Scaling Live Chat with Intercom and MadKudu

When interacting with their leads and customers, businesses are moving more and more toward the world of instant communications.

Having your customers fill out a form may not be the best way of engaging with prospects anymore. A study by Twilio found that nine out of 10 consumers want to use live messaging to chat with a business. They want their questions answered and a solution presented faster.

From a business standpoint, live chat delivers leads faster. It captures them at their moment of interest and allows sales and marketing to engage while the iron is hot.

In a recent webinar, our own Francis Brero teamed up with Brian Kotlyar of Intercom to explore how live chat can impact business performance by discussing best practices and predictive lead scoring strategies.

Check out the highlights of the conversation below. And for an extensive look into live chat and predictive lead scoring, watch the full webinar.

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Best Practices for Live Chat

For live chat to be successful in addressing prospect needs, businesses should follow a set of best practices when developing their systems and workflows.

Define Your Goals

Before you begin, you need to identify your goals for the live chat messenger. Consider questions like:

• What percentage of my leads will employ the chat feature?
• On which pages would they most likely want to chat?
• What do I want to happen after the chat?

Start with your business outcomes, and then work backward to figure out how you’ll craft your live chat experience.

Use Humans

Companies shouldn't rely solely on chatbots — they should plan for human resources before chat implementation.

It's also important to let prospects recognize that they are talking to a person. Use photos instead of company logos for chat profiles, and don't be afraid to use the same tone as you would when talking to someone through social media.

When bots are used, be transparent about it. Let your user understand that they are not speaking with a person. This helps to avoid drop-off and frustration.

Ask Questions

Prompt people to chat with you. To facilitate this, ask specific lead-in questions.

While in the testing phase, see which questions net the most responses. Find out the best length of time to wait before prompting your prospects.

Target the Right Pages

You want your live chat messenger available on high-intent pages, such as a pricing page.

Be sure to offer appropriate calls-to-action based on what page your user is on. Offering a demo on an “about us” page, for example, is probably not as helpful as offering it on a “contact us” page.

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Live Chat and Predictive Lead Scoring

Going hand-in-hand with a successful live chat platform is lead scoring.

The goal of lead scoring is to build a ranking mechanism. It should figure out your priority leads and be able to differentiate the level of interaction you're going to have with each type of lead.

Predictive lead scoring is a process that gathers data on your prospects and automatically assigns them a lead score based on historical patterns.

With predictive lead scoring, companies are able to deliver the right messages in live chat to different types of prospects at different points of interest levels.

Predictive lead scoring ingests all of your historical data — in-app data, marketing activity data, and CRM information — and enriches it with third-party information. The information then runs through a machine that uses complex decision trees to identify different types of customer profiles, along with the conversion rates associated with each.

So why do businesses use predictive lead scoring? 

• It helps marketing and sales go beyond preconceptions of leads. They can leverage historical successes to better assess their next steps.
• It saves their sales team time, giving them signals as to why a lead was scored a certain way. 
• It helps them scale!
  

Once scores have been assigned, your goal becomes a matter of focus. Predictive lead scoring helps identify the small segment of leads that generates the most revenue for your company. That way, your marketing team knows when, where, and how to best engage a specific customer with a specific message.

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3 Ways to Use MadKudu + Intercom

1. Use a lead’s score to send targeted messages (e.g. who should be treated like a VIP prospect?)
2. Qualify people in real-time and give instant access to sales’ calendar to book a meeting
3. Route leads to the best person to complete the job based on lead score (e.g. lower quality leads are routed to a bot vs high quality leads being routed to a live person)

Get more details on how to use these two applications together - check out MadKudu on the Intercom App Store.

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Want to Hear More?

Find an in-depth conversation on scaling live chat, including a real-time question-and-answer segment, by watching the full live chat webinar.