Boosting Prospect Engagement on B2B Manufacturing Websites Through Live-ChatBoosting Prospect Engagement on B2B Manufacturing Websites Through Live-Chat

Boosting Prospect Engagement on B2B Manufacturing Websites Through Live-Chat Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how you doing, sir?

Carman Pirie: I’m doing well. I feel like our listeners really ought to know that we’re recording this in what is probably or most likely the East Coast’s last snow storm of the season.

Jeff White: True. Day’s not starting off. Great.

Carman Pirie: it’s gonna get better. Yeah. And so who knows where our headspace is at, guys? Yeah. Because it is one of these things that you hate to see it, but you also know it makes the grass greener in about three days. 

Jeff White: True. 

Carman Pirie: I don’t know. I don’t know. 

Jeff White: Keeps the forest fire index down.

Carman Pirie: Indeed. But the one bright part of the day, however is today’s guest, really looking forward to diving into this conversation. Because it speaks to the kind of, the heart of the evolving B2B manufacturing buyer. There’s changes afoot in terms of who are the people listening to this podcast, who their, those firms sell to and the communication preferences that they have. It’s a square peg, square hole episode as far as I’m concerned. 

Jeff White: And I think we’re gonna be talking too, about a channel that people haven’t necessarily considered in this way before. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Yeah. 

Jeff White: Anyway, I don’t wanna hide the lead for too long, but so joining us today is Nelson Bruton. Nelson is the President of Manufacturing Chats. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Nelson. 

Nelson Bruton: Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Carman Pirie: Nelson, awesome to have you. Thanks for joining us today. I’m hoping it’s not snowing where you’re at. 

Nelson Bruton: I tell you what, it was 90 degrees yesterday. I think we’re expecting a lot of the same today down here in Florida. So we just went through pollen season though. And my gosh, that, that, the last couple weeks have been brutal. Black truck turns yellow. Yeah, exactly. Oh man. 

Carman Pirie: The only stock that’s up is Claritin. Yeah, look there’s a bunch of, tell listeners if you would, just a little bit, give a bit of an introduction to who you are and a little bit more about Manufacturing Chats.

Nelson Bruton: Absolutely, I’ll do it. So for me personally I got absolutely fascinated with the internet many years ago, 20, 30 years ago. I don’t know when, back in the day when AOL and CompuServe and Prodigy were just mailing out those free trial disks. 20 hours free. 50 hours free. And my parents had, the computer, the Gateway computer that came in the cow box and and so it upstairs in our bonus room and man, I was just fascinated, you could put this disc in a computer and then just have conversations with people all over the world through AOL instant messenger and the various chat rooms that were, prevalent back in the day.

And so I always wanted, from that point on, I wanted to do something with the internet, something with the computers. Went to school as a computer science major up until I took my first c plus programming class. Quickly realized that maybe wasn’t what my brain was wired for. And so pivoted.

Jeff White: You’re not the only one on the show who feels that way. 

Nelson Bruton: Yeah. So I pivoted really quickly. I got a degree in economics, went the business route and lo and behold graduated, moved to Florida and, ended up meeting our a longtime friend mentor, CEO of our company at the time. And we hit it off and he was building websites. And so that’s my story. And the cool part is I got to, I’ve been working in the internet for the past 20 years as anticipated. Just in a completely different way. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Love it when life does that and you’re not wrong figuring out whether or not c plus pluses in your bones or not. That’s not three months figuring that out. 

Jeff White: No, it’s not. No. It’s am I going to be able to understand German? 

Nelson Bruton: Yep. So everything works for the good, as long as you keep that positive mindset. 

Carman Pirie: Indeed. What are y’all up to with Manufacturing Chats? 

Nelson Bruton: So it’s, we’re having a lot of fun. We’re basically helping people really simply offer another form of communication to their website visitors. A lot of my customers, they already have an agency or internal team. If they’re a bigger company that’s doing all the right things and driving people to their website. And so what we do at Manufacturing Chats, we pop up a live chat window and our unique differentiator is we provide the people behind the chat 24/7 for our customers.

So it’s real humans, it’s never AI or a bot. Now we have some hybrids where we have some Humans assisted by AI. We can get into all that later. But quite simply, it’s offering real time conversations via, live chat window with the people that are already going to your website. 

