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Billy Bateman, Co-Founder and VP Operations Chat Funnels - How To Evaluate Your Chatbox Game for 2021

[00:00:00] Next up, we have an awesome session, and this is very much, I think, relevant to a lot of us, but something that really hasn't been talked on a

Zac Muir

Zac Muir

VP of Sales & Marketing
Zac was one of our first hires. Outside of waging war on spreadsheets and time-killing systems, Zac loves to push the boundaries of what's "safe" on a wakeboard, spend time on the golf course or tennis courts, and more than anything, live life with his beautiful wife and 4-pound dog, Twix.

[00:00:00] Next up, we have an awesome session, and this is very much, I think, relevant to a lot of us, but something that really hasn't been talked on a lot at the summit. We are bringing on Veli from chat funnels, going to talk Chatterbox's. This guy is basically out. Braynon lives and breathes chat, chat, everything, writes hatboxes on your website. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?

[00:00:28] Yeah. Thanks for thanks for having me, Zach. Yes. So I'm one of the founders of Chiat Funds. And what we what we do at chat funds is we have a conversational engagement platform. So if you want to use chat bots to engage your customers and automate things, we can help you do that if you want to and just have a live chat with people and engage them right away. We're there to help you with it. Our real philosophy is we can use intelligent information to engage people to the right people. That's really what we believe the bots best at is let's get right people connected and we can do it. Twenty four seven with the bot.

[00:01:09] I love it. And if a lot of you are having like deja vu right now, Royal Beyman works with us. A lot of you might have demoed with him before and we've done a lot of work with them as well. On our chat box, on our site. They do awesome work. So it's great to have you, man. So I guess where to start? All of us. I mean, every single website today you go on and there's a chat box on that, right. So. Yep.

[00:01:35] What what's the what are the things that make a difference between, like an amazing chat system and an amazing chat box that's just crossing it versus just a little icon in the bottom right hand corner. My website.

[00:01:47] Yeah. So I'll start out with a few things that are that are just general to anyone, not just not just real estate. The first thing is you've got to have a real goal of how you're going to help your customers when you put it bought onto your site. So a lot of people this is one of the biggest mistakes that that that I've seen was, OK, we we bought whatever platform it is and we're going to put this bot on our homepage that does like anything you could want to do. We're going to we're going to take you to support. We're going to take you to sales. We're going to find articles for you. We're going to do fake use. And initially, when you get started, you don't know how to do all of those things well yet with your customers. So whenever you're getting started putting a new a new strategy, whether it's a bot or even just having live chat available, what you want to do is choose one goal that you're going for. And so that goal could be, hey, we're going to we're going to build a bot that books showings for us for this subdivision that we've got listed. And on the page for that, we know they're in in the promo area or wherever it is.

[00:03:02] We're in L.A., whatever neighborhood, and we can figure out what questions we need to ask people and when we should be targeting them to let them automate booking appointments so they don't even have to talk to anybody they can know. OK, Zach, if you were the agent, you would sync up your calendar and say, I'm available for showings in this neighborhood. During these times, they could just come in in the middle of the night, only have to call you. They could say, oh, yeah, I am preapproved for a loan. I'm interested in this house. And then your calendar would be given to them and they can book a meeting right there and and say, OK, well, we're going to meet you here at this time and let's look at this house together. And then you get that information as an agent and go off and do it. Just start with one use case. If you're going to have a live chat, you've really got to be responsive. Is the next thing I would say is the biggest problem we see with live chat is you're not responsive like companies put it on and we've all been there like, OK, is anyone coming to talk to me to the point where you almost expect it?

[00:04:09] Because you've had that experience so many times at so many sites where there is no response, you almost expect it, right? Yeah.

[00:04:16] Yeah, you almost you're like, why do I even bother with this? It's because I've done badly. So what you want to do is be responsive. If you're going to have a live chat available, make sure somebody is is be is watching that and gets notified whenever somebody wants to chat with you and they are trying to do their best to be as responsive as possible. We've found some benchmarks with our customers for being productive on live chat is if you can have an average response time of under one minute, you're doing really good. Like ninety percent of the time people are still going to be waiting around within a minute and you're going to have a conversation with them. It's most likely going to be productive. If you're in that one to two minute range, it's still OK. You're definitely starting to lose people at that point. But if you're averaging over two minutes, you got to rethink your whole strategy on who's manning it. And if you're even going to if you're even it doesn't make sense for everybody.

[00:05:16] So a lot of people on this call, one of their main things is, OK, I want this chat box on my website because I want it to turn visitors into leads for me. Yep. What are some things that you've seen done around that that work? Well, or just general advice in that area?

