AI-powered customer engagement refers to the use of artificial intelligence technology to understand, anticipate, and respond to customer needs in real-time. This approach leverages machine learning, natural language processing, and data analytics to enhance interactions at every touchpoint, from personalized recommendations to efficient customer support.
Key Components of an AI-Powered Customer Engagement Strategy
Personalization at Scale: AI algorithms analyze customer data, ranging from past purchases to browsing behavior, to tailor interactions and offers. This means every customer feels valued with content that resonates with their individual preferences, leading to increased loyalty and spending.
Predictive Analytics: By predicting future customer behavior based on historical data, AI helps businesses proactively address customer needs, optimize inventory, and create targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to convert.
Chatbots and Virtual Assistants:*These tools handle routine inquiries efficiently, enabling customer service teams to focus on more complex issues. AI-powered assistants are available 24/7, providing instant support and ensuring customer satisfaction doesn’t wane due to wait times.
Sentiment Analysis: AI can analyze customer feedback across various platforms to gauge satisfaction levels and identify areas for improvement. This real-time insight allows businesses to make adjustments swiftly, cultivating a responsive and customer-centric brand image.
Maximizing Spend through AI
Investing in AI for customer engagement can have a direct impact on a company’s bottom line. Here’s how:
Increased Conversion Rates: Personalized experiences facilitated by AI lead to higher engagement and conversion rates as customers are more likely to purchase when they feel understood and valued.
Customer Retention: By predicting when customers might churn and providing timely incentives or interventions, AI helps maintain a loyal customer base that is more profitable over time.
Efficient Ad Spend: AI’s predictive capabilities ensure that marketing budgets are allocated to campaigns and channels with the highest return on investment, thereby optimizing ad spend.
Enhancing Customer Satisfaction with AI
AI doesn’t just enhance business spending—it’s also a win for customer satisfaction:
Swift Problem Resolution: Quick and accurate customer service powered by AI leaves customers feeling heard and taken care of, directly boosting their satisfaction levels.
Constant Availability: AI solutions like chatbots ensure that customers have access to support whenever they need it, eliminating frustration due to time constraints or unavailability.
Tailored Experiences: Customers enjoy a sense of exclusivity and recognition when businesses effectively use AI to deliver personalized content and offers.
Implementing Your AI-Powered Customer Engagement Strategy
To harness the full benefits of AI in customer engagement, businesses must:
Invest in quality data. AI is only as good as the information it is fed.
Choose the right AI tools that align with specific business goals and customer needs.
Prioritize transparency and privacy, making sure customers are aware of how their data is used.
Continuously train and refine AI models to adapt to evolving customer behaviors and preferences.
Integrate AI seamlessly with human-led operations to ensure a holistic and empathetic customer experience.
Conclusion
An AI-powered customer engagement strategy is not just about staying ahead of the technological curve—it’s about optimizing business expenditure while simultaneously enhancing the customer experience. In a market that values personalization, responsiveness, and convenience, AI is the guiding force that can align customer satisfaction with business profitability. By embracing the right AI solutions and keeping customer-centricity at the heart of their digital initiatives, businesses can pave the way for a future where both customer happiness and company success soar to new heights.
Your chatbot is a great way to generate extra sales for your eCommerce store. And with ActiveChat is extremely simple to connect your WooCommerce webshop with your chatbot.
In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to show your WooCommerce products in an ActiveChat chatbot.
Connect WooCommerce to ActiveChat
First, we need to connect WooCommerce to Activechat, so we can use the products from WooCommerce.
Make sure your WooCommerce store has everything in place:
Your website should have a secure connection protocol (HTTPS).
Smart permalinks should be enabled in WordPress settings. Go to Settings → Permalinks in your WordPress admin panel.
Legacy REST API access should be enabled in the WooCommerce settings. Go to WooCommerce → Advanced → Legacy API and check that setting:
Enabling the legacy REST API
Once this is in place, go over to ActiveChat and log in.
Open Settings → Integrations in the main chatbot menu on the left and click on the gear icon in the WooCommerce tile. Then fill in the URL of your store and click on “Connect”:
Connecting WooCommerce to ActiveChat
Now, fill in your username and password:
Logging into WooCommerce
Then, there comes a window that will ask for permission to access your WooCommerce store by ActiveChat. Click on “Approve”:
Granting ActiveChat the necessary permissions
Once you have approved, you will be taken back to ActiveChat and the integration settings will display all the products, categories, and variations of your WooCommerce store:
WooCommerce store data in ActiveChat
Show all categories in your chatbot
We have connected our WooCommerce store to ActiveChat. So, now it’s time to create the actual chatbot and show the different categories.