Carman Pirie: That’s awesome. And look for our longtime listeners, you’ll know that we do not, The Kula Ring is not a sales channel for folks. We don’t bring people on to to pimp their solutions. In this instance, there’s obviously an awful lot of crossover between Nelson’s business and this, incredibly powerful channel. And we think that there’s just a lot of learnings that people, if they’re trying to stand up a chat function within a customer service organization you know I think a lot of the advice that Nelson’s gonna be bringing to the show today can, people can try to roll their own and do it on their own. And of course it’s lost on no one that if you need somebody to help you out, you know who you could call. With that kind of preamble in mind, let’s just dive into it. What are you finding as you do this kind of live human enabled chat on the site? Do you find it almost just unlocks a a stream of leads that otherwise weren’t converting, weren’t engaging?

Nelson Bruton: Yes, a hundred percent of the time. It really does. Again it’s, if you think about it from a people’s preferences, I’m old school. I like to pick up my phone. I like to call and talk to somebody. That’s my preference for communication. Some people, they don’t like to talk. They wanna do their own thing. So they’ll fill out a contact form or a quote request form, continue on with what they were working on in their day, and wait for a response. And then there’s a whole other group of people that’s, more prevalent than ever that prefers realtime chat if it’s done correctly. And to your point, that’s what we’re gonna talk about today is really how to do it correctly. And there’s lots of different options out there in terms of deploying chat.

Jeff White: Let’s break that down a little bit because I can think of three easily off the top of my head. Full bot powered chat. Pure human chat and augmented human chat. I guess you could call it, the power of AI in the backend, but how do they compare in your mind and is there a time for each there? 

Nelson Bruton: There really is a time for each. We’ll just take the chat bots and the AI and we’re totally invested. We have an RD department. We’re watching all the learning model language models and AI’s amazing to watch and there’s lots of different takes on AI. This is not the show for that, but from a chat bot perspective they’re typically the easiest and fastest to deploy because you have Salesforce and HubSpot, they have built in bots, right?

And the thing is if you’re going to do the more here, one of the things that we’ve talked about over the years with my prospects and customers, no matter how well you program your AI, your bot with your data it really becomes just an interactive FAQ for your visitors. And so if your goal is to deliver, just information to your visitors, then a chat bot can absolutely work. You can deploy it relatively quickly depending on how complex you want to do the, ifs, thens and depending ons, what language model you’re using behind the AI. So it’s quick, it’s easy. If you haven’t done anything. Certainly test it, right? Marketing is testing at the end of the day. So the bots is one. And then you have the self-serve, right? The self staffed chat with your employees. And you know what we found over the 20 years doing this is companies typically try to staff it themselves with their internal customer service team or with, their inside sales team. And, it becomes a major issue for a number of reasons. And from an education standpoint, here’s some things to consider or be prepared for. So I’m never gonna say, don’t try to staff chat yourself. But if you’re going to be prepared to have a feedback loop with the people that are staffing the chat, where you’re asking them, does this interrupt your flow during the day? Does it put pressure on you where you’re being pinged and you’re having to stop working on a proposal, or you’re on a sales call and you see your email go off, or your texts go off to, you have to jump into a chat, but you’re already doing something else. Does it interrupt your flow during the day? Is, does that get annoying? That’s one consideration. The other consideration is on the customer side, right? From a visitor experience or a user experience side. If that one thing is happening and there’s potentially delays in response taking place for the visitor, that’s an absolute no-no. 

You cannot cause delays in response when a visitor’s on your site expecting the chat. If you’re staffing it yourself, if you have a delay in response. If you’re over 25 to 30 seconds in response time, that becomes a long wait when you’re sitting there waiting for a response from a chat person on the website.

Carman Pirie: Nelson, that makes some sense to me about we have obviously there’s… you’re trying to feed a desire for immediate gratification and interaction. And when I’ve seen customer service organizations or inside sales teams try to staff chat robustly themselves… I think you were hitting on the main challenge that I’ve seen, which is they, it sometimes always becomes the least important thing that they’re doing that day.

