Up until now, we’ve guided you through many aspects of Pipedrive implementation on our blog, such as creating a Pipedrive account structure, configuring Pipedrive permission sets and visibility settings, as well as building reports and Pipedrive automations. Even if you’ve implemented only half of our 100+ tips, your Pipedrive account is poised to generate a high ROI. But we can make things even better. In this article, we’re going to explore how you can actually get leads into your account.
Pipedrive’s lead generation tools are bundled under the LeadBooster add-on, priced at €32.50 per company/account. Today, we’ll focus on the first LeadBooster product: the Chatbot, along with Pipedrive’s Live Chat, and share 10 tips for maximizing their use.
These tools are easy to start with, but unlocking their full potential requires understanding best practices and hidden features. Drawing from our experience with Pipedrive Booster 2.0, our Pipedrive implementation package, we’ll go beyond the basics and share tips to maximize their value.
Introducing Pipedrive’s Chatbot tools
Pipedrive Chatbot is not a natural language processing-based AI agent that can lead conversations on its own. Instead, it follows a predefined conversation sequence that you build and configure using the chatbot playbook in the Pipedrive interface.
Pipedrive Chatbot has two main goals: engaging top-of-the-funnel visitors and capturing qualified leads. It interacts with inbound visitors, answers their questions, and either converts them into pre-qualified leads or routes them to a 1-on-1 qualification with your sales team. The chatbot should focus on building rapport rather than hard selling, guiding visitors through the pre-qualification step.
The Chatbot is tightly integrated with Pipedrive, which is crucial. Chatbot leads are added to the Leads Inbox with labels indicating their qualification status and important details that populate the predefined lead and deal fields. We covered these fields in detail in our entry on the ins and outs of the Pipedrive account structure. The Chatbot can also redirect conversations to Live Chat if the lead cannot self-qualify or has additional questions.
How to start building your Chatbot? It’s easy! After activating the LeadBooster add-on, go to your Leads Inbox, navigate to Chatbot, and click ‘New Playbook’ to build your personalized Chatbot flow.
10 best practices to get more value from Pipedrive Chatbot tools
Apply brand colors and personalize your chatbot appearance
When setting up your chatbot, customize the window with your brand colors by adjusting the header and main colors to match your branding. Replace the default “Pip” bot with a real person’s name and image to lead the conversation in a more human way.
Note that the name and image settings are configured once per account.
Create an engaging Chatbot flow
To create an effective chatbot flow, define the actions the chatbot will take in response to specific user inputs. There are four types of actions you can include:
- Message: This is a simple text that appears in the chatbot window and can include images and links. A special type of message, the Proactive Message, is the initial welcome or engagement message displayed after a set time (e.g., immediately, after 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 seconds).
- Question: This leads to predefined response options that trigger the next chatbot action. Responses can be up to 40 characters long.
- Capture: The most important action, built to collect user data. Each capture node collects one data field at a time, whether it’s a standard or custom field from the Person, Organization, or Deal entity (refer to our entry on the Pipedrive account structure). These fields integrate directly with your Pipedrive account, ensuring chatbot responses populate the relevant fields.
- Live Chat: Transfers the conversation to a real representative. You can configure the welcome message, add links and images, and set the waiting time for a Pipedrive user to join. A rep must assign the chat to themselves for it to continue. If no one joins, an offline message is displayed.
At the end of each chatbot flow, the conversation reaches a Qualification Node. Based on the gathered information, you can qualify or disqualify the lead. Chat details are saved only for qualified leads. You can then add qualified leads to the Leads Inbox or, if highly valuable, directly to the Deals Inbox and assign an owner.
Mark yourself as online to manage Live Chats and gather data
To participate in live chats, mark yourself as available by toggling the “I’m Online” option in the web interface. New chats will appear in your Unassigned folder; you must assign the chat to yourself to engage.
Use live chats to collect valuable data and context from users. You can populate the following fields using the Live Chat side panel:
- Deal value and expected close date
- Person’s name, email, and phone number
- Organization name and address
- Any custom notes
Once the conversation is complete, be sure to close the chat.
Add a prefix to Chatbot leads
Each new lead source, including Chatbot, adds complexity to tracking performance and reporting in your Pipedrive account. This also applies to different Chatbot playbooks that leads may come from. Fortunately, Pipedrive lets you label all leads acquired through the chatbot with a custom prefix. You can set this prefix in the save preferences and use any name, such as the conversation name (e.g., convo-2). This feature ensures that all chatbot-acquired leads are labeled for easy identification.
