Using chatbots and enrichment to reduce friction for meetings booked

Tas and her team were testing using Drift, a chatbot service on their website. In an attempt to serve up as much valuable content as possible to nurture prospects, Tas created a full automated content journey.

Tas said:

“This was a great service, but with any tool - it’s only good if you use it correctly. We were definitely trying to over engineer it. I spent way too much time building up a logic flow with the intention of getting people to content binge.” 

“But we soon realised that prospects just don’t care to go through a process like that. They just want to talk to someone.”

Tas was finding that there was a heavy drop off rate on this content chatbot flow within the first 20%. 

She already felt she had sunk too much time into this idea, and knew that to optimise it, it would take a lot more time and may not ever have the intended results. 

At the same time, the book a meeting form was friction heavy with multiple fields required. 

Tas said:

“We needed a lot of information for that hand raiser so that sales have enough to follow up on.” 

And this was likely causing prospects to fall at the first hurdle - they didn’t want to fill out a long form with loads of details. 

These two catalysts got Tas thinking of ways she could hit two birds with one stone, making the form fill process much less work for prospects, whilst also finding a better use of the chatbot service. 

Tas and the team started a test using the drift chatbot to pop up to prospects on high intent pages offering them a direct route to speak to sales. 

A message like ‘Hey, do you just wanna skip the form and book a meeting?’ would appear on screen, and they’d use enrichment data to minimise the number of fields they had to ask each prospect for. 

Tas said:

“If we knew their email address, our intent tool would fill in the blanks and only ask for information we didn’t have. For example, if we didn't know what company they worked for, then that would be the only question we’d ask them.”

Idea being they’d only ask essential questions before booking the meeting. 

After booking the meeting, the chatbot could then ask follow-up questions that were not covered by the enrichment process, allowing them to delve into the prospects' specific circumstances. ‘In order for us to prepare for this meeting, could you tell us about x, y and z?’

Tas added:

“Even though we’re asking the same questions, it made it feel a bit more natural.”