Alfredo Ramirez is CEO of Vyopta. His expertise includes enterprise SaaS and employee/customer experience management.
In today’s global and continually changing business climate, businesses need to be highly agile, which requires continual investment in new technologies that improve workforce performance and customer experiences. Lately, companies have been looking, in particular, to invest in exploring and implementing AI opportunities.
Approximately one year ago, my company began to focus on improving business efficiencies in sales and customer service to increase revenue. To achieve this goal, we leveraged AI as an assistant to empower our teams and transform our sales and customer service functions. As a result, we’ve seen increases in annual recurring revenue and other key benefits.
In this article, I’ll share a few ways that we’ve seen success with leveraging AI as well as a few tips about how other companies can embark on similar journeys.
Optimizing Virtual Sales With AI
To begin, we focused on a couple of areas where we believed that we could perform much better: improving sales and documentation of customer interactions.
We started our AI journey with a solution that allowed us to manage and assure the quality of digital user experiences. In other words, we used AI to track customer engagement activities and to document what customers and sales teams are saying, allowing us to accurately track sales progress, adjust customer account plans and provide sales teams with the necessary mentorship and guidance.
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As a result of integrating AI into sales workflows, we exceeded our top-line and bottom-line financial plan this year.
Based on our experiences, here are some initial key learnings that might be helpful for other companies beginning to leverage AI technologies to improve sales processes:
• Ensure that your sales team is motivated and dedicated to using these insights.
• Review digital user experience, engagement activity and deal progress a couple of times per week. Use this information to hold weekly one-on-ones with each team member to see how the takeaways compare to their experience.
• Focus the one-on-ones around deals that are stalled, and then invest time to understand how to make the right adjustments to an account plan and your sales strategy.
Transforming Customer Support With AI
Next, by feeding AI with our frequently asked questions (FAQs), troubleshooting methods, product documentation and other product data, we used AI to improve our ability to scale our customer support team.
These advanced capabilities enabled quicker and more precise responses to customer queries. We quickly found out that AI can also reduce the need for our other software tools.
This transformation has been profound. Our customer support team reports higher quality and shorter customer interactions. In addition to improving the efficiency of customer support, this advancement has led to improved customer satisfaction. Our AI assistant has also increased the number of customers supported per sales support agent.
If you are considering implementing an AI assistant for customer services, here are a few suggestions:
• Like with above, confirm that your internal teams are motivated to use and to contribute to the learning and advancement of the AI-based solution.
• Start with an AI-assisted solution for internal use first (e.g., customer services, sales engineering). For us, it provides automated responses with answers for any level 1 ticket. AI also automates content cleanup to continue updating the knowledge catalogs, which power the AI-assisted solution itself.
• Develop a “closed-loop” management solution. For all questions asked, there needs to be feedback from users regarding the accuracy of the AI solution’s response. This feedback must be continually tracked and reviewed to continue improving the knowledge catalogs.
• Become the co-pilot. Once accuracy hits greater than 90%, we plan to enable direct customer interaction with the AI assistant.
Next Steps: Empowering Customers With Self-Service AI
Building upon our success in customer support and sales, we hope to empower our customers with the self-service AI assistant, giving customers instant access to needed information and support.
In the end, I believe that AI initiatives can both enhance customer autonomy and liberate employees for addressing more complex customer needs, which is the essence of operational efficiency. AI-assisted solutions can greatly benefit businesses by enabling workers and customers to get more done individually. This frees up employees by allowing them to work on more complicated or higher-value functions and frees up customers to spend more time using your product or services as intended.
