We’ve found that live messaging is the future of business communication

I won’t “bury the lede”: We have launched services around using Drift for instant messaging for business, like you see on our website. They include Implementation/Integration, Team/Culture Kickoffs for Teams, and Managed Messages (where we help you respond and talk with people on your site.). Chat with us to get info on next steps.

Everyone has experienced the agony of finding a product they want more information about, and being met with “Contact Sales” forms that ask you for your life story and your mother’s maiden name.

If this were the trade-off for an instant answer, it might be worth considering. But, it’s not.

The truth is that folks are hearing back days later, if ever, in most cases.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Our friends over at Drift recently did a study on actual response time (or lack thereof) from B2B technology companies. Here is a sample of what they found.

Now let’s flip it. If you asked your sales/marketing team about their response times, what do you think they would tell you? The truth? Or what they strive to achieve?

Technology has caught up. It’s time to start acknowledging that most people would rather send a text than to call their friends (even their besties) to set up lunch. What makes us so delusional that we think they want to sign up to be “nurtured” in an email sequence forever while they wait to hear back from a business development rep whose only job is to qualify for BANT, and not to answer this poor person’s questions.

What if we just allowed this person to send us a message with their questions and gave them… a simple answer? On the same note; How many leads are you losing because you don’t have an option like this?

Well we’ve been practicing this for several months now and the results have been astounding. It turns out that a lot of folks are not immediately up to speed on what our product is, and by asking questions, they are telling us what they need more information on. (We have taken that info and built better website content over time.) These people, once answered, often have more to say. Many of them want to talk in person and ask us for an appointment, not the other way around. The technology will allow them to schedule an appointment right there in the chat. It’s seamless and easy for them, and us too.

The only thing that isn’t as easy is time. The number one thing we hear from folks when talking about this is wanting to make sure there is always someone there to respond within five minutes. Hey, me too!

We’ve addressed this in two ways:

1. Use friendly “conversational chat-bots” to route customers to the right department and help prequalify leads while they are connected with the right person.
2. We’ve put intelligent people who know our client’s products in the bullpen to help catch these chats and route them accordingly.

Regarding point two: It turns out that most people who are looking for information on a well-documented product tend to ask similar questions. We work with your team to be ready for these. For the one-offs, we integrate directly with your knowledge base. Our expert writers will enhance existing articles even create new articles over time to develop a more robust knowledge base.

In other words, leave the outsourced ESL chat team to the telecom companies. We’ll plug in people you would hire in your process to help develop and qualify people in a real and human way. All this information will be available in Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive and most other CRMs.

We provide company leaders with a dashboard to track the performance of incoming messages from the folks on your website.

If you are thinking about implementing live chat or instant messaging in your business and are looking for some help with implementation, kickoff workshop for sales/success, or managed service (starting at $750 per month). Just send us a message in the chat! We eat our own dog food around here.