Generative AI for sales: The power and the potential
Generative AI for sales promises to revolutionize B2B sales by accelerating and fine-tuning customer engagement for better outcomes.
Time and again, research has shown the strong connection between customer experience and employee experience. Most organizations know that delivering good CX and achieving business success depends on having motivated employees who feel valued and happy in their work.
However, there’s often a gap between theory and practice.
Here’s where artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, can play a key role. Let’s look at how gen AI can help connect the dots between employee and customer experience, improving employee well-being, the customer journey, and ultimately, a company’s bottom line.
CX and EX: The great divide
Businesses face three major challenges when it comes to improving both the customer and employee experience.
- An inability to mine data for insights, a reality often exacerbated by the lack of data as CX and EX are often treated as two separate entities within a company.
- Inadequate employee training, which is further fueled by poor or inconsistent communication internally (and externally).
- Poor infrastructure, including siloed systems that prevent teams from collaborating and focusing on the customer.
Using generative AI for CX insights
The latest advances in generative AI make it possible to easily access visual overviews of business data as well as ask for help in gaining valuable insights.
New technology makes it possible for business users to get answers on their own, without analysts or IT. For example, they could ask for revenue by region and brand and get instant answers.
In the context of customer experience, questions could be: “What is the most-sold product in the last months?” and “Which channels are customers engaging the most with?”
These kind of insights can help sales and marketing focus on what matters to customers and deliver the personalized experiences that drive loyalty and sales. And by streamlining tasks, they help improve the employee experience.
Of course, for generative AI to be truly valuable for data mining and CX, a company needs to collect the right data and may also need to do some cleaning of existing data.
Employee training: Enter the digital assistant
It’s a well-known fact that upskilling and reskilling should be a priority for every business in order to keep employees motivated and to stay ahead of market trends.
Generative AI makes it possible to have a digital assistant that employees can interact with to ask questions, receive data-based guidance, and perform their daily tasks faster. For example, AI can provide service agents with customer history and sentiment, and even suggest a solution to resolve a customer issue. This increases efficiency, boosts customer satisfaction, and gives the agent time to focus on more complex tasks.
However, there’s still a need to train employees and equip them with knowledge about how to use the tool effectively. Upskilling can be crucial for preventing confidentiality breaches. The danger lies in the possibility of human error when providing the digital assistant with business relevant data. Employees must understand and adhere to corporate data usage policies, in order to protect confidential data from becoming public.
The best tools are only as effective as the skills of the people handling them. Employees need proper training and support when encountering changes or new additions to the company’s infrastructure.
Digital self-service and AI: Streamlined service, happy customers, real-life results
Success! A top utility provider implemented self-service + AI chatbots to boost customer service, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.
AI reality check
Generative AI has had a mind-blowing impact so far. Some have even gone so far as to predict that it disrupt our societies even more than the internet. I share this optimistic outlook and am looking forward to more innovations ahead.
At the same time, we need rules and boundaries for use of AI in order to protect privacy and comply with local and international regulations. This applies to all types of AI, whether that’s generative AI, machine learning, or neural networks.
We also should remember that there will still be a need for orchestrators — a.k.a., humans.
Rather than taking jobs away, AI provides an opportunity to become the orchestrator. By advising and guiding AI, employees can streamline their work day, becoming more efficient than ever. They’re able to focus on higher level, business-critical tasks and unleash their creativity to deliver customer experiences that drive long-term business success.