[00:05:36] Yeah. So be clear about your offer is the first thing. So if you want to generate leads with a bot and this is whether you're in real estate or selling software or selling tractors, be very clear with whatever you're offering them. Is it a showing? Is the consultation, is it a product or is it a pricing discussion? Be very clear that this budget can help you accomplish this thing from the beginning and then set the expectations of what they need to do for that to happen. So often we'll see like somebody wants a demo and the bottles say, yeah, I can help you book that demo. Then they've set it up so that the bots can ask a 12 questions before they can schedule that demo or watch the video demo. And they don't tell them like, hey, can you answer these 12 questions? And this is why I would never say I have 12 questions before you give them what they want optimal is three to four questions. So you could ask them, you know, like, hey, what neighborhood are you looking for? Great. What's your price range? OK, what's your name? What's your email, your phone number or something like that? To be very clear on what that offer is and set the expectations within that bot. And then the next thing is really like be optimizing that like as much as we'd love to just set it and forget it with a chat bot, you gotta like always be looking at it and thinking, OK, how can we make this better.

[00:07:06] Yeah. So talk in, just chat and messenger your in general, what are some trends that you're seeing. I'm sure there's been a lot of growth there you wouldn't be involved with.

[00:07:18] So yeah, people want answers now. That's the trend that we're seeing. They no longer want to come and fill out a form and wait for somebody to call them back, although I'm looking for a new house right now. I filled something out on Zillow. Somebody called me within two minutes and I'll tip my hat to that agent for being right on it. But people want answers now, like we no longer want to wait around for somebody to get back to us. And what chat does for you is it allows you to get answers to people right away, whether that's via bot or live chat. And so one of the trends we've seen is we've been running a study with a few of our customers to see how having a form versus chat affects contact rates for people. So the way that this worked is they had a form after visitors got a form for an offer and then the other half got the bot when they clicked.

[00:08:19] I want this demo and what they found is what we would do is within the bot. We would have a certainly a trip point where we'd say, OK, they're not quite qualified yet, but it looks like they are probably somebody we want to talk to at that point. We can root an agent and if they're available and what we would found is that by doing that with the bot versus waiting for them to fill out the whole form, submit it goes into the CRM, pre the agents email or call them back as soon as possible. They had a 50 percent higher contact rate. So they were talking the way more people having those conversations with now generated from the chat box actually had a higher contact, right?

[00:09:08] Yes. Yeah. And so and the main reason is speed to lead with the bot. You can talk to people, right? They're thinking about, you know, if we've got a form on our site to say, hey, I want to see this home or I want to do a consultation, you've got to wait for them to submit the whole form before you know they're there and they're ready to talk to you with the. But what you can do is once they start chatting with the bot, depending on how you've set it up and what you're you're ready to do, you could get alerted right away as soon as they initiate that conversation. If you want to add on your high end ten pages, that's what we advise all of our customers to do, is if you've got a page like a pricing page or for for a lot of people or with real estate, like, hey, these are my listings. I want to know when anyone initiate. The conversation on those pages, I can get a text message, I can hop in and just start chatting with them right there. And so you're able to just contact people right now. And what we're seeing is people don't want to wait around. The first person to contact me has the best chance of getting my business.

[00:10:17] Yeah, we see a lot of a lot of preferences around. And we were talking about this earlier. But I think chat, text, I mean, that's the way things are moving. You look at the younger generation, they don't call people to pick up their phone. They just want to text. Right. And that is an offshoot of that for sure.

[00:10:39] I see that with my own team. Like, I'll ask somebody to research something. And I would I would do chat working on a demo or a phone call with somebody. But even guys just, you know, five, six years younger than me, they'll just go in and they're just going to chat with them like they'll never get on a phone call until they're about ready to buy. They'll just get in there like, yeah, I'm chatting with them or I'm texting with the guy. I'm getting my questions answered for you. So.

[00:11:07] So if I if I want to go in and evaluate, like, my chat box and what we're doing, and if you are to come on to a consultation with me and just look at what we're doing with Chad, I mean, what are some of the first things you'd be looking at? Obviously, that speed, right.