Important: Make sure that your WooCommerce categories have their own images because these will be used in the chatbot. If you didn’t set them yet, go to Products → Choose a category → Add thumbnail.
First, I will make a Welcome message, which has a greeting message and a button to go to our categories skill:
Welcome message in the Visual Builder
Which looks like this on the front-end:
Example of the Welcome message in Facebook Messenger
So, in our “woo_categories” skill (which shows all the categories of your store) we need to add an element after the catch event. You can do this by dragging a line from the Catch event to somewhere in the editor and then click on Blocks → eCommerce → Category:
Adding a new Category block in the “woo_categories” skill
This should look like this now:
The Category block in the “woo_categories” skill
Now, click on the WooCategory block and use the following settings:
Single/Multiple = Multiple
Category = 0
Exclude = 15
The Category block settings
There are also other settings, but you can just leave those ones out because we are not using them right now.
What this block does, is that it grabs all the categories of your WooCommerce store, except for the category with the ID 15. The reason why I leave that category out is that it is the standard Uncategorized category, and I don’t want that to show it in my chatbot.
But the ID 15 is only applicable to my category, so how do you find the ID of your Uncategorized category?
Go to Settings → Integrations and click on the gear icon again in the WooCommerce tile:
Opening WooCommerce settings
Then an overview of your WooCommerce categories comes up. Search here for your Uncategorized category and look up the ID:
The ID of the Uncategorized category
You need to use that number in the Exclude setting of your WooCategory block.
Okay, now we get back to our chatbot flow.
Next, go back to your WooCategory block. Click on it and scroll down, hover over the + icon and click on the square icon:
Adding a new button to the Category block
Now, fill in “Show products” as button name, so it looks like this:
Example of the Show products button in the Category block
Then, hit “Run” on the top-right corner to update your chatbot. Now your chatbot shows all the categories of your WooCommerce store, like this:
Example of the product categories in Facebook Messenger
Show products per category
But, we also want to show the products per category, right?
Okay, let’s do that!
Drag an arrow from the Show products button in your WooCategory block to somewhere in the editor and then click on Blocks → eCommerce → Product:
Adding a new Product block in the “woo_categories” skill
Then, use the following settings:
Single/Multiple = Multiple
Category = $_selected_category_id
For the rest, you can use the default settings.
The Product block settings
What this block does, is that it shows all the products from the category you just selected.
Now, scroll down and hover over the + icon and click on the square icon:
Adding a new button to the Product block
Now, fill in “More information” as button name, so it looks like this:
Example of the More information button in the Product block
Now, we show all the products of a category in our chatbot:
Example of the product menu in Facebook Messenger
Show individual products
The last thing we need to do is to show the individual products.
So, we need to draw an error from the button “More information” of the WooProduct block to somewhere else in the editor and click on “Send to new skill”:
Readdressing to a new skill
Give the Skill title “woo_single_product” and click on “Create skill”:
Creating a new “woo_single_product” skill
Then, draw an error from the Catch block to somewhere else in the editor and click on Blocks → Talk → Image:
Adding a new Image block to the “woo_single_product” skill
Use $_selected_product_image as Image URL in the Image block:
Image block settings
So now we show the image of the product. But adding some text is also nice.
Thus, connect the Image Block with a text Block by adding an arrow:
Adding a new Text block to the “woo_single_product” skill
As text we use:
“$_selected_product_title is an excellent product.
Price: $_selected_product_price”:
Text block settings
This text blocks shows the name of the product and the price. But, that’s not all! We also need to give the user a description of the product, so another Text block:
Adding another Text block to the “woo_single_product” skill
You can show the description by using $_selected_product_description in a Text block:
Text block settings
At last, we also want to let them go to the webshop. So, we can do that by adding a button. Hover over the + icon and then click on the Share icon:
Adding a URL button to the Text block
Then, add “Go to product” as Name of the button and “$_selected_product_url” as URL:
Example of the URL button in the Text block
So it looks like this:
Example of the product description in Facebook Messenger
And when you click on the button, the user goes to your webshop:
It was January 2019, and we’ve been getting ready to launch our product on Appsumo. They are the largest software deals marketplace with over 1.5 million subscribers which I felt made it the perfect place to officially launch a new kind of chatbot platform to the world.
