custom Bots was simple and quick, allowing the team to iterate and improve their bot as they learned and collected more engagement data.

“The biggest advantage of Custom Bots is that we are able to design, implement, and iterate faster on our entire end-to-end customer experience without relying on our product or website team to make changes. We can launch a new version of our bot in minutes to quickly test parts of our customer journey.”

The initial results from setting up just one Custom Bot have been great.

“The automation capabilities of Custom Bots help us use live chat effectively at scale. We can now connect with users in a timely, personalized and meaningful way no matter the volume of traffic. In just three weeks with Custom Bots we’ve seen a 50% growth in engagement with the Messenger and we are moving 16% more users through the journey because we are delivering the right resources to the right people at the right time,” Paulo says.

Snapt qualifies leads and drives more meeting bookings using Custom Bots

Gabi Goldberg leads marketing at Snapt, a B2B SaaS startup that develops high-end solutions for application delivery. Her goal is to build qualified pipeline for their sales team and drive more demo bookings. Before implementing Custom Bots, the marketing team at Snapt was using forms to collect qualification information but completion rates were low and weren’t driving the right lead profiles to their site.

Snapt hoped that implementing Custom Bots would lead to a lift in engagement, completion rate and meetings booked with qualified leads. The team was able to get started right away by implementing our bot templates around qualification and pricing.

By immediately triaging sales and support requests, Gabi’s team is able to ensure each prospect or customer quickly finds the best path for their desired outcome.

For those that are looking for sales, the bot asks two quick qualification questions, capturing their email and company sizes to determine who they should be connected with. All of this data is then automatically populated into Salesforce to keep their CRM updated.

After a month of use, Custom Bots have helped to drive a 63% lift in completion and 40% more demos have been booked over forms. Snapt has now also implemented Custom Bots in other places, including inside their product, to handle questions post-sale, and on their pricing page to help prospects find the best plan for their needs.

Gabi says: “Custom Bots helps us build a personalized experience for our prospects that is tailored to deliver the best resources for the stage of the buying journey they are in. Bots enable us to increase user engagement, accelerate our lead efficiency and create a more consistent customer experience from when a visitor first comes to our site all the way to when they are a customer who needs support.”

Apply Pixels uses Video Bots to personally greet website visitors at scale

Every bootstrapped business will face the challenge of having to capture visitors’ attention on their website. While some businesses may choose to pay for driving ad traffic to their site, Michael Flarup, founder of Apply Pixels, didn’t take this approach. For Michael, he believes every dollar must be maximized when a potential customer visits Apply Pixels website. That’s why he turned to Video Bots to personally greet new website visitors and to authentically convey why he is so passionate about building sustainable UI templates for the design community.

Experimenting with @intercom custom bots (with video!) greeting new users on https://t.co/dnXNmRK4Wc and offering conversational style branching help.Really powerful stuff. pic.twitter.com/MBvvD6yAUX— Michael Flarup (@flarup) September 18, 2018

Using our branching workflows, Apply Pixels can guide visitors towards the best resources for them, whatever stage they are at in their journey.

For interested visitors, they can immediately be routed to the right page to pay and sign-up for a subscription. Users who are interested in learning more can check out some templates that are available for free and sign-up to the newsletter.

No visitor is left without a personal touch. “Since launching video bots,” Michael says, “we’ve been able to engage more website visitors in conversations and have increased subscriptions to our newsletter which is a key step in the funnel to convert free users to paying subscribers.”

These are just a few ways our customers are unlocking value across the entire customer experience with Custom Bots. If you’re as excited as we are about how chatbots can grow your business, you can get started today by using one of our pre-built templates or check out our documentation to build your own customized Custom Bot!