Conversational Marketing

Chapter 10 Step Five: Build a Lead Qualification Chatbot (Without Writing a Single Line of Code)

A common criticism I hear when it comes to chatbots is that businesses often treat them as novelties. Instead of identifying actual problems that chatbots would be well-suited to solve, some businesses simply insert chatbots into their online marketing as a way to appear modern and to generate buzz. That’s why, at Drift, we started out with a philosophy before we developed any technology. We established from the very beginning that we would only use chatbots where it made sense to use them—for performing tedious, repetitive tasks that sapped up the time of marketers and salespeople. We identified real problems that thousands of marketing and sales teams (ours included) were experiencing on a daily basis and built chatbots that could solve those problems as quickly and efficiently as possible before getting out of the way.

One of the biggest problems we were able to solve with the help of a chatbot was qualifying leads in real time. As we learned back in Chapter Three, the rise of messaging has made it infinitely easier to have conversations with your website visitors, but the number of conversations you’re having can sometimes become unmanageable. And when your team is offline, it’s possible that some potential customers on your website could end up slipping away. This was something everyone at Drift hated: knowing that potential customers were coming to our website, but not being ...