Challenges
When Maruti started in 2009, it was and is almost entirely located in India. With this, it faced a challenge that almost every IT company in India did - generating leads and increasing the sales pipeline. Maruti betted heavily in its content strategy with the notion that their expertise in a variety of service offerings, once put to words would bring in the traffic to their website, and in turn, convert them into leads.
Slowly but gradually Maruti’s traffic surged to a monthly recurring traffic of 50,000 visitors. Though the numbers were more than what Maruti was expecting, the conversions on the website were not that great.
At first Himanshu Kansara, VP - Operations tried implementing and using a live chat tool on the website to speak with visitors. Given that a majority of these visitors were from countries outside of India, people were coming to chat outside of operational hours for Maruti Techlabs.
Returning to the drawing board, Maruti realized it needed a scalable way to return to the basics of personalized communication:
Be always available to your visitors no matter the time, as buying intents are higher when they are online.
Probe visitors coming to the website, so that we engage them, and ask qualifying questions to generate quality leads.
Be scalable, as the number of visitors could increase or decrease anytime due to any reason.
Reliable and quality experience to each and every visitor, reflecting the company’s brand of providing top-notch experiences.
Solution
Maruti began to create a prototype of an automated solution that could speak with the visitors coming to their website. They embarked on what would later become a chatbot platform that thousands of businesses would use to automate their own processes of lead generation and customer support.
Their content-marketing focus was reflected in creating a very intriguing and compelling conversation flow through which the bot would interact with the visitors coming to their website. Focusing majorly on their premier service offerings, their marketing team structured the flow in such a way that would potentially eliminate the initial few emails that their sales team would send back and forth to the prospect.
The bot would intelligently ask qualifying questions specific to the service offering that the visitor selected, and end the flow by asking their contact details. This way Maruti was able to engage with thousands of visitors coming to their website, and in-turn convert a majority of them into both MQLs and hot SQLs for their sales team to close. The best part? Sales team had the full context of what each lead was looking for, and could get straight to the point when they got in touch with them.
Being automated end to end, the bot would speak with visitors round the clock and create leads in their Salesforce CRM, mapping each lead to a sales rep responsible for a service offering.
Looking at the results, Maruti’s team kept improving the conversation flows, and made it even more personalized after analyzing the data from the bot.
Results
Since adding WotNot, Maruti Techlabs has brought down response time to customers and leads to roughly few seconds, while managing even more conversations round the clock.
In addition, the team at Maruti Techlabs is developing the product WotNot, so that it can help other businesses like it facing challenges in growing their business.
Here are some numbers to show exactly how much Maruti benefited from leveraging conversational marketing -
182,000+ conversations handled by the bot
1400+ SQLs generated
60% increase in visitor engagement
