Automated email funnels are nothing new. Even recommended text in email service providers like Outlook and Gmail have become mainstream. But what if you could send personalized, automated email responses and have a fully automated conversation with customers that speaks directly to the intent and content in their responses? 

If this sounds futuristic to you, your future starts today! 

How much time do you spend responding to emails every day? According to a McKinsey report entitled The social economy: Unlocking the value and productivity through social technologies, the average professional spends 28% of their day reading and responding to email.  

The Harvard Business Review gives five practices to help lessen the time you’re spending in your inbox:  

  • Turn off notifications and instead check your email hourly 
  • Move every email out of your inbox the first time you read it 
  • Use the search functionality with search operators to re-find emails 
  • Set up just two email folders and use shortcuts to archive emails there 
  • Avoid processing irrelevant or less important emails individually 

What this list misses is the power of automation to take on a lot of the burden of reading and responding to emails.  

Meet Email Buddy 

Email Buddy, at its core, is an automated email responder. But it’s so much more than that.  

  • By monitoring your marketing software and CRM, Email Buddy ingests leads and engages them in a friendly, chat-like conversation.  
  • Unlike human customer service representatives, Email Buddy can respond to customer questions and inquiries immediately 24/7. It can identify customer sentiment and automatically create a CRM ticket, so all your systems are up-to-date with accurate information.  
  • By integrating Email Buddy with Microsoft Teams or Slack, you can quickly connect agents with customers to solve customer needs faster. 

Won’t My Customers Know They’re Talking to a Robot!? 

When it comes to implementing automated responses, whether in a chatbot or other delivery systems, people are often skeptical about whether their automation system will be off-putting to their customers.  

There’s plenty of data to expel this fear (i.e., zdnet.com reported that 54% of survey respondents said they would always choose a chatbot over a human customer service representative if it saved them ten minutes). But I’ll spare you the endless statistics and just show you instead.  

Let’s say Email Buddy is monitoring your marketing software or CRM and identifies Lorenzo, Director of Operations at ABC Hospitals, as a warm lead due to his having attended a recent webinar. Email Buddy will then send Lorenzo a “Thank You” email for attending and – identifying Lorenzo’s industry as healthcare, suggests an industry specific product for him to check out and offers him a special promotion. Email Buddy also invites him to set up a demo of the product.  

Lorenzo replies, “Is it HIPPA compliant?” 

Email Buddy is able to identify that Lorenzo has asked a question and immediately serve him a relevant response. “Yes, it is HIPPA compliant and ISO-27701 compliant.” Email Buddy also serves Lorenzo a link to resources where he can get more information before committing to a demo.  

Lorenzo is interested, but has one more qualifying question, “Does this promotion cover more than one location? We have multiple offices including one in London. If so, I’m interested.” 

Email Buddy understands Lorenzo is interested and seamlessly hands off the lead to sales.  

“Great news – it’s available globally! I am copying Meredith who is our in-house expert for healthcare. Please choose a time that works for you: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm or 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm.” 

Once Lorenzo chooses his meeting time, both him and Meredith are served a confirmation email. Lorenzo can also change his appointment if necessary and intelligent notifications will be sent to all stakeholders.  

Now, you may be asking, how does Email Buddy understand customer intent like that!? The key here is automated intent extraction.  

What is Intent Extraction? 

Before I get into what intent extraction is, let’s define this word “intent.” Intent is what the customer wants out of the interaction — their aims in calling, emailing, posting on social media or interacting with chat interfaces. Intents fall into two categories: casual and business. Some examples of casual intents include greetings, thanks, affirmation and negation. 

Bally (our CTO) laid it out really well in an earlier blog all about predicting customer needs with automated intent extraction. Here’s how he described what automated intent extraction is: 

Automated Intent Extraction (AIE) systems automate analysis of customer conversations based on the back-and-forth interactions with interactive machine learning. Human language learning occurs through complex iterations of back-and-forth exchange of language. AIE algorithms follow the same logic. The end result is an automated method of language analysis that follows the complexity and nuance of understanding in human language. 

Are you ready to leverage automated intent extraction for your business? 

Your Next Step to Email Automation

To start decreasing the amount of time you spend in your email, you can start by spending a lot of time in there by following the steps I outlined above from the Harvard Business Review.  

Here they are again for your convenience: 

  • Turn off notifications and instead check your email hourly 
  • Move every email out of your inbox the first time you read it 
  • Use the search functionality with search operators to re-find emails 
  • Set up just two email folders and use shortcuts to archive emails there 
  • Avoid processing irrelevant or less important emails individually 

Or you can let your entire organization benefit from less time in their inboxes by implementing Email Buddy. If you’re ready to spend less time in your inbox and more time on your most important business objectives, contact us (Social27) today.