EAB's Success Story: 120% Increase in Demo Requests with Drift AI

Founded in 2007, EAB is a trusted partner to education institutions and corporations through their best practice research, technologies, and enrollment and marketing services. They work with schools, from K-12 to graduate programs, to help reach all institutional goals, and partner with corporations through an acute focus on DEI. The Washington, D.C.-based company has supported thousands of institutions and was recently featured in The Washington Post’s “Top Workplaces 2022” list. In 2019, EAB acquired YouVisit, a virtual tour platform and existing Drift customer, which led them to experiment with chat and eventually adopt AI.

In 2019, EAB, a trusted partner to education institutions and corporations, acquired YouVisit, a virtual tour platform and existing Drift customer. With Drift now at their disposal, EAB saw an opportunity to experiment with chat. Initially, they used Drift only to generate demo requests, but they knew there was potential to tap into additional Drift features to scale the impact. They wanted to provide website visitors with fast, frictionless experiences. As site visitors started using the Drift chatbot for inquiries beyond YouVisit, EAB realized there was an opportunity to generate demo requests and commercial conversations for their other lines of business. However, they were hesitant about upgrading to AI due to its unfamiliar territory.

After a year and a half of optimizing Drift’s built-in functions, EAB began evaluating Drift AI. They saw the potential to capture leads outside of the team’s usual hours, ensuring no lead slipped through the cracks, regardless of geography and working hours. They wanted a human-like, frictionless experience that allowed for free-text responses from the site visitor. EAB followed Drift’s crawl-walk-run strategy, training the AI on real conversations and gradually implementing AI across different parts of their website. With the help of Drift’s AI team, they saw immediate success. After just two months on AI, EAB was already seeing 80 percent accuracy. They began training the AI to respond to their unique business-specific topics, and were able to train it to respond at a staggering 95 percent accuracy. Now, EAB is running at full speed with their AI-powered chatbot, Eabert, enabled across their website.

• With AI helping their website visitors, EAB’s digital marketing team can dedicate more time to engaging high-intent customers, while still ensuring that low-intent visitors remain supported at every stage of their journey. The time from when the individual site visitor first reaches out through the chatbot to the time that they’re actually having a conversation with their salespeople is much quicker. Fewer pieces of outreach are needed from their BDR team, accompanied by same-day or same-hour scheduling. The AI capability is having a measurable positive impact on all individuals that come to the site — prospects, partners, and site visitors with unidentified intent. EAB continues to sprint forward as they explore new ways to expand their AI use cases.

• 2X more qualified leads with Drift

• 120% increase in demo requests in the past year

• 160% increase in partners being supported after AI implementation