Ever visited a website and saw a tiny box-like structure that pops up with a friendly nudge like “Need help?” The other day, when I was browsing products in a fashion e-commerce brand, I experienced the same thing. I searched for specific dresses on two different e-commerce websites, and both provided other experiences.
In one e-commerce fashion website, the chatbot said, “Hi! How can I help you?”, while in the other fashion website’s chatbot, it said, “Looks like you prefer blingy black party dresses? Should I show you some suitable ones?”
Here’s the twist: You’ll definitely go ahead with the second chatbot as it comes up with a very specific query. Besides, it understands how much you’re longing for a particular kind of dress. No hassle or confusion. Straight-to-the-point question with ideal product suggestions. Yes, lead generation chatbots have now become a strategic asset. Now, the bots are proactive, sleek and mini geniuses that flip the customer service script.
So buckle up and go through this blog to learn how lead generation chatbots are embracing future trends to meet customer expectations and push them into the sales pipeline.
Why does future-proofing lead generation chatbots matter?
Let’s get this straight - The digital world is full of commitment issues. What worked six months ago now feels stale and gets you ghosted by your leads. Now, your customers have outgrown the 2022 technique, as everything is changing rapidly. Your customers are now swiping, scrolling, and looking into five apps in ten seconds in the hope of getting into honest conversations before making any decision.
Your tech stake is now evolving at light speed. One moment, you are tweaking FAQs, while at another moment, your customers want the bot to send personalized emails and recommend products. They want voice-enabled bots speaking multiple regional languages to solve their queries. If your bot is still rolling out generic responses, it may be technically acceptable, but your customers are not happy with it. Here’s why this isn’t working anymore:
Consumer expectations are sky high
Chatbots are no longer novelties. They are an integral part of the daily user experience. So, your customers expect bots to remember their previous chats, speak the local language, and suggest relevant products based on their intent. Today, users don’t prefer bots that don’t understand their emotional side. So, if your business’s chatbots cannot have an honest conversation today, they won’t have one ever.
Tech has left the chat
Now, AI has gotten smarter. People are loving no-code platforms. They are now looking forward to real-time analytics to make more improvements. So, if your chatbot is still not personalized, cannot be integrated into the CRM, and doesn’t update as per feedback, it’s not a future-proof one. Instead, it’s a future-fragile chatbot.
Conforming to privacy laws
CCPA, GDPR, DPDP Act - these are no longer just buzzwords. They are the rulebook your chatbot needs to follow, especially when it’s dealing with a lot of human data. Now, your lead generation chatbot needs to seek permission, log consents, and offer opt-outs for more safety and security of the customers. This builds trust and binds all your customers together.
Top future trends in lead generation chatbots
So, what exactly is changing? Well, a lot! Lead generation chatbots are now becoming more demure and human-like. They are understanding customer vibes more, choosing the perfect moment to get into a conversation and even crafting messages like a copywriter. Let’s check out the new additions in the lead generation chatbots that are here to stay and rule.
1. AI-powered personalization
Honestly, most lead-gen chatbots still sound like they were made in the 2000s. The moment your customers land on a website, the chatbot greets the customer saying, “Hi! How can I help you?” This happens even if your customer has been in the same website ten times and even if the customer has made a purchase from the same website.
This appears robotic as it lacks context. Think of such messages from your lead-gen chatbots when you are trying to convert leads into paying customers. Such robotic scripts just don’t cut it.
Enter AI-powered chatbots. These are smart - they don’t just know your name but are aware of your story. They remember what purchase you made previously, your browsing history and your wishlist. So, the minute an out-of-stock product you added to the wishlist comes back, these chatbots nudge you. This is what gets the real conversion to happen.
2. Voice-based chatbots
Typing every query is a real task, and your customers do not want to engage in this heavy lifting. Think of how your customers have to juggle between a hundred tasks. Amidst all of these, typing a query and asking a chatbot means the customer will have to leave some important work and devote some amount of time to typing, autocorrecting, and sending.