Launching on Appsumo is a lot of work. It took the rest of the team and me almost three months of meetings, online demos, content building, and negotiation to secure a deal date.
Before the official launch, our cost for a single chatbot having up to 500 conversations was $49 per month. We planned to offer Sumo-lings, the collective term for AppSumo’s subscribers, lifetime access to a single bot for the same price. This was an incredible deal that both teams were confident would be a hit, and we launched Activechat into the Appsumo Marketplace.
The Start
The impact was immediate. Before the launch, the record amount of daily visitors to our website was 150. After the launch, it leaped to 1,500 a day, but that extra attention almost led to the end of Activechat. Appsumo’s subscribers are mostly freelance marketers, and small agencies hunting for software tools and services they can re-sell to their customers, and they were not happy with the terms of the deal.
“One bot per coupon? BS, give us more!” was the type of comment on the deal page.
This initial negative feedback reflected low sales of the deal. After discussing with the AppSumo team, we increased the number of bots from 1 per coupon to 10 and upped the limit of monthly conversations from 500 to 5,000.
Sales and comments improved but Sumo-lings continued to demand more. A group of long-term AppSumo customers approached me and suggested I offer unlimited bots, with unlimited conversations for those who bought the maximum of 5 deals for $245. This is where I should have said “No” and stuck with ten bots per coupon, but I was obsessed with making this launch a success and agreed.
Sales sky-rocketed. In two weeks Activechat made it to the #1 product in Appsumo history with over half a million dollars in sales, 6,000 paying users, and over a hundred 5-star reviews for our product. This influx of users put a new level of demand on the tool and the team. The support team worked 24-hour shifts to fix issues and answer questions as soon as they were reported. Customer feedback was healthy and positive. Sumo-lings accepted that Activechat was a new product, and they were happy to wait for new features to be delivered.
The launch provided a massive cash injection into the company, the users were happy, and I was confident that we would build on that success to attract more monthly revenue from regular subscriptions.
Everyone was happy!
The Tool
A quick note about the Activechat product. A long time ago, I started as a digital marketer specializing in chatbots. There are a lot of cool products out there, but they lack something important. Regular chatbots are limited to fixed responses to a user tapping pre-set buttons or typing a few phrases. This is restricting, and it’s why most people do not like chatbots. When two people talk their conversation does not follow a strict path. Sometimes they answer a question with another question, sometimes they change topics mid-sentence or take a while to figure out what they’re trying to say.
I dreamt of a drag and drop tool that would allow me to build chatbots capable of having complex natural language conversations for my clients. I could not find such a tool, so I decided to make one myself, and that’s how Activechat.ai began.
Activechat goes far beyond a few menu buttons and simple, canned responses. A well built and trained Activechat bot can hold tens of thousands of real-time, natural conversations with visitors every day without the need for human intervention.
Combined with the ease of a drag and drop builder, I was looking forward to seeing the different bots built by this new army of Activechat users and a rise in sales.
Life proved me wrong.
The Catch
After the Appsumo launch, we offered fully-featured Activechat subscriptions on a freemium self-service model. We targeted small to medium-sized businesses with the belief they would trial the service and move to a paid subscription for additional bots and conversations.
Freemium growth was strong, with around 1,000 sign-ups each month for the next six months. Guess what? We did not close a single sale and had zero monthly recurring revenue!
Crickets…
Demand was also high for lifetime deals. Sumo-lings were selling on their unlimited bot accounts for up to $1,500 in some Facebook groups. People obviously wanted Activechat, so why weren’t we selling more regular subscriptions?
And there was another problem that I was really worried about. Despite multiple investor and marketing pitches, I could not explain to myself – what’s the problem that Activechat is solving.
The Frustration
Our first thought was that our freemium model was too generous. In July 2019, we limited our Free plan to a simple set of features and rebuilt our onboarding series to highlight the benefits of the premium subscription. This change barely moved the needle. We went from zero conversions to slightly over 2%, well below our forecasts.