[00:11:21] But yeah. Yeah. So the first things that we do when we're evaluating and chat for somebody and just how well they're doing is we're going to look at them and see if they've got live chat. How fast are they responding? We found that is the leading indicator of success. If you if you're going to use live chat is how fast are you responding to my live chat? And like those benchmarks I mentioned earlier, if it's slower than two minutes, like, we can definitely help you with that. Even if you're in that one to two minute range, we can still help you with that. We built gamification into our product to help your team know where they stand and rank them against the rest of the team. The next thing we're going to look at is what offers are you taking the bot to? Is the bot really providing ROIC for you if you're just using it to kind of be a, hey, we have a bot, but there's no clear use for it. You should definitely look at, OK, what is the one offer or use case we can do to start driving value and add something we can tie back to to real money? You know, having the bot just to have it is nice. And if you want to pay for it and do that, fine. But I would tell anyone you want to tie this back to real money. So whether that's booking for real Turbit's booking showings or consultations and you can put a dollar value on those, that's what you should be doing to see if you really get the return on investment and if you close more deals as opposed to just having forms on your site. Yeah.

[00:12:58] Do you have benchmarks or maybe you have some examples, clients you've worked with where you know they because the name I mean with a lot of this chat box, the name of the game is I get a thousand visitors to my website. Can I convert more of those thousand visitors? And even if I can get one percent more, that's going to be a pretty significant attribution, right? I mean, are you seeing increases with chat versus other.

[00:13:25] Yeah, yeah. We we usually see see an increase and we always encourage all of our of our customers to do a split test and and we help them set up those test whenever possible. But what we see is as high as a 40 percent increase in the conversion rate with the bots once they're dialed in. And that's usually not right off the bat. The first iteration that you do for anyone, you know, like it'll work. But the second the third iteration, that's when you really dialed in and you learn what your customers want and how they want to interact with you. But anywhere from five to 40 percent increase in conversion rate is what we see with our customers.

[00:14:08] Ok, very cool running that split test. And this is just kind of a more general marketing thing. But how many variables are you thrown at them? What kind of timelines are you typically running? Split test solver.

[00:14:21] Yeah, so it all depends. Zach, is that is the split test, I guess, because I. Yeah, I'd love to hear that.

[00:14:32] So what we do. Can I share my screen on that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Let me let me share my screen with you and we do the social graph and there we go.

[00:14:44] Throw it up.

[00:14:47] Ok, awesome. OK, so this is our product right here, and this is a bot that we built just as an example. And so this would be on a page for a specific property you've got listed, OK? And so the first question is like, hey, it will pop up and would ask somebody, would you like a showing of this property? And you can even put the exact property name in there, the address, and they have an option. And right here we've got. Yes. And so I haven't finished this bot out, but we can say, OK, I've got two questions for you. First, I'm going to ask for a name, then we're going to ask for an email. And then what I do after that is if I'm the agent that owns this or I'm building this out for my team, what I would do is I would put a calendar right in here, invite in here, and then we would select a meeting type and would just call it a showing. And you can choose which agent gets that. Now, if it's one agent that owns it, you can just choose that agent and have it go directly to their calendar where they've already set up the windows, that they would be available for a showing if they don't have anything else booked or if it's shared between a group. You can round-robin that between a group or any of your teams as well. Now, when you're testing this, what I would do is I would start at the top of the bot or the funnel, as we like to call it. And so here what I do is I would change that that call to action that I've got. And I could I could run a split test now here and our software, we've built it right in so that you can run these test. So I just go, I was going to make me it's going to make me save before I do that.

[00:16:42] And what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here and I'm going to start a new test. And I'm just going to call it Sisu.

[00:16:54] And then I'm going to select that box that I've got here. And now it's already saved that original version. I can change this and so I'll change the copy, here is what I would start with and I'll be a little more aggressive. Keep the buttons the same. I could change the buttons, and if I want to be conservative, I'm just going to change one thing at the very top and work my way down is the very scientific way to do it. The problem with that is it's so like you got to wait for enough data to come in to make changes and be like, oh, well, you know, I had to wait for five hundred people to look at this before I knew which one was the winner. Now, if I'm brand new to this, I'm just trying to figure it out. I would change everything pretty much. I would change my question order.

[00:17:54] I would change myself or play the different workflows and figure out which one works and then work from there.

