Dealing with impatient customers? Invest in AI to streamline services

HubSpot’s Kipp Bodnar said feedback from AI chatbots will help marketing teams improve their services.

Handling more impatient customers in 2023 prompts marketing teams to use more automation and AI tools. One other advantage, as pointed out by Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot’s chief marketing officer, is that using tech will avoid having extra people to do one marketing task.“

Customers want to interact on their time so if they’re chatting on your website, they don’t care if it’s midnight or 7 a.m. They want to get an answer,” Bodnar told Asian Business Review at INBOUND 2023, an event held recently in Boston, Massachusetts.

AI is proving beneficial by generating customer feedback, which, according to Bodnar, enhances the work of marketers.

“We’ve seen a lot of success with AI chat on websites, our own, and our customers’. And what we have found is that AI can answer a very high percentage of those chats — almost 80%,” Bodnar explained.

Through AI, chats with customers will be quicker and easier, he added.

“Companies that adopt general AI are going to be able to connect at a much better and deeper level with their customers,” said Bodnar.

An example of this is HubSpot's new AI products and features that help create marketing campaigns faster, allowing teams to create better images, content, and blog ideas.

AI tech investment keeps increasing, especially in Singapore, which now has more than 60% of marketing and sales professionals using generative AI tools.

Despite growing AI capabilities, authentic input should still be mixed with AI since the tech is, so far, still a mimic of various information. 

Strategies for a marketing team

Marketing teams working in business-to-business (B2B) platforms should follow these strategies to be more productive, Bodnar suggested.

Because working with B2B would mean running ads and campaigns that will directly be sent to a customer or a salesperson, the first strategy for a marketing team to be productive is to understand what their lead generation’s direct response strategy is.

“That normally happens through a mix of paid advertising, organic search, and email marketing, which is the most common kind of tactics to drive that,” Bodnar said.

The second strategy is to create clarity on the brand and to tell the story of the business.

“You’re taking that story to a market through normally a host of advertising, video ads home ads, and print ads. That's something that any team, even if your budget is very small, needs to have a little bit of investment there,” said Bodnar.

After establishing a clear brand, the third strategy is to create a clear and simple customer-focused way to describe the value of your products. This is called product marketing, where you detect customers’ problems and how to solve them, he said.