Artificial Intelligence and the Transformation of Sales Engagement
Companies are struggling. Roughly 85 percent of all businesses today cannot make accurate sales forecasts, and somewhere around half of all their time spent chasing leads is unproductive. However, artificial intelligence is transforming these shortcomings by providing unprecedented insights and analysis. While you will always need a human touch to be effective in sales, AI is able to augment those efforts in a meaningful way. Here’s a look at how.
Finding New Customers
Finding new customers is a good example. Companies that use artificial intelligence to help their salespeople report 50 percent more leads through the use of automated systems to engage and interact with prospective customers. These chatbots work 24/7 and let prospects ask questions in a natural way to get answers. Some people might even think they are talking with a real agent because the flow of the conversation is so natural. However, behind the scenes, that AI-powered chatbot is evaluating whether the prospect is serious enough to become a qualified lead or if they are just browsing.
Offering Personalized Sales
Personalized sales are the future. Already, roughly two-thirds of people will switch brands if they feel like they’re not getting the best customer service possible. These days, many consumers prefer receiving personalized emails and meaningful interactions with sales reps who know them, or at least act as if they do.
Artificial intelligence can help your company achieve that in two ways. For one, AI increases sales enablement, or how efficiently your sales reps are able to make a sale. It also boosts sales engagement. This is the relevance of your company’s interactions with its customers. Artificial intelligence does this by providing your salespeople with insights about specific customers and your clientele in general.
Enlisting Better Targeting
AI is also able to produce better targeting by looking at your existing customers and analyzing how they found your company. The technology also looks at why they stay, what they buy and what makes them buy more. This information can be boiled down into different buyer personas and different insights. AI can also help you spot upselling and cross-selling opportunities that may not make sense intuitively, like finding a correlation between local weather patterns and shopping tendencies.
Providing a Call Center in the Cloud
Finally, artificial intelligence has the ability to tie everything together — your business insights, customer preferences, and different communication channels — to create a more powerful sales engagement process. AI can pull together all of that information via a call center in the cloud dashboard so that your customer service agents and salespeople can communicate with their customers on any medium.
From live chat to email, phone conversations to social media messaging, those AI-informed conversations have context. Your salespeople will know what other issues the customer has experienced, the products and services they like and how they shop, all by looking at the same screens that show the customer’s name and location. Your customers won’t need to repeat the details of their issues ever again.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence is transforming sales engagement by making it easier to find new customers and qualified leads. AI also lets you personalize your efforts and produce better targeting. All of this can come together in an artificial intelligence-powered call center in the cloud that combines customer service with your CRM and business insights to deliver an unprecedented level of customer care.
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