By the end of 2019, the entire Activechat team felt defeated after almost two years building a powerful product that hardly anyone wanted to buy.
Is that all we’re good for?
To make matters worse, we were under extreme pressure from Appsumo users who demanded immediate delivery of all the features that we promised. Only a few Sumo-lings were actively selling chatbots to their clients based on the powerful natural language features we were so proud of. The demand was mostly for features already offered by traditional chatbot services, and that was exactly what we did not want to be.
There was a major disconnect between the product we were building and the audience we were targeting, and if we didn’t find it soon, Activechat was going under.
The Change
The big change came in December 2019 when Activechat was accepted into the 3rd batch of Overkill Accelerator. Overkill is a VC fund in Latvia to coach and fund startups. Working with the program and other SaaS founders, it became apparent what we had been doing wrong.
Activechat creates bots capable of answering questions for entire teams of sales and support staff 24×7, and you really can do things 10x more complex and 10x faster in Activechat than with any other competitor product. Even with our drag and drop builder, it is a significant investment of time to design and build a fully conversational natural language chatbot. That investment of time is overkill for most small to medium businesses who just want to deploy a simple chatbot with more traditional features.
With help from the accelerator program we’d discovered we were targeting the wrong people. The primary audience for Activechat wasn’t small to medium businesses looking for a DIY chatbot. It was large Enterprises looking for a solution to a specific problem!
Enterprise customers wanted help with their customer service and communication. They wanted to reduce long waiting times for customers, lower the high workload for support teams, speed up internal requests, convert more sales and help leads, clients, and staff gets the answers they needed faster.
Armed with this knowledge, we rewrote our pitch and approached a large telecom company that immediately switched to us from a competitive product. That relationship further refined our value message and opened doors to other Enterprises.
This new understanding of the specific problem we solve for an Enterprise rebuilt our cold outreach program. We’ve built a new sales team of 2 lead research specialists and one sales development representative who do their best to close demos made by me as founder, and we started the cold outreach that actually brings us demos and starts to fill in our pipeline. This new approach has increased our monthly revenue from $42 to $3,700 per paying user, and that keeps growing with every new deal!
We now have many enterprise deals in the pipeline, and we’ve been approached by a company with 19 million small business customers to discuss reselling our product to them as an add-on service. We know we’ll have to progress those small businesses with more structured hand-holding for them to get the most out of Activechat. We know this because we learned that customers might love you for your product, but they only pay you for solving their problems.
The lesson learned
Activechat no longer builds products; we solve problems. That’s how we survived the most successful launch ever on Appsumo.
The Tool (revisited)
Now we’re closing a larger seed round with Overkill (there’s still space in it if you’re an early-stage investor reading this!), but most importantly now we know what kind of problems we’re solving for our customers. We also know who these customers are.
We help large enterprises improve everything that has to do with customer service and communication. We’re fixing long waiting times, the high workload for support teams, low CSAT levels, low conversions, the complexity of multichannel communication, etc. And we’re targeting large companies in telecom, services, SaaS, and e-commerce – they are aware of these problems, actively seek solutions and are ready to pay high prices once the solution is clear.
To the powerful chatbot platform that we already had, we’ve added live chat CRM and conversational intelligence AI tools, and now we provide a complete solution for all customer communication needs. We help automate mundane support conversations with chatbots and we help improve the efficiency of more complex conversations carried out by humans. Activechat helps bots and humans work hand in hand for awesome customer service and increased sales.
Better customer service for enterprises
We’re still perfecting both our software and our presentation skills, but it’s getting better every day and we start feeling confident that we can compete with big players like Intercom, Drift, Gong.io, or even Salesforce – we have a vision and a secret sauce that helps us do that.
The Ask
Everyone’s tired of answering the same support questions over and over again. They are tired of confusing IVR menus, long waiting times, and soulless announcements. We know how to make automated conversations bring value and feel human, and we know how to reduce stress and take the load off of human support teams.
If you’d like to see how Activechat can massively reduce the demand on your sales, support, and internal teams while increasing your service to Wow! level then let’s get in touch.
If you can introduce us to a large enterprise that does a lot of customer communication, we can help them reduce costs and increase the quality of service at the same time.
If you’re an investor potentially interested in joining our seed round led by Overkill Ventures, send me an email and let’s talk. I’m available at Andrew [🐶] activechat.ai.
