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Digital Horizons
Capture Every Opportunity: AI Enhances Lead Response Efficiency
Can you afford to let high-value leads slip through the cracks? This episode of the Digital Horizons Podcast promises to equip you with the knowledge and tools to treat every lead like gold and optimize your sales process. Brian and James unravel why some businesses fail to close leads despite their high quality. We emphasize the indispensable role of AI tools and chatbots in managing a high volume of leads, ensuring that your business captures every opportunity. By sharing a compelling client experience, we highlight how transforming your sales process with advanced tools can significantly improve your conversion rates.
Do you know how quickly your team needs to respond to leads to maximize conversions? We reveal eye-opening statistics showing that businesses responding within one hour are seven times more likely to qualify leads than those taking just two hours. Despite this, many organizations still lag, with an average response time of 17 hours. Enter BlandAI, an innovative tool designed to revolutionize lead response and customer support with instant, high-quality interactions. Join us as we share our excitement and scepticism, preparing to test BlandAI live and explore its potential to replace traditional call centres and enhance lead handling efficiency.
Imagine AI taking your customer interactions to the next level. That's precisely what Google's AI, Blandy, promises by managing inbound calls and bookings for businesses like restaurants and hairdressers. We share our firsthand experiences testing Blandy, showcasing its ability to mimic human interaction and offer customizable accents. Envision Blandy handling both outbound and inbound calls, seamlessly integrating with your existing systems, and providing tailored support based on your website data. We also highlight quick response tools like GoHighLevel's missed call text back feature, emphasizing the importance of immediate responses to prevent potential customers from seeking alternatives.
Discover how these advanced tools can transform your customer engagement and supercharge your conversion rates.
The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:
James Walker - Managing Director Walker Hill Digital
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous
If you're attracting a very low volume of really high quality leads or high value let's say really high customer value leads, you may want to treat every lead like gold and get on the phone to them yourself personally, but if there's a high volume of leads potentially coming through that you can't get access to or you can't get back to in a short amount of time, it's definitely something to implement.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Digital Horizons Podcast. I'm your host, james Walker, and I'm joined here with co-host Brian Hastings. G'day happy to be here Today. We are going to be, I guess, expanding a little bit on the episode that we did recently around what you should be paying for a lead, but thinking more about, well, how can we convert more of those leads? Because I feel, no matter what you're paying for a lead, if it's cheap or expensive, your conversion rate is probably more important, because the more you're converting, the more you can afford to pay for a lead. So we're thinking about looking at how you can use new AI tools to really assist with this, with your conversion rate on the sales side of things, and this is going to be looking at firstly around the core platforms and then, more so, around chatbots. So, brian, what do you think?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like this is such an important topic, such an important thing to get right for businesses, and it's also one of those stages of the process that seems to be a little bit outside of our control as the agency trying to drive leads to a business or drive traffic or potential customers to a business. It seems to be an area where we feel the client or the business has their own sales process or their own response process and if they can do a better job at converting, it delivers more value from the campaigns we're driving traffic from. So it's really important to us. We want to see our clients and brands get the most out of the leads that they're driving to their business. So, yeah, I think it's really important to look at what other attributes or features or things or tools you can install or set up in your business to improve that conversion rate once you've captured that lead 100%.
Speaker 2:So I guess just on that I mean you were in the meeting that we're at yesterday, that we're talking about this, and we had a client finish up with us recently and they on paper, like we were looking at it, they were getting a lot of leads coming through from the campaigns that were running.
Speaker 2:They weren't just hey, what's your name and phone number? It was pre-qualified questions, everything. We made sure that what was coming through had quite a bit of a process to get through before it was going to hit their inbox and it was in terms of what. The target CPA versus what they were receiving was very low. But they said oh no, we weren't able to close any leads. So my business partner had said on that well, that sounds like a closing problem, not a lead problem. So I feel like turning off the. I guess if you're not closing, there's no point in spending the money if you're not going to put an effort in to actually close the inquiries that are coming through or get in touch. But I guess, by talking about these tools, hopefully something like this may be able to assist with that process. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Looking at the data around lead conversion and lead response times, we can see this isn't just something that we see with our own clients.
