When you hear the term chatbot, you probably think of customer-facing applications. That’s not surprising given how many businesses currently use them or plan to use them to automate communications. Business Insider reports that 80% of businesses are expected to have some sort of chatbot automation by 2020.
Chatbots are already used for everything from customer service to capturing sales leads. But if you’re only using them for external communications, you’re only getting half the value.
What if you could chatbots it to get answers to your own market research questions such as “What is the key unmet need uncovered in this patient segment?” or “What imagery will speak to this target segment?” Thanks to AI and natural language processing, you can create a solution to do just that.
Most pharma companies have an abundance of market research information within masses of PowerPoint documents. The teams that create these documents know the contents. But that knowledge is easily lost when employees leave or transfer to other areas.
Combing through each presentation for relevant insights would be a tedious and time consuming task. The person searching for insights couldn’t be sure whether the information they need is even there at all. And even it is, it would be easy to accidently skip over something important.
Using a keyword search could speed up the process to an extent, but even then, the process is largely manual and ineffective if you’re dependent on exactly matching keywords and phrases.
Thankfully, AI and natural language processing can solve this problem. Just look at Google. They made search results more relevant to the searchers’ intent when they incorporated AI into their search algorithm Rank Brain in 2015. Through natural language processing and semantic search, relationships between similar products can be identified even when the searcher may not be fully sure of the name of item they are seeking.
You can do the same thing with your data. By creating a database of all your market research PowerPoint files and applying AI search to it, you effectively allow everyone on your team to have the entire database of knowledge at their fingertips. Plus, they can search it in multiple ways, even if they don’t know whether what they are seeking is in there. The AI natural language processing will be able to interpret what is required and identify the content they are seeking.
So where do the chatbots fit in? We can layer chatbot technology on top of the AI-enhanced search, so the marketers don’t even need to type. They can simply ask the question like they would with Siri or Alexa.
This may seem like a small thing, but it
can be a big help. Remember, one of the biggest reasons that chartbots are becoming more widespread is their ability to interpret and mimic conversational language. This means that marketers simply need to ask questions rather than try to figure out what keywords or phrases will return relevant results.
Let’s go back to the examples above: “What is the key unmet need uncovered in this patient segment?” or “What imagery will speak to this target segment?”
When the information in all those PowerPoint presentations has been properly collated, tagged and the AI and Natural Language Processing has been implemented, the system can quickly search for answers based on the intent, whether or not the keyword phases match exactly.
And rather than return a big list of documents for the marketers to go through, the chatbot delivers pulls out just the specific information needed to answer that question, just as Siri or Alexa do with their voice search functionality.
And those are just two examples. Imagine all the opportunities a solution like this opens up for all your marketing initiatives. You can ask questions to unlock key insights for everything from brand positioning, to your next launch strategy to specific marketing and customer communications components.
And the best part is, the more questions and other interactions the chatbots have with users, the more accurate and predictive they become. We can even program them to alert other people and link to calendars so they can pull key insights for meetings with agencies and other partners.
Conclusion
Given the competitive nature of the pharma industry, marketers need all the advantages they can get. Using chatbots for stronger market research fits the bill. It’s faster, easier and more efficient than traditional, manual market research efforts. Plus, it’s less prone to human error and eliminates the risk of losing those insights due to staff reassignments.
To learn more about how Eularis can build AI-powered chatbots to strengthen your market research, drop us a note using the contact form or email the author at abates@eularis.com.
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To learn more about how Eularis can help you find the best solutions to the challenges faced by healthcare teams, please drop us a note or email the author at abates@eularis.com.