Result? It gets worse, especially on mobile devices. Here, the screens are small. So, the thumb movement for typing feels clumsy. Now, typing anything more than a normal ‘Hi’ becomes a full-on task. Things get even more complicated for people with language barriers and visual impairments. Here, voice-based lead-gen chatbots are the only solution. With real-time verbal flows, both the customers and the chatbot save time. Besides, it’s faster and smoother.
3. Omnichannel integration
Your lead-gen chatbot is fixed on your business’s chatbot, while your potential leads are hovering all over the place. You are losing customers because of a lack of presence on other social channels.
Here’s the problem with a ‘homepage-only’ mindset - Your users do not stick to just one platform. Instead, they check your Instagram stories and ask questions about products. They open the pricing page in the WhatsApp group. They read emails/newsletters at midnight. If your chatbot is missing out on this party, be sure to lose business to your competitors.
To be the social butterfly and be all over the place, your lead generation chatbots need omnichannel integration. These chatbots follow the user’s journey in this way - WhatsApp for real-time queries, Instagram DMs for product interest, SMS nudges for cart abandonment, email replies for late-night queries, and Alexa or Google Assistant for voice-based search.
4. Predictive lead scoring with AI
You’ve gotten a hundred leads. Great? The real problem occurs when your sales team asks: “Which ones are actually worth calling?” Suddenly, the leads start feeling mysterious. They think that it could be spam.
It’s impossible to score leads and their journey manually. The moment a lead takes an action, you score them. This happens a hundred times throughout the day. One of the biggest mistakes that sales reps make here is chasing the wrong leads.
This is where you need predictive lead scoring. This feature doesn’t just let you chat with users, but it also judges the leads and their journey throughout the sales pipeline. Here, chatbots use AI that automatically assign scores based on how long the customer was on the product page, whether the customer watched the demo video, the excitement or frustration reflected in the messages, and more.
5. Data privacy and consent automation
You may have a charming lead generation chatbot. But if it captures customers’ data without consent, be ready to face unwanted troubles. Now, violating customers’ privacy is not just a breach of trust or a sign of bad PR. It’s an illegal activity.
Now, it’s time to give your lead generation chatbot a structure that saves you and your customers from any cyber threat. Now, lead generation chatbots ask for consent before acquiring the personal data of customers. Besides, the chatbot logs every consent action for future audits.
6. Multilingual and localization support
Your chatbot might be fluent in English, but not all your customers are fluent in the same language. Offering a generic chatbot experience to customers means you’re making your them feel like an outsider. In most cases, customers bounce not because of a poor product, but because chatbots fail to understand them.
However, the future-ready chatbots speak multiple languages, understand different timezones and handle regional currencies. You can expect the chatbot to translate chats, auto-adjust date and time, and be culturally aware. In short, lead generation chatbots are not just smart but also relatable.
7. Integration with sales intelligence tools
Most chatbots are charming enough to start conversations. But when they grab a lead, they stop nurturing it. Whatever info they gather, they simply dump it into a spreadsheet or a CRM, hoping that someone will pick it. However, leads go cold as one takes the information from the CRM and connects with the customers.
Your sales team opens up a chatbot lead only to find some basic information. They have no idea about what the lead asked or what the lead was interested in. Naturally, the sales rep sends something generic that does not hit the right mark.
Here, when you combine chatbots with AI-based sales intelligence tools, the chatbot literally becomes a know-it-all about the leads. They nudge leads with specific requirements. This closes deals faster and with zero ghosting.
8. Emotionally intelligent chatbots
Imagine someone wrote this to your chatbot: “This is ridiculous. Your app is broken” and your chatbot reacted in this way: “Would like to speak to sales?” Well, this is something you certainly don’t want. Here, the static bot completely ignores the tone and sounds extremely annoying.
When people are associating themselves with any brand, they are not just talking. Instead, they are expressing their confusion, frustration, angst or even happiness. If your bot cannot make the difference between all these emotions conveyed through human language, it’s killing people’s trust.
Here, you need emotionally intelligent chatbots like Copilot.live that use NLP and sentiment analysis to feel what the user is typing. The chatbot should sense every emotion of the customer, switch tone automatically and escalate in terms of challenging queries.
