An inside look at OnceHub’s AI capabilities with Gilad Goraly
OnceHub’s CPO takes questions after the successful launch of our new conversational AI features, which are already transforming the way many of our customers engage with website visitors. He shares insights about the evolution of these features, describes some of their unique capabilities, and reveals what new users can expect starting out.
Introducing new and exciting AI features
Congratulations on the launch in May, Gilad. It’s exciting to see how well these features have been received!
Gilad: We’re exceptionally pleased with the response.
Chatbot, conversational AI sales rep, B2C consultative sales tool, all of the above? What is the essence of these new features in a nutshell?
Gilad: Our AI capabilities let you build a conversational chatbot that’s almost like a digital clone of your best sales rep. It’s deeply familiar with your business and excels at communicating your unique selling points. It’s a fluent and engaging conversant; always professional and polite; highly skilled in drawing out website visitors’ concerns or needs; and it has a particular knack for handing the conversation over to a human when the time is right. Plus, it can conduct many conversations simultaneously, in scores of languages, around the clock.
It’s been incredible seeing how actively visitors engage with OnceHub’s AI chatbots, on our customers’ websites and our own.
Conversation AI use cases
You ran a beta program with a subset of OnceHub customers earlier in the year. What did you learn from that exercise and how did it impact the features?
Gilad: We started the beta focused on Q&A, on engineering a fluent, sophisticated conversational experience powered by generative AI. What we saw pretty quickly, though, was that Q&A wasn’t enough.
Participating businesses loved how the conversational AI chatbot engaged visitors and answered their questions in such a personal and relevant way, but they also wanted it to hand the conversation over to a human without breaking that spell. And, naturally, it couldn’t be a handoff to just anyone for any reason; certain conditions have to be met.
So that’s how OnceHub’s lead qualification and distribution capabilities were factored in the new AI chatbot features? To streamline the handoff to a human of a warm and qualified lead?
Gilad: Exactly.
OnceHub’s customers know it for appointment scheduling, so it’s natural to view the new AI features as primarily an extension of that functionality. But that isn’t necessarily the case, is it?
Gilad: Our AI chat features can be very effective in lead qualification, make no mistake, but you don’t need AI lead generation to do that job. Some of our customers prefer to filter prospects using hard-coded questions. They feel that there’s greater control, when it’s black or white who you want to meet or not.
You don’t need AI lead generation to identify your better opportunities, but I think you do need it to really engage, inform, and warm leads on your website day and night – to excite those visitors that aren’t yet fully convinced and to hand them off to a salesperson before they move onto your competitors’ websites and get excited about what they read there.
As our beta customers made clear, a smooth handoff is essential in B2C consultative sales, and we have the expertise and the technology to ensure it happens. So, yes, it’s definitely worth looking at our AI capabilities from another angle, one where appointment scheduling, routing, and live engagements are extensions of an AI consultative sales or AI lead generation experience.
A smooth handoff is essential in consultative selling, and OnceHub has the expertise and the technology to ensure it happens.
The AI chat experience
For the benefit of those who have yet to give these AI chat features a try, could you describe the experience and how it differs from interacting with a more traditional bot?
Gilad: Consumers haven’t always liked chatbots. I’m sympathetic to the argument that the benefit that older generations of chatbots provided accrued mainly to service providers, not users. To say that there were technical limitations on what you could do would be an understatement, but that has changed with generative AI. Today, there’s no reason why a conversational AI chatbot can’t provide excellent service to website visitors while driving sales momentum at a lower cost.
It’s been incredible seeing how actively visitors engage with OnceHub’s AI chatbot, on our customers’ websites and our own. Many of them may approach the bot with some hesitation, expecting canned answers of limited value, but, when they receive a really useful response in natural language, they almost instantly follow up with another, more complex question.
Fifteen to 20 minutes’ effort will repay you very nicely with a chatbot primed to answer questions about your business in a genuinely meaningful way.
What do you think anyone trying OnceHub’s AI features for the first time will be surprised by?
Gilad: Firstly, our customers have been stunned by the quality of the answers themselves. To be honest, so have we. They are really good – precise, relevant to the business in question, authoritative. One customer actually started using the tool internally. Client-facing team members there are using the conversational AI chatbot to answer questions over the phone. That’s not a use case we have pursued, but it goes to show how well the technology is performing.
They are also amazed at how fast it is to get going. We’ll be setting it up and – just like that – it’s done, ready. You can have something to work with in just five minutes, but I’d say 15 to 20 minutes’ effort will repay you very nicely with a chatbot primed to answer questions about your business in a genuinely meaningful way. This could be revolutionary for any business. The main thing is to try it.
Getting updates and support
It sounds like things are moving very fast. Where’s the best place to get the latest news on OnceHub’s AI capabilities?
Gilad: You can follow our progress on our LinkedIn page.
And where can our customers get help as they move into this new era of conversational AI?
Gilad: In addition to the post-signup guided tour and industry-specific templates to get you up and running fast, we have help articles and the 24-hour support via live chat or email that OnceHub has long offered its customers.
And we’re always interested to hear from our early adopters – to learn about their experiences, answer questions, and address particular challenges they face. We designed these features to be as intuitive as possible, but AI is a tool that didn’t exist a year ago, and it takes a shift of mindset to really get the maximum benefit from it. It’s a question of strategy now – “I have this powerful tool. What do I want to do with it?”
We’re here to help our customers make that leap and realize that ROI!
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