Speaker 1:In a study that I found focusing on lead response times, 55% of organizations take longer than five days to get back to their lead. 12% of leads aren't even getting responded to. But also what they found is organizations that respond within one hour of the lead coming in are seven times more likely to qualify that lead as a marketing qualified or a qualified prospect than organizations who call within two hours. So just that separation, or that difference of one hour, from one hour to two hours and even two hours, is a pretty quick response time, I would think. But you can see the impact seven times more likely to convert into a qualified prospect and again, that's not convert into a customer, but it's to qualify. The other stat that was interesting is the average lead response time for website leads for organizations in the study was 17 hours. So if you think the difference between getting back to leads within one hour and getting back to leads within two hours is a seven times improvement, the sooner you do it, imagine what 17 hours on average is doing to your lead conversion rates.
Speaker 2:There's really no excuse for taking that long, like there's no reason why you couldn't have something in place that is making an autoresponder, something when someone makes an inquiry, like there shouldn't be any reason. When someone's made an inquiry for you and then they're waiting for nearly 24 hours and like whole next day to hear a response from your business, like if you haven't got the setup in place and what are you even bothering running any campaigns or doing any digital marketing to generate leads, because it's just a waste of time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do see in lots of businesses there is a separation in responsibility between the marketing team and the sales team. When the sales team do eventually get around to the lead lists and they're late or a day late, sometimes two days late, there are complaints about the quality of the leads generated. Some of these leads didn't even know that. I'd inquired, but that can come down to the turnaround times of the sales team. So having processes in place to get immediate response is really important, but it's also sometimes hard if there's only a few people in the business and you don't have the ability to get back to them within a couple of minutes or an hour. So a tool we wanted to try today is an outbound AI calling tool, I think it's inbound as well.
Speaker 2:I actually think it's inbound too, so I think it will take inbound calls and outbound. So if it's as good as what it says it is, it could be a game changer, I think, for all businesses.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. It could ensure that we'll forget one hour. It could be two minutes Instance. Yeah yeah, instant response, but it's equally important that it's a good quality experience. So we're going to try this for the first time with you guys. On the podcast there's a number you can call to or request a call to test this tool, and we want to see what it's like, how well it sells its own tool and see whether it might be something that could be introduced and what sort of use cases we could get from it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So to get into, before we jump onto the actual call, give you a bit of an idea of what it is. So this is blandai. They position themselves as build, test and scale AI phone agents. So they position themselves as a phone agent for your business. So ideally, you want to replace any. I think the end goal would be to replace your call center and have it all done via AI. I think the benefits and if this does what it says it's going to do they're saying that it will allow you to take inbound sales. So boost your conversion rate as much as eight times by calling inbound leads the moment they fill out your website form.
Speaker 3:So this is where we're saying people are taking up very little time.
Speaker 2:So it's coming in and then it will call that person based on, I guess, how you train them. The next thing that it says it's doing here is customer support. So 24-hour customer support agent to answer customers' questions and collect their contact info to call back later. So it's not really providing it sounds like answers. Well, it says answering questions, so maybe it's still on that, but I guess the power of this if it works right and again, we've tried a lot of AR tools that don't quite work right in terms of what they say they're going to do but if you have a huge amount of information on your website and you can train this customer support agent on all this information you have, it could potentially be more powerful than a sales agent because they've got to memorize all this stuff where this is going to have direct access to all the information and be able to respond immediately. So really excited to hear what this sounds like and if it is going to live up to what it says it can do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think with all AI tools we try and look at at the moment, my viewpoint on AI tools is if it's not great right now, it'll probably be a matter of weeks or months until it's improved or there's a better version. So even trying something and if it works really well, great. If it isn't quite there yet, it won't be long until they are. I saw a demo on Google's potential inbound responses for restaurants and hairdressers to take bookings. It was indecipherable from a real person answering a call. They had different accents that you could choose depending on what geographic location you're in, and that is the future potential. They haven't quite released it yet, but if this is good enough now, it could be something that could be implemented quickly to get those response times down or even just book in a call with a real agent to qualify that lead further.
Speaker 2:If this call goes well, I will implement this into one of my businesses tomorrow and we'll report back on how this goes. Depending it's good. I'm not going to throw it on anything and potentially risk some business coming through. But if it does work, I'll put it on tomorrow and yeah, see how I'll give it a proper real life trial. All right, so we're just going to call this up now.
Speaker 1:So I just realized what we're about to do is effectively a Turing test. You know Alan Turing's famous test to determine whether a computer could be confused with real human intelligence. The way the test is carried out is to separate the subject and the computer by a divider of some kind and have them interact and see if you can trick the human into believing they're having a conversation with another human. So it's pretty interesting. We're trying doing a Turing test again to see if it can help us with our conversion rates.
