Overview
Custom Intents is an enhancement to AI replies that enables your AI to recognize & respond to specific customer questions and custom scenarios.
Why it matters
Reduce Human Review or Premature sales reps' handover: Your AI can handle more complex interactions independently, reducing the frequency and need for human review or early handover to sales.
Increase number of qualified leads: Your AI can handle objections now. This should gradually increase the number of qualified meetings booked over time.
How to start using it
Custom Intents is a Beta feature. You can contact your Customer Success Manager to enable it for your account.
Go to the Conversation Flow editor and toggle on AI powered responses at the top left hand of the screen. You should see Custom Intents are now available.
Scroll to the bottom of the page. Click on the box Add custom intent.
You will be prompted to specify the scenario for your custom intent, describe when it should be used, and how you want the AI to respond. You can decide if your AI should handover the prospect to a sales rep or continue the conversation.
Remember to click on Save.
Scroll down this article to Best Practices and Sample Plays for examples and inspiration on how to set up your Custom Intents.
Now that you have created a new Custom Intent, you can test your AI’s responses in the Playground on the right-hand side of the screen.
Check that your AI can correctly bucket the Intent in the grey box below “Your AI classifies this as...”. And adjust What scenario does this custom intent handle and When should this custom intent be used as needed.
Once you are satisfied with your Custom Intent, go back to the Conversation Flow editor and click on Publish. Now, any new incoming responses that fits the Custom Intent will be handled with your specified strategy!
Best Practices and Sample Plays
Example: Budget Objection Custom Intent
What scenario does this custom intent handle?
Contact mentions they have no budget left
Action to take for this intent
Continue conversation
When should this custom intent be used?
This custom intent should be used when contacts mention they have no budget left.
What to do when handling this scenario?
The handling strategy is to acknowledge the contact's budget constraint, reframe the constraint by offering to share more so the prospect can factor the Conversational Email solution into their future budget planning, and share more about how other customers increased their pipeline conversion rates - so the solution effectively pays for itself. An example customer case study would be Custom Trucks which generated $6M in new pipeline and $1M in closed-won revenue within 5 weeks of implementing Conversational Email.
The call to action is to offer to jump on a call so we can share more ideas on how they can find budget for a solution like Conversational Email, but highlight that there's no obligations to do so.
Example: If Already Customer Custom Intent
What scenario does this custom intent handle?
Contact is already a customer
Action to take for this intent
Continue conversation
When should this custom intent be used?
This custom intent should be used when contacts say that they are already existing customers of Conversational Email.
What to do when handling this scenario?
The handling strategy is to acknowledge the contact is already a customer, then try to upsell them the Conversational Email’s Enterprise Plan. The benefits of the Enterprise Plan include additional scalability, administration, security, and support.
The call to action is to ask if they would be interested in jumping on a call to find out more.