Always end your chatbot sequence with a contact email
Even with a well-structured chatbot built around predefined questions and answers, there may be instances where prospects don’t find the information they need. To ensure they have a way to reach out to you with their completely custom question, it’s a best practice to include your contact email in the final farewell message as a fallback scenario.
This simple step encourages prospects to get in touch directly if the chatbot couldn’t fully address their queries. It also opens the door for activating lost prospects in the future through the e-mail follow-ups.
Save the chat conversation URL
To track the pages where your chatbot conversations come from, enable URL tracking in the chatbot settings. This feature helps identify the specific pages on your website where prospects engage with your chatbot.
Once enabled, Pipedrive will automatically create a custom field in your lead or deal data model called “Chat Conversion URL.” This field captures and stores the exact URL where the conversation began, allowing you to analyze which pages drive the most interactions and conversions.
For step-by-step instructions, refer to this guide: Chatbot Settings.
This data offers valuable insights into your prospects’ journey, enabling you to optimize high-conversion pages and enhance your chatbot’s overall performance.
Analyze drop-off rates
Pipedrive does not provide specific Insights reports for chatbot activity, but it does offer key metrics unique to this feature. One important metric is the drop-off rate, which shows the percentage of users who abandon your chatbot at a particular step compared to all users who reached that step.
Drop-off rates are displayed on your playbook’s page, helping you identify where prospects exit the chatbot interaction. This information allows you to refine and optimize these steps to improve Chatbot engagement.
To view drop-off rates for a specific playbook, ensure the “Show Drop-off Numbers” option is enabled. This setting provides detailed statistics on where users lose interest, enabling targeted improvements to maintain their engagement.
Note that editing your chatbot sequence will reset the drop-off rates.
Capture lead information from unfinished chats
Many prospects abandon chatbots not because they lack interest, but because the chatbot may not fully address their questions or they don’t feel heard. While leaving a contact email can help, you can also recover valuable data from dropped conversations. In Pipedrive, you can create leads from chatbot conversations that become dormant (referred to as “Unresponsive,” meaning chats that didn’t reach a live agent and have been inactive for 8 hours).
To capture lead data from these dropped conversations, follow these steps:
- Go to the general chatbot settings (not a specific playbook).
- Enable the Capture unfinished conversation details option.
Once enabled, remember to:
- Categorize chat contacts as either leads or deals.
- Assign an owner to these unfinished conversations.
- Apply a prefix to distinguish them from other leads.
- Assign them to an appropriate Pipedrive visibility group. Since these are often lower-quality contacts, use a narrow visibility group.
Optionally, configure Pipedrive to send email notifications whenever a new lead or deal is added.
Analyze chatbot performance
Regularly monitor key performance metrics. Focus on the following metrics:
- Viewed: The number of times your chatbot has been seen.
- Clicked: The number of times users interacted with the chatbot by typing, even if the conversation was not completed.
- Qualified: The number of successful chat submissions that resulted in leads or deals.
- Disqualified: The number of chats that did not qualify as leads or deals.
- Status: Indicates whether the chatbot is active or inactive. Deactivated playbooks will appear under “Inactive Playbooks” and will not be executed on your website.
Use Live Chat as a fallback option
Live chat acts as a fallback for chatbot conversations, allowing you to step in and continue the conversation when needed.
Include live chat in your chatbot playbook for better lead qualification and personalization. It helps you engage more effectively with leads from the start.
To configure live chat, add it as a node in the chatbot playbook wizard. It must come after at least one capture or question card.
Set up an offline sequence to handle cases where no one responds to the live chat within the specified time.
Happy chatting!
Now that you have a deeper understanding of how to maximize the value from Pipedrive chatbots and live chats, nothing should stop you from implementing them in your business. Develop an interesting and engaging set of questions and responses to assist your prospects, and simply install the chatbot on your website. To build something more advanced, make sure to check our custom implementation of both that’s included in Pipedrive Booster 2.0, our specialized implementation package for Pipedrive.
Photo attribution
As usual, the featured image of the article is a photograph that corresponds with the article’s topic. This time, the shoutout goes to Jr Korpa via Unsplash.
