When we started creating content at TARS, four years ago, we used to publish posts on pretty much any topic that came to our mind. Our reasoning was that if we found something interesting, our customers surely would too. We were wrong. While our content did well with other tech geeks like us, it didn’t resonate with the average marketers and small-mid sized business owners who were our target customers. At the core of our problem was our language. In our content, we spoke about chatbots as if our readers already knew what they were, and unfortunately (for us) most of our target customers (the average marketers and business owners), had no idea what a chatbot was! Since then, we’ve been able to avoid situations like this through a combination of trial-and-error and consumer insights from our sales team, but I’ve always wondered if there was a way to get these insights without burning fingers first, and this week I finally got an answer! I spoke with Jerome Van der Linden, CEO at Bot Implementation Institute about how he and his team are helping large CPG businesses learn more about their customers using chatbots. Traditionally if a business wanted to learn more about their customers’ preferences, they would have to carry out a market research study which usually consists of a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. On the quantitative side, they usually conduct surveys, and the beauty of this method is that you can do a lot of them. Since they are self-administered, you can literally conduct thousands of them for relatively cheap. Unfortunately, surveys can only get you so far. Surveys tend to give you relatively surface-level data and often miss key insights that could be useful to your business. This is where qualitative research comes into the picture. Before conducting surveys, businesses will usually conduct a set of in-depth interviews to get a deeper understanding of their customer’s psyche and use that understanding to frame their survey questions. The only problem with this approach though, is that interviews are time and labor-intensive. You need an actual human interviewer to spend 30-60 minutes talking to one person to get a single data point. The end result is that the researcher conducting the study has to strike a delicate balance between quantity and quality. What Jerome and his team are doing is they are bringing these two methods together by automating interviews through By automating the interviewing process through chatbots, they are giving the researchers the ability to conduct in-depth 1-on-1 interviews at scale. As someone who is a social scientist by training, I found the conversation super interesting, because essentially what Jerome and his team are doing is they are automating a data collection method that most researchers the ability to conduct in-depth one-on-one interviews at the survey scale. While Jerome’s work primarily focuses on enterprise-level customers, his insights about customer engagement can be used by any business regardless of size. If you want to improve your marketing effort by understanding your customers better, give the interview a listen In this podcast, you will learn… 👉How chatbots improve consumer data quality👉How chatbots can help businesses scale data collection👉How chatbots provide a better UX for consumer surveys👉How consumer insights can be operationalized to improve marketing efficiency Links, links, and more links… Jerome’s LinkedInBot Implementation’s websiteBot Implementation’s podcast (I was the guest int heir latest ep)Arnav’s TwitterTARS’ Twitter
