6 Ways to Use AI for Lead Automation
Read Time: 4 minutes
Marketers work hard to drive leads and sales professionals work hard to convert those leads. But despite these efforts, 71% of leads slip through the cracks and are never contacted. When someone reaches out to an organization and can’t connect quickly (or doesn’t hear back almost instantly), chances are they’ll move on to your competitor and do business there. Effective lead automation is essential if you want leads to stop slipping through the cracks.
The right lead management automation tools can solve this costly problem that many companies (sometimes unknowingly) face.
These lead automation tools help your organization stop missing valuable leads, but that’s not all. They also improve speed to lead and the overall customer experience, two important factors in converting prospects and keeping customers happy.
The right lead management automation tools help your organization deliver an exceptional customer service experience by:
-Reducing wait times and transfers
-Improving routing to help customers connect with the best agent for their needs
-Personalizing service
-Decreasing the need for callers to repeat information to agents
-Offering more channels for customers to connect with you
-Shortening response times
-Better supporting customer service teams
In today’s ultra-competitive, ultra-techy world, if you aren’t using the best lead management automation tools in the industry to drive and convert leads, then you’ll fall behind.
“The key is when a customer walks away, thinking, ‘Wow, I love doing business with them, and I want to tell others about the experience.'” – Shep Hyken (Connor J. Wilson)
As artificial intelligence (AI) powered automation tools begin to take over certain tasks in the marketing, sales, and customer service landscapes, your competition has the ability to become more efficient and effective. Lead automation is a vital part of staying in the game.
Traditional Lead Management v Lead Management Automation
Traditionally, the tasks involved in lead management are tedious and time-consuming. The bigger your organization, or client list, the more challenging it is to manually manage your leads. AI-powered lead automation software and tools are able to seamlessly accomplish many of these tasks.
The move for organizations to engage in omnichannel communications–branded, consistent communications across multiple channels–makes having automated omnichannel marketing tools even more vital than ever.
What’s more, this software easily scales with your organization all the way from a small start-up to an enterprise contact center. To stay competitive, consider investing in AI-powered software and tools. These will help your organization to:
-Deliver superior customer service
-Support productivity across multiple departments
-Maximize your budget
Let’s take a look at these six tools that help you do more with less and unlock the potential of every department in your organization.
1. Virtual Agents
Connecting with your customers and prospects when and where it works best for them is a must today. Whether it’s after normal business hours or during busier times virtual agents make it possible to connect with anyone reaching out, anytime.
Whether it’s a password reset, scheduling an appointment, collecting a retainer, or checking for insurance qualifications, virtual agents can relieve agents of these tasks so they can focus on connecting with their hottest leads faster.
2. AskAI Conversation Intelligence
Call scoring and lead scoring both help streamline lead management. Manually doing either takes up valuable time that your agents could be using to follow up with customers and prospects.
AskAI, when used with call recordings and transcriptions, enables automated sorting, classifying, and scoring of activities like calls and chats. This instantaneous scoring can also trigger next steps like text confirmation, email follow-up, or call back.
The options with this AI-powered tool are endless. It gives you the ability to sift through large amounts of data automatically–and instantly. You can find important data like:
- Patterns indicating a product preference
- Trends with keywords driving high-value conversions
- Sources or channels driving the most conversions
- Sentiment of interactions from specific channels
This information can help departments from sales and marketing to product development and more.
3. Modern Call Tracking
Speaking of data, getting all of your attribution data is a key part of connecting offline activity, like phone calls or texts back to its source. This is particularly important in industries like healthcare, behavioral healthcare, home services, etc. where most prospects and customers like to call or visit in person.
Call tracking makes this possible.
Marketing and sales teams sometimes think they’re seeing the full attribution picture when they’re really not. Not having all of the attribution data so you can accurately assess all of your marketing efforts can cost you big as you struggle to accurately assess your marketing efforts.
After all, if you don’t know which ads, channels, keywords, and campaigns are working the best–and which aren’t working at all–it’s impossible to correctly allocate your marketing budget and know where to focus your efforts.
With call tracking, you get all the data you need, paired with AI-powered tools, this data automatically summarizes and highlights key points. Based on this information, the next steps, like sending a text appointment reminder or adding to a specific agent’s queue to callback, are automatically triggered.
This helps to improve the speed to lead dramatically. When agents know exactly which callers are ready to buy and important details (like their touchpoints, product interest, keywords searched) they can personalize their interactions and nurture prospects to convert faster.
4. Customizable IVR Menu
Every business has different needs and ways they want to send their callers. Customizable IVR menus make it possible for every organization to provide a streamlined calling experience to meet their callers’ needs.
Prospects and customers are able to quickly and easily connect with the agent who they spoke with the last time they reached out or the one who is best suited to meet their needs. This helps to deliver an exceptional experience for your callers every time.
According to Zendesk, 81% of consumers say a positive customer service experience increases the chances of them making another purchase.
5. Smart Router
This smart tool uses criteria you define to automatically route calls to specific teams, schedules, or queues (or even another smart router). You might direct callers based on:
- Campaign activity
- Visitor history
- Location
- Caller ID details
- Current date and time
- And more.
In addition, you can use unique ‘if/then’ conditions and build a sophisticated call routing workflow. No matter how you want to design it, this lead automation tool will help you provide a more personalized and efficient customer experience.
6. FormReactor®
Today, completing a form to learn more from an organization is commonplace. While this is a convenient way to track leads, many of these forms fall by the wayside without the right lead management automation tools in place to bring them front and center to sales teams.
Tools like CTM’s FormReactor® solve this problem–automatically, of course.
This lead automation tool triggers an automatic call back or text message to your contact as soon as they submit your web form. This improves the speed to lead and helps you connect before your competition even knows who they are.
Learn more about how this tool can help your team to generate and convert more leads faster: Convert Leads Quickly: FormReactor, A Digital Marketers’ Secret Weapon
Attracting, nurturing, and converting is the motto of every marketer. AI-powered tools and automation software make it easier to keep your pipeline full of great leads–and seamlessly convert more of them.
Learn more about CTM’s AI-powered lead management automation tools and how it can help your organization stay competitive. Book a Demo today.