Speaker 2:That would be amazing if this works. But I'm just putting the details in. So, from what they're saying on the website, this is currently available in the US, uk, australia and India. So if you don't live in any of these countries, it's not currently available, but I'm sure if it becomes a successful program or platform, people will start, I guess, rolling out further. Okay, so almost just asking me for my name and phone number and where do you work? So we're going to put the company name in and now we're just going to say we're going to talk to Blandy, which is the name of their AI agent.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to go quiet and let you just have the conversation as to not confuse the situation, and we'll see how it goes. Sounds good. So James is about to input his details into a lead form on Blandai, or Blandai, and hopefully we'll receive an outbound call from them, from their AI chatbot or their AI voice model, and see how it sounds.
Speaker 2:And have a conversation with it, hopefully. Okay. So pretty much. It's asked for my name, my phone number and the company I work for. So we'll just put that in. Its name is Blandy and now we'll just put it through. Now I'm just going to wait for a call to come through. I'm excited, all right. So here is the call coming through now.
Speaker 3:Hey, who's this? This is Blandy, the AI agent from Bland.
Speaker 2:How can I help you out today? This is Blandy, the AI agent from Bland.
Speaker 3:How can I help you out today? This is James. How are you doing? Hey there, james, it's great to meet you. As an AI agent for Bland, I'm doing fantastic, always excited to chat with new folks and learn about their businesses. So tell me, how are you using phones in your work right now? I'd love to hear more about that.
Speaker 2:Mostly to call leads, and we also inbound inquiries.
Speaker 3:I see so you're using phones for both outbound lead generation as well as handling inbound customer inquiries.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, that's awesome.
Speaker 3:Those are definitely two of the most awesome. That makes a lot of sense. So tell me what are some of the biggest pain points you're facing with your current phone setup.
Speaker 2:I'd love to hear more about the challenges you're dealing with so I can share how Bland's platform could help solve those issues.
Speaker 3:So my team had taken too long to respond to inquiries that are coming through. Oh, I see that's a really common challenge a lot of businesses face making sure your team can respond to inquiries quickly and efficiently. That's one of the areas where Bland's platform really shines. Our AI agents can handle those inbound calls, get all the key details and then seamlessly transfer the caller to the right person on your team. That way, no leads or customer inquiries slip through the cracks.
Speaker 2:Okay, what about your customer support side of things? Do you train it on all of our website data as well? How do you get the information you need to be able to train it?
Speaker 3:Great question, james. For our customer support capabilities, we actually integrate directly with your website and any other customer data sources you have. That allows us to train our AI agents on all the relevant information about your business products, services, faqs and more. So when customers call in, our agents can provide personalized support and answers pulling from that deep knowledge base we've built, and the best part is it's all customized and tailored to your specific needs. We don't take a one-size-fits-all approach that sounds so good.
Speaker 2:Does that help?
Speaker 3:explain how we'd be able to.
Speaker 2:It does. It really helps with all that. Well, james.
Speaker 3:I'm really excited to hear how your business could benefit from Bland's platform. It sounds like we could be a great fit to help streamline your phone operations and provide top that's right, why don't you head over to AppHeat?
Speaker 2:Hold on, how about do you have an Australian accent person like AI that could talk to our customers? Being that, we'd like it to sound like it's a localized support service.
Speaker 3:Ah, an Australian accent. You say, yeah, that's a fantastic idea, james. You know, I think we can definitely make that happen. James, our platform has the ability to customize the accents and personas of our AI agents to match your specific needs. Ability to customize the accents and personas of our AI agents to match your specific needs. An Aussie accent for your customer support line would be a great way to give your business a more localized feel. Let me get one of our accent specialists on the line to discuss the options. I'm sure we can find the perfect fit for your team. Just hold on one moment while I transfer you over.
Speaker 2:This is cool. I'm liking this. I was hoping she'd automatically turn into an Australian accent.
Speaker 3:It was great chatting with you, James. I'm really excited about the potential for Bland's platform to help streamline your phone operations. Feel free to check out our website at appblandai to get started.
Speaker 1:Okay, what about price? Let's see how they hung up. Okay, they're done. Cool, yeah, that must be outside of hours.
