Using AI to Predict and Engage When Prospects Are Ready to Buy

Lara Booth of Genesys shares an Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategy that will help your organisation to boost sales through service.

Imagine being able to track customer journeys across your website—to predict when to engage with prospects based on previous customers’ behaviour and to help proactively when customers lose their way or leave items in a shopping cart.

This isn’t a fanciful dream: leveraging AI and machine learning can mean the difference between success and failure in today’s noisy digital market.

Across industry sectors, companies are using technologies like Genesys Altocloud to drive more sales on their websites.

Turning Prospects Into Customers

You’ve designed your website to help sell your products, enable service sign-ups and provide customer support. But to be successful in sales, you have to sell more than your products and services: You also have to understand and shape your customer journeys.

With journey analytics AI, you can track every customer’s individual journey in real time. This enables you to advise your sales teams proactively on whom to engage and when to engage them—and you can do it all with an appropriate offer for the customer.

Say a customer searches your retail site, puts a pair of jeans in the shopping cart and then gets distracted. Using AI, Altocloud can track this activity behind the scenes and offer a pop-up message—perhaps suggesting shoes and a shirt to complement the jeans. This gives you a chance to bring the shopper’s attention back to the cart. (When carts are abandoned, leads are lost: The average eCommerce store loses more than 75% of sales to cart abandonment.)

Or imagine that a prospect stops filling out an insurance application halfway through. Altocloud can open a chat window and, at the right time, ask if the customer would like to speak to an agent. If the customer accepts the offer, the agent will know exactly where the prospect was in their journey.

Awareness of your customers’ activities provides opportunities for you to offer premium service in a timely manner, present personalised offers and increase brand loyalty. It’s all about turning prospects into customers and increasing sales.

From Reactive to Proactive: Smyths Toys

Retail giant Smyths Toys used Altocloud to improve its customer engagement. The merchant, a provider of children’s entertainment products in the UK and Ireland, wanted more flexibility from its existing chat solution and more overall functionality to meet its customers’ growing needs.

Smyths Toys took a phased approach to implement Altocloud—first focusing on the checkout process and then adding Altocloud Visit ID to its website’s page footer, to give agents visibility into the customer journey.

Enhancing the website with Altocloud Journey Analytics and Predictive Communications transformed customer engagement at Smyths from reactive to proactive. Altocloud offers options to reach out to customers with the right mechanism—such as chat, SMS or voice—assisted by customer journey analytics, which removes the guesswork from the interaction.

Customer satisfaction has improved since deploying Altocloud, with average ratings at 4.6 out of 5. They’ve reduced abandoned shopping carts by 30%, and the customer care team now handles fewer support tickets and solves customer issues more quickly.

Dramatic Savings, Improved Functionality: Polycom

In the IT solutions industry, Polycom has also seen dramatic improvements from its Altocloud installation. A global provider of voice, video and content sharing solutions, it faced similar challenges to Smyths Toys with its own previous live-chat platform.

Polycom subscribed to Journey Analytics, which reveals customer behaviour patterns in real time. It also adopted Digital Messaging, which allows agents to use the customer’s platforms of choice, as well as real-time communications for live voice, video and screen-sharing interactions.

In the first four months after implementing Altocloud solutions, Polycom realised a 72% savings in costs per chat and a 62% savings in costs per lead. Further, improved functionality is making it easier for Polycom to connect with customers.

These case studies demonstrate that by leveraging the power of AI and machine learning, using real-time insights and proactively engaging prospects at the right moment through the best channel, you can increase conversions and drive more sales through your website.

Author: Robyn Coppell