So kinda, no, nobody’s gonna get fired in some way because they didn’t uhanswered chat fast enough. They’re gonna get fired because they didn’t meet quota. Sometimes, it just seems yeah it’s hard to prioritize and maybe they just don’t staff it, which makes sense. Why not outsource the arrangement. I’m not trying to pimp that, but just trying to be, matter of fact about it.

Nelson Bruton: My job is to let people know we exist, right? Because a lot of people don’t, and another level on that, if you’re gonna staff it yourself, the temptation is in the mindset, going into this. For most people, no matter what they’re thinking about live chat is their expectation is we’ve gotta make sure we’re able to, if we’re gonna deploy a live chat solution, we have to make sure we can answer every single question.

That is absolutely not the case, right? We stand extremely contrarian on that viewpoint. It’s actually damaging if you try to answer every question. I was speaking at the industrial marketing summit a couple months ago in Austin, Texas, and after my session, I was sitting there talking to a table in the audience. Just one-on-one. And one of the ladies was like, yeah, I actually am the person that staffed the chat for our company. And it’s hard for me to get people’s contact information. She said, I answer all their questions and then they just leave. As soon as she said that, she got it.

Just like when people call into your receptionist, or, my favorite analogy is when people, when you’re at a trade show and you have your booth there, and there’s people that pass by and end up talking to somebody that’s on the outskirts, the chances of that person knowing all the answers is pretty rare. So what are they gonna do? They’re gonna walk ’em over and say, oh, that’s a really interesting question about your particular facility or application. Lemme walk you over to John, who’s our expert integrator and let me have him answer those questions for you. So there’s a handoff that takes place. We promote that same thinking when you’re gonna deploy a chat, collect what you need from the visitor, maybe answer some top level questions, but more importantly, ask some top level qualifying questions and then get them to where they need to go within your organization. 

Jeff White: Is it, is it as important to get the contact information as it is to have multiple people in the organization follow up in order to create those multiple touch points within the org? I’m just, it to me, it seems like that’s pretty powerful and important. 

Nelson Bruton: Yeah. I mean it’s critical. If you have somebody on your website, they’ve gotten there from an ad, they’ve gotten there from your organic rankings, they got there from a referral. No matter how they got there, they got to your website.

It’s parallel to what I just talked about it. If you’re at a trade show, you spend a lot of money to get there. To get in front of those people that are passing by. You want to have conversations with them and pull them into a discussion. Even if it’s not the end all discussion, you don’t want to do the sale right there at the first touchpoint. So yes, you want to get their contact information so that the technical people and the salespeople or your dealers. A lot of my customers are the OEM and they sell through dealers. So you want to get that opportunity over to the person that can actually schedule a Zoom or a teams or an in-person demo to do the sales process in more technical discussions. So getting contact information is absolutely critical If you’re gonna deploy chat on the site and you don’t wanna do it by throwing up a whole bunch of friction. This is another kind of consideration if you’re gonna deploy chat and just about all of the out of the box chat softwares do this and it drives me crazy because I know how much it hurts the results. Is they pop up a contact form for the visitor to fill out name, email address, question, right? Or even if it’s just email address to start with, that’s a friction point where people wanna remain anonymous until they don’t. They don’t want to have to fill out a form or, fill out information before the chat.

And our data over the years tells us that if you remove that friction, you’re going to see a 50 to 70% increase in conversations take place. So if you have chat on your site now to all the listeners, and you’re popping up a basically a contact form you’re creating a roadblock for your visitors. You’re not getting as many engagements as you could be. Now, the flip side of that is, and this is very rare. But some organizations have a very high, if they have a lot of website traffic and it’s a high volume, if they don’t gate their chat, then they’re gonna get a whole lot of conversations and then it becomes a question of if they’re staffing it themselves, is that gonna overwhelm their team anymore? So there’s a lot of dynamics at play when you’re deciding how to, gate it or not. Depending on your chat volume, depending on how quick your team and how readily available they are, all those things. 

Carman Pirie: That all makes really good sense to me. And it, your emphasis on it being a transitional dialogue really is what I’m thinking about where else can you apply that and clearly, like you say, the folks staffing a trade show booth, ought to be thinking about their job in the same way.