9. No-code bot building and democratization
Every time you wanted to change the flow of your chatbot, you had to inform the developer team. Either they had to get into fixing bugs or rearrange chat bubbles in a haphazard way. Although chatbots are meant to aid marketing, they have become profoundly technical and beyond layman’s understanding. This led to missed leads and slow marketing campaigns.
Here, you need no-code chatbots that allow you to add features with a simple drag-and-drop feature. Here, you get a visually appealing chat flow builder for effortless customer conversation. The conditional logic that these chatbots come up with lets you choose between options. Besides, the live analytics dashboard gives you a clear idea about what worked and what flopped.
10. GPT-based content generation inside bots
Most chatbots today are lazy. After they gather leads, they simply sit back and chill. They pass on the customer information and think that the rest will be taken care of by the sales team. Here, your sales team does the hard work of sending follow-up emails and messages and creating product descriptions.
This makes leads go numb. While your competitors craft the most customised emails, your sales team follows one particular kind of template for all. Result? Customers reply this: “Thank you, we’ll get back to you soon.”
Not, the future-proof chatbots are GPT-based. Not only do they collect leads, but they also write for them. For this, the chatbots use large language models to draft a killer follow-up email or message, summarize an entire conversation into a short CRM note, suggest a more humanized LinkedIn message and spin product descriptions based on users’ needs.
11. Proactive lead engagement bots
If your chatbots still sit tight without taking any action, you’re letting your leads move ahead with your competitors. So, even though you notice traffic on your website, people reading your content, asking about price, they don’t take action. If you don’t nudge customers, this silence of the chatbots will cost you heavily.
Understand that people go halfway through your website and still don’t click on anything; it’s because they are confused. When leads visit your site more than twice in a week, it means they are just a step away from taking action.
Here, the ultimate solution can be proactive chatbots as they don’t wait for customers to take the initiative to start the conversation. Instead, they watch, sense and jump in like a perfect virtual sales assistant.
12. Bot-to-human collaboration upgrades
When it comes to connecting with humans, you think only humans can build relationships. Well, chatbots can also do this if they are on the right track. Leads get annoyed when bots stretch something too long or fail to understand what they are saying.
Here, chatbots need bot-to-human collaboration. Through this collaboration, the chatbots know when to shut up and get a real person into the scene with grace. Such a collaborative effort of the chatbot provides customers with real-time notifications, context-rich conversations and detailed chat replays.
How can businesses adapt to chatbot trends?
So, you’ve gone through the trends and you’re fired up to implement one of the finest lead generation chatbots across all social platforms. But how do you do this? We hear you. Of course, following trends gives you visibility. And, more visibility means more leads. But here’s how you implement them:
- Select flexible platforms: The chatbot building platform you choose shouldn’t give you a hard time. Instead, it should be equipped with all the features that get your high-quality leads from all over the globe.
- Have a multilingual feature: If you want to take your business into the global sphere, the chatbot should remove the language barrier. You certainly don’t want to lose leads because of such a petty issue.
- Set up consent flows: Now, privacy laws are becoming stricter than ever before. So, train your chatbot to ask for consent before collecting anything personal.
- Plug into CRMs and analytics: Your chatbot here works like a lead-generating machine. So, you don’t want it to just collect data and dump it randomly. Connect the chatbot directly to the CRM and let it pass on your lead information there. Additionally, consider adding the chatbot to your analytics dashboard to measure its effectiveness.
If you’re looking for a future-proof lead gen chatbot platform, Copilot.live is all ears. It understands how people’s needs have changed over the years. Now, it creates completely future-ready lead generation chatbots with a special feature: AI-based voice calls. Further, it has a sentiment analysis feature that lets conversations come with an emotional context.
Conclusion
So, lead generation chatbots can now be the front-line performers of your business, provided they have these future-proof trends in them. The trends covered in this blog are not just tech tales. They are already out there making a big difference in developing better customer relationships. So, get a lead generation chatbot now and treat it like an integral part of your sales team. The faster you do this, the more you capture customer loyalty.
