Building Better Leads With Bionic Chatbots: How buildings company Ulrich is using AI chatbots to boost their business growth

A website rebuild became the perfect opportunity for yard-and-lifestyle buildings company Ulrich to re-evaluate their strategy and tools for turning site visitors into qualified leads. As part of this process, the limited functionality of their existing chatbot was identified as an area where improvement should be made. With a clear understanding that today’s AI functionality is only poised to grow, Ulrich set out to evaluate, select, and deploy the best way to turn website visits into qualified leads and greater revenue.

Challenge

With an expected 333.5 million ecommerce shoppers by 2029, timely and relevant engagement with site visitors is increasingly critical to capturing more business growth. Like many companies, however, it was unsustainable for family-owned Ulrich to have staff available 24x7 to chat with online visitors in real time. In addition, when their sales team picked up a chat during business hours, they were finding that these prospects did not necessarily have a high level of product knowledge or purchase intent — an inefficient use of the team’s time.

Leads slipping through engagement cracks

Traditional decision-tree chatbots — like the version Ulrich was using from another provider — have some serious limitations, especially for marketing and sales. For Ulrich, the strategy with their existing chatbot was to “hope that someone was available” if a site visit was during business hours. Outside of working hours or if no one was free to take the conversation, the only option was to ask for an email address. With many visitors choosing not to submit their contact information at that point, it was clear to Roland Brickey, the company’s Director of Marketing Operations, that Ulrich was losing potential customers. 

“It (the chat bot) was a little pop-up thing that most people would just minimize right away and go about their browsing,” recalls Brickey. “ We wouldn’t get any engagements at all — it got to the point where (our) people thought we turned off our chat because there were no chats coming in.”

Solution

Having decided that Ulrich clearly needed a “better tool,” Brickey started searching for the right chatbot option to enhance the company’s rebuilt website. That’s when he discovered AI Bionic Chatbots from Drift.

Unlike typical (and often frustrating-to-engage-with) chatbots that rely on fixed responses and decision trees, Bionic Chatbots let prospects lead the conversation, seamlessly shifting between topics as needed. By utilizing content you have uploaded to create fast, highly relevant AI-generated responses, a Bionic Chatbot lets you use AI to easily and efficiently offer the next best action for visitors — tailored to their identity, journey stage, and past interactions. The Bionic Chatbot also monitors intent in real time to navigate users towards meetings, support, or content effectively. If sales intent or support intent is detected, the bot exits its AI Response node and continues the conversation as designed. The Bionic Chatbot can use different playbooks based on where your site visitor is coming from, be it an email, an ad, or organic search.

An “easy, straightforward” deployment

At Ulrich, the Bionics Chatbot was rolled out to four different lines of business teams. In addition to sheds, cabins, and garages, the chatbot was also extended to the horse barns unit. According to Brickey, “The process was fairly straightforward, nothing super-complicated . . . I feel like it was a good experience. And it’s so nice to have the confidence now that a customer will get a response — no matter the time or bandwidth.”

Having led a successful deployment of the Bionics Chatbot, Brickey also offers these practical tips for others who are thinking about making the move themselves:

• Hitting the ground running will drive visible value more quickly
• Keep feeding the chatbot good information
• Let it do its thing as early as possible
• There’s so much functionality — continue to build out your deployment

Choose your own adventure

When engaging with a site visitor, the Bionic Chatbot acts as the digital experience’s ultimate traffic cop, using conversational cues and questions to direct visitors to the most appropriate resource or destination as quickly as possible. For visitors doing pre-purchase research, that may be the site’s customer service page, products page, or helpful content like articles and blog posts that Ulrich has uploaded. 

But engaging and educating prospects without tying up sales reps is just the first step. When the bot determines through its interactions that a lead is ready to speak with sales, it will connect the visitor with a relevant Ulrich team member to continue the conversation. Having pre-qualified leads on the line has been a huge positive for Ulrich sales team members. “It’s boosting our salespeople's confidence,” relays Brickey, “because they know they have a live person on the chat. They just get to it a lot quicker.”

Results

Ulrich is definitely reaping the benefits of more efficient engagement with their move to a Bionic Chatbot. As Brickey explains, “It’s bridging that gap between us trying to call or email at the ‘right time’ as opposed to knowing they’re live on the site, ready to talk.” Here’s what that looks like in terms of business impact:

• Meetings booked – 35% improvement
• Deal cycle time on our sheds has improved by 30% for online leads
• Conversions from chat up 84%
• Average ticket increase of 15% 

What’s particularly remarkable is that these notable results have been achieved despite the fact that Brickey’s team hasn’t yet had the opportunity to fully leverage everything the tool has to offer. “We have a few playbooks in place for general meetings bookings,” he reveals. “I wish we were doing more, but we haven’t had time to build out things like the paid ad playbooks and stuff like that.”

The Ulrich website proudly informs visitors that, “We are a high-energy, driven bunch with a big audacious goal to serve 1,000,000 families by 2028!” By adding the sophisticated yet straightforward power of the Bionic Chatbot to their online prospect and customer experiences, that goal doesn’t feel quite so audacious anymore.

About Ulrich:

The Ulrich family of companies is the premier solution for your backyard and lifestyle structure needs. At Ulrich, we have built and sold thousands of sheds, cabins, garages, and outdoor living structures in California, Texas, and Virginia. As the highest rated shed company in America, we are strategically expanding into more U.S. markets. With a combined 250 years of industry management experience, we offer a unique ability to truly understand your needs and find solutions for them with a 5-star experience.