About Hatch Assistant

All your questions about Hatch's AI offering, Hatch Assistant

In this article, we'll cover what Hatch AI is, how it benefits your business, how it compares to other AI offerings, and more. Use this article to gain a better understanding of Hatch AI.

What is Hatch's AI offering?

Hatch’s AI offering is called Hatch Assistant. With it, you can customize AI agents that converse with your leads, prospects, and customers over text and take the appropriate admin action in the back end in Hatch.

What kind of AI does Hatch Assistant use?

Hatch Assistant is a generative AI tool, powered by OpenAI. This means, while prescriptive AI can make suggestions and predictive AI can make forecasts, generative AI can produce its own content.

In the case of Hatch chatbots, generative AI means that the bots can come up with their own responses to customers based on your rules and instructions.

How does Hatch AI compare to other AI-powered customer communication tools?

Instead of just equipping agents to better engage with customers, Hatch AI actually converses with customers for you—following customer communication best practices.

In other words, it doesn’t simply recommend responses or provide coaching; it does the conversing for you. You configure your bot with:

• a name
• a personality
• a set of rules
• a set of prompts

Once you've set up the bot with these parameters, it will talk to customers for you, pleasantly and professionally, following all the best practices. 

How exactly does it work?

While Hatch AI bots take hours of work off your plate, there is some configuring you need to do at the start. Here’s what getting that configuration set up looks like:

Create your business profile

You’ll train your bot with a specific set of questions to ask the customer, but customers can also ask your bot their own questions (like “Do you offer window repairs or just replacements?” or “What are your hours?”). The bot will use information in your business profile to answer “off-script” questions.

Define your persona

A persona refers to the way the bot behaves and interacts with customers. It’s the bot’s personality. The persona consists of the bot’s name, tone, and additional instructions.

For example:

• Bot name: Emilio
• Tone: professional and empathetic
• Persona: This is an optional field. We usually leave it blank unless we're having fun with it (such as "you use HVAC puns in every message")

Note that you can combine tones, like “professional and empathetic” or “witty but professional.”

Define your prompts

Each bot you create has one directive (like to book appointments or follow up on quotes) based on the campaign you assign it to. Prompts (called interactions in the Hatch Assistant platform) are the questions your bot is responsible for asking customers and getting an answer to.

These questions help the bot to achieve their assigned directive. You can also tell the bot what constitutes a valid response to a question (for example, address must include zip code).

Set your rules

Once you have your prompts, you can then set specific rules. These tell your bot how to detect certain scenarios as well as what to say and do in response to them, such as with objections, unqualified leads, or the customer needing to talk to a human rep.

Publish and refine

You'll have a chat window with your bot in the platform as you create it, so you can test the bot as you make changes and refinements. Once it’s ready to go, publish your bot!

Then use the reporting feature to monitor all bot conversations and its overall performance. You can make adjustments as needed afterwards.

Can I trust a bot to talk to my customers?

This is a common concern—and there are a few different answers to this question.

Your bots are polite & professional

Your bots talk to customers the same way any human agents would. Hatch AI uses natural language processing (NLP) so they can understand and respond in a conversational language.

Hatch AI bots have been known to converse with customers better than human agents. They don’t get burnt out, stressed, or take things personally. So, in this sense, you can trust the bot more than your human reps.

For an example of how well Hatch AI bots handle customers, read about Kaitlyn and Lance in the Renewal by Andersen success story.

They take on the top-of-funnel interactions

Hatch AI bots are designed to take on the initial top-of-funnel conversations so that your sales reps are freed up for those bottom-funnel conversations—the ones that require more complex problem-solving and advanced communication skills.

You’re not relying on a bot to close deals for you, but rather to answer questions, set appointments, and sift out unqualified leads. They take on the simple and repetitive tasks for you so you can focus on the more complex ones.

For example, Renewal by Andersen trusts their Hatch bot, Lance, to handle 1,500+ inbound leads a month.

You have full control

Not only can you trust Hatch bots to get the job done and be pleasant to your leads and customers, but you have full control. Here are some ways in which you can exercise full control of your bot:

• Rules: You can set rules to cover specific scenarios.
• Reporting: Our reporting feature allows you to see exactly how many conversations the bot is handling, which are grouped by outcome (success, bailout, or discard).
• Conversation monitoring: You can click into any conversation and review it. If you detect the bot is not responding the way you’d like, you can go into the bot, set a new rule, and test it in the platform before republishing the bot.
• Forced scripts: For any prompt you create, you can let AI decide how to say it or you can instruct it to use an exact script.
• Sandbox: You have an open chat with your bot right in the interface so you can test refinements as you make them.

Will Hatch AI replace my job?

While Hatch AI can take on several of the responsibilities of contracting sales and marketing reps, it is not designed to replace their jobs. Rather, augments their performance while alleviating workload. Here’s a deeper dive into how Hatch Assistant works alongside humans:

• Augment your performance: Hatch Assistant takes menial work off your plate so you can focus on responsibilities that require and show your skills and talents.
• Better employee experience: Hatch Assistant takes care of repetitive tasks so agents can work on more meaningful, gratifying tasks that help the business to grow.
• Meet the demands of your job: Customer expectations get higher every year, business goals are ever-increasing, and you are constantly dealing with fluctuations and challenges. With Hatch Assistant, you can essentially clone yourself to keep up with growing demands in the industry.

How does Hatch AI work with Hatch automation?

Hatch automates your outreach to leads and customers. You program it to keep track of who needs what outreach and when. Hatch will then carry out that outreach, following up until the customer responds.

This saves you hours spent building lists and doing outreach while also increasing response rates. You just have to jump in and engage when the contact responds. 

This increases the amount of time you have, but it also increases the number of responses coming in. Hatch AI comes in to handle the influx of responses so you can keep up.

Together, Hatch’s automation and AI work together to drive your revenue goals while saving you time.

What are the benefits of Hatch Assistant?

Some of the benefits include:

• Improve set and close rates: No more opportunities falling through the cracks (including after hours) and better quality messaging increases engagement.
• Retain customers: Meet growing customer expectations of speed, personalization, and consistency.
• Reduce turnover: Employee retention is a challenge in this industry. Hatch eliminates grunt work, improving job satisfaction and freeing up employees to focus on gratifying, strategic initiatives.
• Reduce costs: You reduce costs associated with missed opportunities, agent turnover, and human error.
• Higher revenue and ROI: Higher set and close rates with less time and effort means higher revenue and higher returns on your sales and marketing investments.
• Scale your business growth: Hatch empowers you to increase revenue without having to purchase more leads or hire more reps. But because it gives you a rinse and repeat process to deliver personalized experiences at scale, you can increase lead or team volume in accordance with your growth goals.