How Does Hatch AI Work?

For software applications today, announcing that you have AI doesn’t mean anything to consumers.

First of all, everyone has AI now. Second, AI has so many forms and use cases, what does that even mean? And third, not many people understand what AI is. You likely have the main idea, but not the level of knowledge needed in order to feel confident about implementing it for your business.

That’s why we’ve written this post. We’re going to cover what Hatch AI is, how it benefits your business, how it compares to other AI offerings, and more. Use it to get a better understanding of Hatch AI as well as AI in general.

Table of contents

• What is Hatch’s AI offering?
• What kind of AI does Hatch Assistant use?
• How does it compare to other AI customer communication tools?
• How exactly does it work?
• Can I trust a bot to talk to my customers?
• Will Hatch replace my job?
• How does Hatch AI work with Hatch automation?
• What are the benefits?

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 (which also powers ChatGPT). We talk more about generative AI here, but what this means is, while prescriptive AI can make suggestions and predictive AI can make forecasts, generative AI can produce its own content.

And in the case of chatbots, generative AI means that while traditional chatbots require you to program responses, these bots can come up with their own responses based on your rules and instructions.

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

While most AI tools equip agents to better communicate with customers, Hatch AI actually converses with customers for you—following customer communication best practices. Let’s look at some examples for comparison:

• TalkDesk’s AI “helps agents help customers.” It acts as a copilot for agents, surfacing information faster, providing real-time coaching, and detecting sentiment shifts.
• Dialpad’s AI helps agents come up with objection responses, transcribes and analyzes calls to provide feedback and action items, and builds coaching playlists.
• Salesforce’s Sales AI can auto-generate personalized introduction, outreach, and follow-up emails based on CRM and external data.

Each of these use cases empowers agents to communicate effectively with leads and customers, but none of them actually converses with your customers.

This is what Hatch Assistant does. 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, and a set of rules and prompts, and it will talk to customers for you, pleasantly and professionally, following all the best practices. (And don’t worry, it won’t replace your job! We’ll get to that in a bit.)

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. And once you do, it’s smooth sailing from there. Here’s what that looks like:

Create your business profile

While you’ll train your bot with a specific set of questions to ask the customer, 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 the information in your business profile to answer these “off-script” questions.

Define your persona

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 persona instructions.

• 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 (like “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). Prompts (also called interactions here) are the questions that your bot is responsible for asking the customer and getting an answer to, to achieve that directive. It’s your scripting! 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 set, you can then set specific rules. These tell your bot how to detect certain scenarios and 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 have a chat window with your bot right there in the platform so you can test as you make changes and refinements. Once it’s ready to go, publish your bot! Then use the reporting feature to monitor conversations and its overall performance, and make adjustments as needed.

Can I trust a bot to talk to my customers?

This is a common concern—and a valid one! After all, appointments, sales, and reviews are on the line here. There are a few different answers to this question.

Your bots are polite & professional

For starters, your bots talk to your customers like any human agent would. Since Hatch AI uses natural language processing (NLP), they can understand conversational language and respond in conversational language.

Actually, Hatch AI bots have been known to converse with customers better than human agents. After all, they don’t get burnt out, stressed, or take things personally.

Kaitlyn Rencher, who is using Hatch AI for Renewal by Andersen, says that her AI bot Lance “Handles our customers with empathy, grace, and care. I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought to myself, ‘How would Lance respond?’ when I am typing out a response to a customer.”

In one example, a customer asked about Section 8 Housing and Lance responded empathetically. Kaitlyn actually sent us a screenshot

They take on the top-of-funnel interactions

It’s one thing for your bots to be polite and professional. But it’s another thing for them to be successful at their task. The first thing to know here is that 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.

So you’re not relying on a bot to close deals for you, but rather to answer questions, set appointments, and sift out unqualified leads. Basically, they take on all the simple and repetitive tasks for you so you can focus on the more complex ones. And they are very effective at these tasks. 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 have full control:

• Rules. As we covered earlier, you can set rules to cover specific scenarios.
• Reporting. Our reporting feature allows you to see exactly how many conversations the bot is handling, 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 set a new rule and test it in the platform.
• Forced scripts. For any prompt you create, you can let AI decide how to say it or 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?

There are several benefits of AI, but while Hatch Assistant can take on responsibilities of contracting sales and marketing reps, it is not designed to replace their jobs. Rather, it equips you to augment 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: With Hatch Assistant taking care of repetitive tasks, agents can then work on the more meaningful, gratifying tasks that not only help the business to grow, but that also build a positive culture and improve retention.
• Meet the demands of your job. Hatch Assistant is designed to help you meet the increasing 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 literally clone yourself and keep up with growing demands in the industry.

Too many incoming contacts is the top stressor among contact center agents—something that Hatch Assistant solves for.

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, and it 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. Now, all you have to do is jump in and engage when the contact responds. And since you’re no longer burdened with reaching out to leads, you now have the time to do this, and to do it well.

The only problem is, you may have more time now, but you also have lots more responses coming in. And it’s not easy to keep up with all of those conversations.

This is where Hatch AI comes in. It takes on the conversations so that you can keep up.

In short, Hatch automation handles your outreach so you can create more opportunities and increase response rates, and Hatch AI handles the conversations that result from those increased responses.

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

What are the benefits of Hatch Assistant?

With Hatch automation taking care of your outreach and Hatch AI handling responses, every opportunity gets seized and opportunities stop falling through the cracks. Here are some of the many benefits:

• Improve set and close rates: No more opportunities falling through the cracks (even 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 and 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.

Take Hatch AI for a test drive

If you think that Hatch Assistant could be a good fit for your contracting business or call center, we invite you to learn more. You can converse with a Hatch AI bot here or if you want a personalized tour of both our AI and our communication platform, you can book a demo with one of our team members here.