Listen to this articleAutomat aims to help companies serve their customers better with their AI powered conversational marketing platform. Automat’s chatbot, cloud-based and powered by AI and machine learning, offers brands a personalized one-on-one messaging experience which delivers meaningful results while simultaneously engaging customers.
To find our more about their platform we sat down with Andy Mauro, Co-Founder and CEO of Automat:
Q: You’ve recently announced $8.3m in Series A Round; could you tell us something more?
A: We’re excited to have raised this Series-A for a few reasons. Firstly we are seeing the growing momentum of Conversational Marketing among the world’s leading brands which led to the caliber of investors that participated in our round. A number of our investors had looked at dozens of different ‘chatbot’ companies prior to investing in us and ultimately decided that Automat had a unique vision, the most advanced technology and a proven ability to execute so we’re pleased to have raised what is to this point the largest round in the conversational marketing space, since it will accelerate building out our roadmap and will allow us to work with even more great brands going forward.
Q: How would you describe Automat in your own words?
A: Automat is a Conversational Marketing Platform for Brands. We provide an enterprise grade Conversational Marketing Cloud offering that allows marketers, creatives and developers to collaborate to build conversational marketing experiences that live inside of popular messaging applications like Facebook Messenger, Kik, and WhatsApp. Automat is unique in providing bank level security, data-privacy, and robustness along with custom built artificial intelligence capabilities for understanding conversational language and optimizing conversion and engagement. Automat also provides strategic consulting and services as many of our customers want to work with us to define their conversational marketing strategy and want our help designing and building the end experience, given our team’s combined fifty year tenure working in the conversational software space. Since the market is still quite early we’re happy to provide these services as both we and our customers benefit from this hands on approach.
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Q: What is conversational marketing and how can it help brands?
A: In order to understand what conversational marketing is it’s worth taking a step back and thinking about the current state of digital marketing in general. Unfortunately most of digital marketing is really about digitally monitoring customers. Marketers have gotten used to tracking which websites customers visit and what they search for, and also through social media are able to monitor who customers are friends with, what they like, what they watch, what they read, and even what their political affiliations are. Now it wouldn’t be so bad if all of this monitoring resulted in an incredible consumer experience, but unfortunately virtually everyone reading this has probably had a digital ad show up recently for a product they already own, or a search they did last week that they don’t even care about that much. The other thing that’s probably happened to readers is they’ve received spam email, often times without their consent or sign-up to the mailing list.
Conversational Marketing offers an alternative to digital monitoring techniques by allowing companies to achieve every marketers dream of having a personalized one-on-one conversation with every customer, allowing the company to get to know each customer as a unique individuals in order to serve them better. Consumers benefit because they have to give permission to companies to talk to them, they can decide what information they provide, and it’s very easy to opt-out of future communication if the company abuses the relationship (simply swipe left to delete the conversation). Consumers also love it because they spend so much time in messaging and having their favourite brands there means they don’t need to download another app. We don’t necessarily think conversational marketing should replace traditional techniques but we do think marketers should be looking to offer this service to their customers as well.
Ultimately, Conversational Marketing helps brands build bi-directional and persistent relationships with their customers, which drives engagement and sales. Specifically conversational marketing is a complete marketing funnel that lives inside of a messaging application. Marketers can create awareness through traditional media channels, drive consumers into a ‘bot’ that lives in their preferred messaging app, engaging them in a conversation that can be entertaining, informative, or just easier than the equivalent web or app experience. By talking to their customers marketers are able to ask customers questions they’ve always wanted to ask and enhance their existing CRM data. Finally conversational marketing allows consumers to not only become aware of a product or service, but learn about it, compare it, receive promotions where applicable, and ultimately convert. When the time is right a company can follow-up using notifications to re-engage their customers leveraging what they learned about them in prior conversations to provide a compelling reason to continue talking to the brand. What’s really exciting about this is that conversational marketing allows brands to design a complete experience from awareness through conversion and re-engagement in the single channel that is most important to consumers today: messaging!
Q: Who are the primary clients of Automat?
A: The clients we’ve announced are L’Oréal, National Bank of Canada, and Covergirl. Our latest launch was L’Oréal’s Beauty Gifter service on Facebook Messenger that lets consumers buy a beauty or skincare gift for a loved one. It solves a real consumer need because these types of products are difficult to buy online when you don’t know a gift recipients skin type or their makeup preference. So we used a ‘bot to ask the gift recipient questions, and learn their preferences. When it’s done talking to the recipient, the bot returns a highly personalized gift recommendation to the gift giver. So far over 90% of the people who chatted with the bot tapped “Loved it!” when asked about their experience!
Across all our customers including the unannounced ones we’re seeing strong demand for experiences that bridge the gap between content and commerce. Of course brands care about consumer engagement but there’s a strong push to introduce commerce opportunities where applicable to ensure that our customers marketing budgets are driving real ROI and not just impressions. They tell us this is one of the most exciting aspects of Conversational Marketing. One concrete example of this is the social media influencer bot we built for Covergirl based on Kalani Hilliker a young celebrity with over 3.5M followers on Instagram. The bot could chat with fans about all kinds of things but also gave makeup advice and provided coupons to consumers which made the campaign measurable in ways that traditional social media campaigns haven’t been in the past.
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Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: We plan to use the funds we’ve raised to grow our R&D team to accelerate the roadmap we have for our Conversational Marketing Cloud platform as well as expand our sales and marketing groups. Our main priority is finding fast moving innovative companies who believe in having personalized one-on-one conversations with their customers so we can define the future of Conversational Marketing together. This is a very early space and there’s a lot left to learn, but we believe massive advantages will accrue to the companies that take an early lead in building data sets and AI expertise in terms of how to talk to their customers, learn about them and serve them better.
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