My job isn’t to sell. My job isn’t to answer all the questions, which, almost you would say if you were, if somebody were drafting that the question, they’d almost do it as a multiple choice, they’d say, do you think your job is either to sell or to answer all the questions? But it must be one of the two. And I love the contrarian nature of saying it’s actually neither it’s to engage in a helpful dialogue that answer some of the top level questions while lifting up the expertise of the organization and facilitating a transition to another. It’s just if you can’t apply that in other places other than chat, you’re not paying attention.

Nelson Bruton: Well said. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Really cool. Have you seen. You mentioned you dated yourself a little bit, that you’ve been at it a while. As the, there’s been lots of conversation about the new world of B2B buyers and that conversation I felt really exploded during covid when a lot of people decided to take retirement, say, to heck with this.

People that were used to selling to 55, 60 year olds now found that they were coming back selling to 35 year olds. Have you really, have you seen a bit of a generational shift in preferences on the chat side as well? 

Nelson Bruton: Seven or eight years ago certainly the younger generation was more prevalent on the chat usage. However, as our society has become text message driven and FaceTime driven, you have your grandma and grandpa who are, CEOs or leaders of organizations who are texting and FaceTiming with their grandkids. So even the older generations are using this, these new methods of communication and their preferences are shifting over time.

So now it’s just a matter of preference. Why does somebody prefer vanilla over chocolate? It’s just make sure that you, as a business, make sure you cater to all your potential preferences of your visitors. And we talked about, make sure there’s an easy to find phone number. Make sure your contact form and your quote request forms are on your product pages. And then make sure you offer chat for the people who prefer communication. And if your business is, applicable. Make sure you have some sort of self-serve, right? Self-serve, meaning e-commerce, if you have a parts parts options for your equipment. And, self-serve can also mean product configurators, which you guys, I’m sure build for a lot of your customers, right? That self-serve  people wanna do stuff on their own, on the website. So those are the four types of paths that people take from usability. They call, they fill out a form, they chat, and then they self-serve.

Jeff White: On the chat front, and you mentioned this when we were just getting started about how you provide outsourced real human chat that can be powered by AI. How are you? How are you implementing that and how would you recommend that? If someone was looking to kind of staff this internally, that they might choose to look at leveraging AI for that?

Nelson Bruton: Yeah, so I am not sure my, my technical team would have to let me know which language model we’re using for the backend AI. But basically what we do, and we typically don’t suggest to our customers, even though we offer this capability, we don’t typically suggest we do it. Just, pointing back to our conversation is we’re not trying to answer every question.

However, a few of our customers. We have scraped with our AI, their website and their data sheets, their sales sheets, their marketing materials, because it’s robust. And we actually have our team, we have our team have access to that AI so they can actually, as they’re talking with somebody, if certain questions come up that are more technical, our team can actually use AI to search that database and provide an answer from the AI. So that’s kinda that hybrid model where we have human first AI powered, right? Which is really the way to look at AI nowadays. Don’t look at it as scary thing. Use it as a tool to make your human performance, be more elevated. 

Carman Pirie: I kinda like the hidden part of what you just said though, which is to say, which kind of seemed like you were suggesting maybe if you’re looking to have all that information at your fingertips. Maybe that means, maybe that’s the sound you’re thinking about, chatting correctly. Maybe that’s a sign that you’re trying to answer too many questions. 

Nelson Bruton: Yep. Yeah, so the goal, people from a chat perspective, what we’ve learned and 95% of people, I won’t say 95, probably 85 to 90% of the chats. When we pop up the chat window, we say, Hey, welcome to XYZ company. How can we help you today? 85 to 90% of the time the visitor’s I need this, and this really specific. And then our team’s been able to either, if they say something that’s in the script for that particular customer, say, okay, can you tell me is a little bit more about your project, right? Or we ask that top level qualification question. Then we say, all right, great. One of our experts will get back in touch with you. Can you provide your contact details?  So a lot of the chats are short, sweet. The visitor was heard, quote unquote heard, right? ’cause we’re chatting, we’re not talking it’s type. But they were heard, they were acknowledged. They got to tell the person, Hey here’s what I’m looking for. And then we say, all and they know they’re gonna hear back from from somebody at the organization. And if the chat comes in after hours, we say someone will be in touch with you as soon as possible the next business day, right?