[00:18:00] Yeah. And I would say, OK, I would let it run for a little while and then I would say, OK, this one looks like it's working a little better than the other one. And the software here will even tell you which one's the winner based on statistics, or you can set it to run over time. So here I can say, OK, my metric that I'm after and if I'm starting at the top, I'm probably just looking for conversations. I just want to get more people talking to the bot or to me. And so then I can choose, OK, why do I want to just run it for a day, for a week, or do I want to run it based off statistics and see which one really proves out to be the winner based on the math? So here with that, I'm just going to choose stats. I'd pick a start time and then what this let me do is just choose, OK? When the stats say one's the winner, do I want to just have it automatically start serving that one all the time or we'll just alert me and let me make the choice, you know, put any notes I want and then I'll start running that test. Now, I can also go in here and see how this is just an example of one. And I can see the stats on, OK, which one's doing better than the other on another bot that we've got running. And it'll give me all the metrics for what's working on these different bots that we've got. So really easy to do. But I would start at the top of your funnel, like, OK, if I'm working through this and I'm trying to get more conversations, well, the first thing I'd start is how am I getting people to engage with the bot if I've got that set in the first place?

[00:19:39] Yep.

[00:19:42] Yep. You got to have those conversations. So I was all, how do I turn this off they go. But yes, start running those split test. Really see how you're engaging with people but your customers want to buy from you. And the best thing that Chet does is it lets your customers engage with you right away or your prospects that you don't know. I don't even know they're on the site. Well, if I've set up a bot, I can book meetings in my sleep out. I woke up this morning and overnight, you know, another demo had been set up, put on my calendar and I'm ready to go. So I love it.

[00:20:20] I like the scientific approach. Right. You get a lot of Sisu people on here that they love the numbers to be able to use them to make the decisions. So I think you take that kind of split test and really run it anywhere. I mean, people that run it with different scripts that they that they use in their prospecting, they'll run it with even like creating completely different systems. Are they want to try a new system for scheduling appointments and the way that that handoff works or they want to implement NASA team and try that out? Well, OK, we're going to go we're going to split test it. We're going to run the numbers against each other and we're going to see how it works. So you guys definitely, obviously have thought about that very much because it's built into your product very early and even down to the hole, like, do I want this feature, this new script to be implemented automatically if it becomes a statistical winner? I think it's pretty cool.

[00:21:17] Yeah, we I mean, we really try to say, you know, stop guessing and start testing. Yeah. Really figure out what's going to work for you. And bots are great but bad, but lead to horrible experiences. And that's our goal is let's avoid putting bad chat bots on our sites. Let's test and see what people want.

[00:21:40] Yeah, totally. One of my favorite this is a chat box thing, but me and my boss Frank had different ideas about which which script was going to work better on a chat box. Right. Well, we have to argue about it. Let's go test it. Right. I think has ended up winning. I was not that surprising there, but at least I got the test right. And so it helps from my collaborative sense as a team to have that mentality of we're not going to talk about it, let's just test the stuff, see what works and run.

[00:22:11] Nothing for sure. For sure. Like no need to argue. And then I have the boss just say, oh, I got it. I'm going to. Pull rank here, just run the test and see what happens, you know? So, yeah, it's it's awesome. And we see our customers, we often we put them in, we implement them. First day, the sales teams are getting getting meetings booked right on their calendar. And usually the sales cycle is a little a little shorter where they don't have to wait. And then you also what you what they've found is they're not going up against as many competitors if they can get their their their customers engaged quickly.

[00:22:56] If you start talking to somebody like, oh, OK. Like, I can look at this house today and let's make this happen, you know, you're not going to look at as many houses. Yeah.

[00:23:07] Yeah. So if someone if someone on this call wants to get in touch with you, they want to they want to keep up their chat box game. They want to have you come in and testify. How do they get in touch with you?

[00:23:20] Yeah, the best way is I'm always on LinkedIn, so just Billy Bateman on LinkedIn. Send me a message. I'll check it. I check it every day. But you can also come to chat funnels dotcom. If you want to see more, just book a demo with us. The bot will help you set that up or you can just start a free trial and and get going on using the product as well.

[00:23:44] But also header script kind of thing that you put on your on your website that.

[00:23:48] Yeah. OK, yep. You put a little pieces JavaScript in the footer, your website and and you'll be good to go.

[00:23:57] And then if you have questions once you get going, we're there to help you the whole way through comment or appreciate you hopping on anything else you want to leave us with the day we get to it all.

[00:24:08] Everything you want to have, I think we got to it all the basics. But if you're interested, like, please reach out to me. Happy to help and would would love to just help more people get in touch with your customers right away and close more deals.

[00:24:26] Love it. But thanks for hopping on man. Let go back to this exact. Have a good day. Everyone has websites in the chat if you want to hop over there. Let's see. So you guys.

[00:24:40] Ok, we got two more speakers, we got Tristin from Lab Coat Agencia, then, of course, Tom Faery, our main key here. Coming up, we're going to take a short break, a couple of minutes here and then we will come back on live with Trystan.

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