5 Ways Conversational AI Can Improve Your Sales Process

Conversely, conversational AI looks simple – you interact with a virtual agent and get a response. Behind the scenes, several technologies work together to make this happen. By up-skilling trusted customer service employees into AI Trainers, businesses can keep their chatbot on brand and ensure a personalized approach for each interaction.

Automated Lead Qualification

Today’s need-it-now customer demands instant answers for every query they make via email, website chat or phone. This is where conversational AI shines, especially when paired with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Conversational Flow technology. While chatbots may suffice for SMBs and companies that want to fulfill a single task, data-heavy enterprises need something in sync with their dynamic workflows. Examples include healthcare organizations, where physicians move practices, appointment times are bumped or canceled, and policies change often. For these companies, a conversational AI solution can be deployed as a chatbot, voice layer on a web page or smart speaker and be fed data from your CRM. It can then respond to user queries with the most up-to-date information in a personal and human way. It can also pre-qualify leads, streamlining the marketing-to-sales process and ensuring that MQLs get passed on to the right people for follow-up. This frees up time for your sales team to focus on closing deals.

Personalized Experience

A personalized experience is key to a successful sales process. But enabling agents to deliver this service requires the right technology and tools. With conversational AI, routine tasks can be routed to a virtual assistant to lower costs and allow agents to focus on higher-value conversations. AI can also help businesses to better serve customers by finding opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. This personalization can be accomplished using chatbots and voice assistants that offer real-time personalized responses based on customer intent, emotions and sentiments. For example, suppose a customer calls to report a problem with an online purchase. In that case, the agent can ask the customer what product they purchased and suggest alternatives or upsells that may interest them. Conversational AI can then analyze the information and provide real-time guidance to an agent so they can deliver a personalized response. This allows for a consistent, personalized customer experience and increases the chances of converting the customer into a repeat buyer or a new revenue-generating lead. Moreover, the AI can be integrated with your CRM system and other business applications so the results are visible to sales staff and can be used to improve their performance.

Real-Time Insights

Personalized AI tools like chatbots and virtual assistants help sales teams capture prospective customers by answering questions, qualifying leads for outbound calls, and recommending products relevant to their needs. The technology also offers real-time insights, such as customer sentiment from call recordings and text data, to improve sales coaching for agents. AI technologies like natural language-powered text chatbots, voice bots, and intelligent virtual assistants can provide instant, personalized customer experiences that drive higher conversion rates. They work best when integrated with CRM, marketing automation and other business applications.

AI can speed up repetitive tasks and free up time for human-focused activities that boost productivity, such as qualifying and managing leads. It can also automate follow-up communication, helping your team focus on selling and delivering a world-class customer experience.

Automated Follow-Up

Chatbots and voice assistants often use it to handle customer queries, pre-qualify leads or schedule meetings with sales representatives. While some people may be nervous about AI replacing contact agents, it’s important to note that conversational AI isn’t rendering them redundant. Instead, it can assist and enhance human interactions with actionable insights, automated knowledge bases, alerts and notifications during live calls. Customers today expect a world-class experience from even the smallest companies. As such, incorporating conversational AI into the sales process allows businesses to deliver personalized customer conversations at scale and across multiple channels. This provides a more holistic view of the customer, including previous interactions such as email marketing campaigns, website visits and social media engagement. This information is critical in identifying customer pain points and offering solutions to prevent customer churn. The result is a faster sales journey and a more successful conversion rate.

Automated Communication

Whether customers reach out via messenger apps, chatbots, voice assistants or other channels, they expect a world-class customer experience. Conversational AI enables businesses to meet these expectations. This technology helps reduce the volume of low-value calls burdening a call center, freeing up human resources to handle high-value inquiries. It also ensures that every interaction with a company is consistent across all channels.

Previously, companies had to rely on various manual tools, such as spreadsheets and handwritten notes, to track customer interactions and sales data. But with automated communication, businesses can automate many manual tasks and streamline their data collection processes. This technology makes delivering personalized content that moves prospects and buyers through the sales funnel easier. NLP and text-to-speech are often combined with machine learning, which analyzes accumulated data to improve accuracy over time.