Speaker 2:Possibly hours possibly, but that that was impressive. I like I'm gonna try that. I like, if I've got the australian accent customer support and I can link it into all my notes, I will try it. I mean, I was going to try calling it with a whole bunch of different questions prior to, hopefully, any of our customers calling on through it, but that was pretty impressive yeah, there were a few off the bat.
Speaker 1:The stilted pausing or being a bit awkward or not noticing the cue when you want to interrupt is a bit of a challenge, but I think it covers it by admitting it is an AI agent up front. It's not pretending to be human.
Speaker 2:I feel like I've had more frustrating phone calls with overseas call centres anyway, potentially with similar communication issues.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the way it works quickly assessed what your challenges were, but then it repeated back the challenge in a way that made me feel confident. It understood what the problem is. It's not just using a blanket script.
Speaker 2:It's being trained to tackle that challenge and then align their product to being the solution to your challenge which I thought was really good, and it was continually trying to drive it through the process of all right, we want to close this as a customer. Because, it's obviously the objective of this. It is a sales tool for them. It's basically a lead form that's pulled back from it, and it was continually trying to drive me through. All right, well, let's get you to the next stage of what we need to do here.
Speaker 1:And I think, because it's overseas, it was obviously trying to connect you with a real person who had qualified you. Let's get you on the phone to one of our accent specialists. I didn't know that that would exist, but it probably only didn't go through because it's outside of hours. I also liked you know it had a answer for you know the customer data sources and your website, so it can be trained automatically on what you've got access to.
Speaker 2:If you're plugging it into a Shopify site, then that should then be pulling all your Shopify data. So if someone's saying, hey, where's my order, it could potentially have all your tracking details, what they've ordered and everything, and be able to communicate about the order.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think, as long as you accept that it probably won't get into the deep technical detail about how you could connect or exactly which platforms would connect and what level of data would be available. I mean, obviously, if you trained it on all of that it probably could.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it probably got more data than the typical support person could handle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. But you know that curly question of the accent thing, I thought it was going to just say oh, that's a nice feature request, yeah yeah, We'll see.
Speaker 1:Why don't we get you on the phone. But it said absolutely I think we can handle that and it remembered your name and it kept using that back to you. So I do think there's probably certain industries or things where that would be welcome. This type of call and response would be welcome, but it would probably be worth trying in ones that we typically wouldn't think it'd be accepted, like service-based business requests. If you're a plumber or an electrician and you're out on the road and you don't have the ability to take all the immediate lead calls and put them in, that could be a good option.
Speaker 2:Connect into your calendar as well, so they could then ask all right, when would you like to book an appointment? And if it can then connect into your calendar, it can book those in without you even having to worry about it. You know that leads come in, it's called about it. You know that leads come in, it's called, booked into an appointment. Appointments are just filling up your calendar.
Speaker 1:Like that would be gold for any lead service I did see on the landing page that it also integrates with SMS, so it can send a calendar booking link as well. So while they're on the phone and say I've sent you this or I've sent you this link, which is pretty cool it can direct them to your already pre-existing booking tool or system be when there's availability. That was really exciting.
Speaker 2:Of all the AI tools we've trialed out. I mean, it was only a very short trial, but that was pretty impressive. I definitely want to explore that more. It'd be interesting to see how it handles conflict, yeah, like that's something. I guess that was very much just info-seeking. I mean it's a lead call.
Speaker 1:It'd be weird for if that was turned into a conflict situation, but how that would approach it and how it would mediate to come to a good resolution there, yeah, and I also think if it was known to the customer or they weren't expecting a real person anyway, like potentially a lead ad on Facebook or Instagram, where they're sort of seeking more information, it would be okay to send an outbound call. In this way, you could call at any time of the night, 24-7, if they've requested information at that time. It's not limiting you to just office hours.
Speaker 2:Yeah, impressed. All right, well, I guess there's that. I'm going to trial that and we'll report back and just see how that's gone, because I really want to explore how that could be used further, because it just seems like it adds so much value to what you can do there. The next one, and it's kind of like extension of this it does basically the same thing, but it's going to be using AI chatbots on your website and the same way that this caller one was done as integrating into your whole website database, integrating into all of your resources or your knowledge base, so that way, it can provide real-time chat solution based using all the information that your business has. This is another one I'm really excited about. I haven't actually implemented or trialed any of these yet, but I do feel if, again, if it is able to deliver on its promise of what it does, then that's something I think that businesses should definitely be implementing into the business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I mean there's instances of AI chatbots being tricked or hacked to say things that you wouldn't want your brand to be saying, but they're edge cases and they're generally for big government brands that people want to make a scene out of. But if it's a support chatbot or a helpful chatbot that has access to customer data and can qualify who the person is who's messaging in, it can do more than just qualify leads and improve conversion rate. It could be, you know, self-service level support where you can find out information about your existing account or ask for changes to your service.
