“We need to bring our website into 2023 or else we’ll lose more customers.”
And yet…“We don’t have the money to invest in new marketing programs, nor can we afford to hire any more support representatives to monitor chat.”
Do any of these statements sound (painfully) familiar to you? If you answered yes, you’re definitely not alone.
According to a recent survey from Adobe and Econsultancy, 52% of financial service professionals said that offering meaningful digital interactions to improve their customers’ financial health was one of their top two priorities in 2023. However, at the same time, 71% of CMOs reported that they don’t have the budget to execute on their 2023 marketing strategy.
So, at a time when your website experience matters more than ever but you don’t have any money or headcount to spare, how are you expected to improve your digital customer experience?
With the help of Drift. Drift’s Conversation Cloud platform provides you with the insights and tools you need to deliver better real-time education and assistance to all of your site visitors without adding any headcount. On average, financial services customers see 12x ROI with Drift, so you could say it’s worth every penny 😉
Let’s take a closer look at how Drift can help your business deliver on customer expectations without breaking your budget 👇
24/7 Assistance
The reality of today’s digital buying landscape is that many buyers don’t buy during the standard workday — instead, they wait for breaks in their team meetings or spend time outside of work to research your solution. In fact, according to Drift data, 40-50% of all chats where meetings are booked happen after hours.
But while this timing may be convenient for your buyers, it likely isn’t for your team. Artificial intelligence (AI) allows you to be there when your buyers need you without forcing your team to work long, costly hours. For example, you can train Drift’s AI chatbots to answer basic questions, provide website navigation, and set up meetings for your sales representatives for when they’re back online.
Even during normal business hours, AI can assist in increasing the productivity of your sales team. This is because, on top of scheduling meetings, AI chatbots can deflect irrelevant conversations — such as support questions or questions from unqualified site visitors — away from your sales reps, so they can just focus on preparing for a successful call. Moreover, with AI taking care of answering all the simple questions, customers no longer have to wait for hours (or days) to get the information they need, and they can come to their first meetings with a basic understanding of your investment options — which leads to a more efficient buying experience for everyone.
Additionally, by training your AI to answer support questions, you can also reduce your overall cost of service because the AI will be able to interpret a site visitor’s open-text question in real-time and serve up the relevant help doc or submit a support ticket if needed. As a result, you get a winning situation for all parties — site visitors can get their questions answered quickly, sales reps can avoid being looped into support conversations, and support teams can focus on bigger projects that will really move the needle for the business. Just take it from our customers who, on average, see an 80% deflection rate from their sales and support teams when leveraging AI in their playbooks.
More Productive Conversations, Faster
So much of a sales rep’s day is spent figuring out who to talk to and what to say. But think about how much more productive they’d be (and how much more revenue they’d drive) if they spent their day holding conversations only with the accounts they knew wanted to talk.
Drift’s Live Chat helps foster higher-converting conversations by providing a channel for site visitors to get in touch with their sales reps as soon as they’re ready to talk. With live chat, when a customer or prospect chats into the bot on your website during normal business hours, you can immediately route in the most appropriate sales rep based on the visitor’s firmographic data. Through the power of real-time notifications, your sales reps will also be notified about the site visit via their desktop notifications or mobile app, so that no matter where they are or what they’re working on, they have the ability to jump into the conversation and maximize the opportunity for conversion.
Even beyond live chat, Drift can help your sales reps prioritize their day by suggesting which accounts they should focus on. For example, with Drift Prospector, when a sales rep logs on in the morning, they get a comprehensive view of all of their accounts and their most recent activity — down to each individual within the account. With an integrated tech stack, Drift will also collect buying signals across all of your tools and leverage AI to calculate an engagement score that ranks your sales reps’ accounts for them, so they have to do less manual work to know who they should reach out to first and with what message.
By combining the power of data-driven dashboards and live chat conversations, Drift gives your sales reps the tools they need to make the most of their work hours, which results in more revenue for your company with no added headcount.
Personalized Experiences at Scale
Customers today expect to go onto a website and find the information they need easily. If they can, they’ll stay with your brand. But, if they can’t, they’ll leave.
In fact, a recent study by J.D. Power found that 91% of financial advisors who are satisfied with their asset manager’s website (rating a score of 801+ on a scale of 1000) are likely to increase their investment with the firm within three months. So, needless to say, if you create a strong digital experience, the revenue will soon follow.
But the only way you can deliver the frictionless experience that your buyers crave is to anticipate what they’re looking for. That’s where tools like Drift Intel can help. Because, by partnering with data enrichment companies to de-anonymize your website traffic, Drift Intel gives you a 360-degree view of who your website visitors are and what they’re looking for.
Within the Intel dashboard, you can see what types of companies are most frequently on your website, as well as what content is resonating with them. You can then use this information to provide more personalized experiences to similar buyers by suggesting content and next steps that you know are relevant to them.
By providing an inside look into the buyer’s journey and making your website do more of your work for you, Drift Intel helps you create a more seamless website experience that reduces your cost-per-lead and gets your site visitors to the point of conversion, faster.
Final Thought
Today’s financial services customers have high digital expectations, but meeting them doesn’t require that you buy a multitude of tools. Instead, it means making the most of what’s already working for your business, and that’s where Drift comes into play. Because, not only does Drift provide you with more channels to get in touch with your customers all through one platform, but it also makes sure that all of your tech “speaks” to each other so that you deliver one seamless customer experience from end-to-end. This results in more productive sales reps, faster deal cycles, and greater revenue.
