Bospar’s PR Generates Great Results for CX GenAI Company
More than 200 companies rely on Quiq, which enables conversations between brands and their customers via messaging across WhatsApp, SMS, Google’s Business Messages, Facebook Messenger, Apple Messages for Business, and many other channels. The company’s customer roster includes such well-known brands as Blue Nile, IHG Hotels, Spirit Airlines, and Terminix.
But the company wanted to raise its brand awareness further through public relations, content creation and social media to highlight how it solves customer pain points, is innovating in the conversational and generative AI arenas, and is disrupting the customer experience (CX) space.
Challenge
The fervor around GenAI in early 2023 sent many companies – including those in the AI-friendly customer service, customer communication software, and messaging technology, arenas – scrambling to respond. Amid all of the excitement, Quiq sought to release a new, GenAI-enabled version of its customer interaction platform and garner media coverage for the news to drive enterprise interest and expand its customer base.
The effort aimed to communicate that AI is becoming a necessity for enterprises, GenAI signals a massive change for customer service and contact center operations, customer experience (CX) features such as chatbots are behind the times, and solutions that lack GenAI are outdated.
The company also expressed the importance of educating the market that developing proprietary GenAI communications solutions in house is too high a bar for most businesses.
Strategy
The PR team knew many companies had already announced or were working to deploy GenAI and that approaches would vary. So, Bospar’s PR professionals compiled share of voice (SOV) reports to track competitors claiming to have made similar GenAI upgrades to their software.
This and the PR team’s close work with the client made clear that Quiq had carefully and skillfully avoided the major GenAI technology pitfalls: privacy/security and the troublesome – some say unavoidable – problem of hallucinations. The client also had a deep understanding of AI across the board and had a designated AI expert on staff. The outcome of this work and expertise was that the client’s solution was not just another ChatGPT clone, a retrofitted ad-hoc solution that checked the GenAI box or an effort to simply shoehorn in ChatGPT for its GenAI.
The Quiq solution was able to solve the complexity of using GenAI for customer communication for its business customers – and without hallucinations. It was the first of its kind in the industry.
That was a crucial point of differentiation the PR team leveraged in all of its media outreach.
Success
Bospar employed this messaging in media outreach, which involved sharing the client’s ground-breaking work with media outlets in two categories. The first was the CX trade publications covering changes in the customer service and communications industry. The second was the technology trade publications, which are more interested in what is happening with GenAI.
The PR strategists at Bospar knew it would be critical to ensure the client’s innovation was covered in the major CX trade publications since Quiq had made a major contribution to CX capabilities by incorporating GenAI so quickly and effectively. It was essential to plant the client’s flag in this space so that potential customers could see this work.
Although not the primary CX media target and audience, the Bospar PR team knew that perhaps only those at tech outlets could fully understand the game-changing implications of what the client had achieved. Major players in tech came to understand what a notable contribution Quiq made, and what the implications would be, and reached out in response.
The PR team enabled this by planting seeds in the CX trades, with a breadcrumb trail of coverage that could be referenced in future media coverage. With the customer experience trades successfully covered, Bospar’s team of PR professionals began pitching tech media, which seems to be best positioned to understand and communicate what the client has accomplished.
Our goal was to get on the media’s radar that the first AI large language model-powered assistant for CX had gone live from Quiq in collaboration with LOOP insurance. Bospar’s PR professionals conducted embargoed outreach leading up to the announcement and shared both the press release and a comprehensive, media-savvy case study housed on the client’s website.
The PR campaign also worked to establish working relationships with reporters by engaging heavily in newsjacking leading up to the major product release announcement with LOOP. The PR team pitched the CEO and founder’s commentary around Gartner reports on generative AI and its implications for the CX industry. After Bospar secured coverage in a piece that Abubakar Idris wrote for The Messenger on hallucinations, the team got Idris interested in the LOOP announcement, which the team pitched to him under embargo a few weeks later. He requested an interview with the CEO and founder to discuss the news the day the release went out.
Results
This successful PR campaign increased the client’s media profile by several hundred million unique visitors per month (UVM). The public relations effort established the company’s CEO and founder as a thought leader among CX and technology media. It also got the attention of gatekeepers in the tech space who are watching AI carefully and whose writing and endorsements can go a long way.
Bospar’s PR team secured top-tier coverage in Fortune (Ivana Pino), The Messenger (Abubakar Idris), The Daily Star (Ciaran Daly), The Daily Mirror (John Bett) and MSN. The PR professionals also landed coverage in every one of the important industry trade outlets that the client’s potential customer base reads and consults when decision-making. That included: CMSWire (Phil Britt), Customer Service Manager, Customer Experience Update, Pipeline Pub, CX Scoop (Angelina Maksimovic), DestinationCRM (Leonard Klie), CustomerZone360 (Tracy Schelmetic), CXM Today, ContactCenterWorld (Veronica Silva Cusi), Retail Technology Innovation Hub (Scott Thompson) and Telecom Reseller (Amy Ralls). And in their efforts to drive more in-depth discussions about GenAI and the power of Quiq, the PR team secured coverage in key tech trade publications including ZDNet (Maria Diaz), engineering.com (Marc Ambasna-Jones), The CyberWire (Tim Nodar), insideBIGDATA (Daniel Gutierrez), Shaping Design (Shubham Agarwal), Information Age (Aaron Hurst), Lifewire (Sascha Brodsky) and Digital Journal (Tim Sandle).