To set the appropriate expectation. Now we always emphasize to our customer when those chats get emailed to you and they hit your inbox within about five or 10 minutes after the chat finishes. Make sure your team is aware. Make sure they have a good response time process. And inside sales did research with MIT years ago, and they basically did a huge study and found out that response time for web leads, if you don’t respond within an hour, you’re six times less likely to put that inquiry into a sales process. So we always say respond within an hour. If you can do 15 to 20 minutes, that’s even better. 

Carman Pirie: You can’t… you just can’t do it fast enough. Even if you’re incredibly fast today, if you were faster tomorrow, it would be better. Yeah, we, that’s the society we live in. 

Jeff White: That metric is constant.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. No. So no wonder as we draw the episode to a close here. As if you’re looking out onto the horizon, AI is only gonna get better. It’s as bad as it’s ever going to be right now. And I think a lot of people are already a little suspicious when they interact with a chat bot.

Are we dealing with a real human here? I wonder is AI in chat bot like the kind of AI driven bot just gonna end up ruining it for everyone? Are they gonna ruin the channel such that the human powered chat won’t succeed? ’cause nobody’s gonna believe it’s a human anyway. 

Nelson Bruton: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. A few years ago we started we moved AI onto our threat box and our SWOT analysis. Over the past few years, as AI has gotten increasingly. Better. We’ve realized and through hundreds and hundreds of conversations with customers and prospects people don’t want to be forced to deal with automation. They want to choose it. So if you as a company are going to force your visitors to use AI, I would pose this question to you. Would you rather have a real human answering your phone, if possible when they call into your business? Or would you rather put them through a phone tree? So if possible, put human first humanize your digital strategy.

The results in the data speak for themselves. We see a much higher engagement rate with actual humans because of the acknowledgement and the empathy that they provide. And one of the, one of the risks, as AI gets better, we’ve realized. And this is a huge risk that, I like to talk about when companies are evaluating us versus an AI option.

If you create a really strong AI and it almost feels human, but then they get down the path and then all of a sudden they realize they’ve been quote unquote duped. And they realize later on in the conversation that it was AI. There’s gonna be weird feelings there. Towards your company. And so it’s just something to consider. So we don’t see too much of a threat from AI. We’re going to continuously find ways to embed it and hybridize our solution to make our solution better and better. But we’re always, I don’t say always ’cause there’s no definite in today’s world. There’s no definite. But right now we’re totally human first. And the results and the data continue to prove that’s the way to go. 

Jeff White: I love what you said about people want to choose automation, not be put into a situation where they have to deal with the automated solution first. My most recent chat experience was with one of those chats where it’s starts off with AI and after you’re exasperated with it, you can ask to speak to a human agent. 

Nelson Bruton: Yeah. Yeah. What you just said needs to be repeated once you’re exasperated with it. Meaning once you’re annoyed enough. Yeah. Then you get so just put the human first. 

Carman Pirie: It’s interesting to consider. I’d love to see some split test data around, like offering two chat options. Do you want to deal with an automated bot right now, or would you prefer to deal with a human?

And I bet for some inquiries, people would be like. Give me the bot. Thanks. Humans are annoying. And then in other instances they’d be like, yeah, I’m not, I just don’t want try to go through the bot tree. And they would probably understand based upon their query, what is likely to get them where they need to go faster. I have to choose your own adventure guidance there now. Yeah. 

Nelson Bruton: Yeah. It’s interesting. We’ll look into that. And I do wanna mention one other thing too, just, from our perspective, because the HubSpots and the Salesforces, they all offer the chat software. For many of our customers, we integrate really seamlessly. We love integrating with CRMs to have the data flow seamlessly within the organization. So our solution in particular it’s not a standalone has to go through everything. It integrates with the way they operate. And that’s a question I get all the time, too. 

Carman Pirie: Understood. Nelson, it’s been great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been an interesting topic to dive into and I think anytime we can make digital more human I think manufacturers win. So this is a really interesting conversation. Thank you. 

Nelson Bruton: Absolutely. Thank you. 

Jeff White: Thanks a lot.