Speaker 2:So, based on this, there's not really any reason why if you've got to implement one of these in a way that is going to be able to respond. Obviously the chatbot support, it's just providing support. It's not so much a responding back from leads that are coming in, but at a minimum there's a platform like on GoHighLevel you can set up a missed call text back. We know from this it works really well as well. So if someone calls your business and you're out unavailable, whatever, you can't answer the phone. Just having this is going to help increase your conversion rate. Because someone's called. They get a text immediately back saying hey, sorry, I'm just currently doing whatever. I'll be back to you within and set the expectation on when you're going to reply. That's already then contacting them back. They're not going to just pick up the phone and call the next person on the Google search results.
Speaker 2:Because, they've got that response. They've already heard back from you that you've set an expectation on timeline, so I feel like just by putting something as simple as that in place is going to help with that conversion rate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and let's not forget that stat we mentioned at the top of this episode Our response times for web leads within one hour are seven times more likely to convert into a qualified lead than those responses that happen after two hours. If your average is, like most companies, 17 hours, imagine what that does to your conversion rate. Any issues or any stiltedness that we found in that conversation with an AI chatbot is completely overcome by the benefit you would have in a quick response and capturing, taking them out of the market, making them feel like they're booked in or they've taken the next step with your brand, so they don't have to keep looking. I think it's definitely worth implementing.
Speaker 2:Imagine that it would be great to see. Well, what are the stats if you respond within a minute? Yeah, Like if the average is 17 or whatever, and even the difference between one to two hours. What is a one-minute response rate going to do for your conversion rate and how is that going to improve your business?
Speaker 1:Also, when we do set up lead-based lead campaigns in social platforms, it's almost a bit daunting for some clients who are having to get their team ready. Are you ready? Because we're going to be spending money on these lead campaigns. We need quick responses to get the most out of them and we kind of have to wait for the client to get the okay from the people in the team who aren't typically used to a high volume of leads coming in.
Speaker 1:we could just counter that completely and just only send through the ones that have been qualified by this tool. I think it's incredible. I think it's worth trying, especially if you're going to struggle to get back within 30 minutes or an hour to leads personally. If you're attracting a very low volume of really high quality leads or high value let's say, really high customer value leads, you may want to treat every lead like gold and get on the phone to them yourself personally. But if there's a high volume of leads potentially coming through that you can't get access to or you can't get back to in a short amount of time, this is definitely something to implement. But then again, even on those high value leads, what's the ramifications if you miss one? Miss one for three, four, five hours or you're away for the day? I think there's a place for this in all sorts of lead responses. So I'm glad we tried it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean we're not looking to be an AI podcast here, so we're just trying to identify tools that we feel are going to help with marketing efforts. So we still while sometimes some of the episodes are going to stray a little bit more into the AI space, it's always going to be marketing related and how it is that you can use this to improve your overall digital marketing strategy. How can you use tools like this to increase your conversion rates or whatever it is that they're going to do? We're on the lookout for these types of tools so that way, hopefully, you're able to implement and learn. Hey, this is actually a really good idea and I should put this into my business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there are a lot of conversion optimization steps and tools that could be put into place that have existed for quite a long time. We can cover those off in another session, but these ones really excite us the ability to do things previously we haven't been able to do before because of the development of this technology. This is great and I think it's definitely worth trialing if you've got a response time problem in your business or a lead conversion problem within your business.
Speaker 2:Yep Well, thank you again for listening to Digital Horizons. If you do like this style of podcast, please let us know in the comments. We'd love to hear your feedback, and if you are enjoying our episodes, please share, like, subscribe, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no subscribing really does help with our ability to get this content out to more and more people. So if you do like anything you've seen in the shorts or in the full-length podcast, please subscribe. That would really help us out. We love doing it and we'll see you for the next episode Brand news in a couple of days, yeah of days, yeah, great, see you. Thanks for listening.