Managing customer interactions is like a high-wire balancing act. The aspects to balance include customer satisfaction, sales targets, and inventory management, just to name a few. At the same time, you can’t neglect keeping up to date with product knowledge and production constraints. Take too long to decide and opportunities slip away. Rush, and you can knock inventory, pricing, or customer relationships out of balance.
We’ve recently taken up these challenges and created a proof of concept (PoC) that makes use of our AI competencies. In the following paragraphs, we share how we managed to overcome the obstacles that we faced along the way and how the solution that we developed may revolutionize the way your sales representatives approach their daily tasks.
The beginnings
Our journey began with extensive consultations with all parties involved in the sales process. We needed to get to the root of the issues that troubled the stakeholders in their customer interactions and sales reporting. Here's what we found out.
Any time sales representatives get on a call, they have to log in to customer relationship management (CRM) software, open up a panel with the products, and then spend a considerable amount of time filling out all the forms and filters. Although sales representatives are supported by many systems, they can all be distracting and steal the time that could be spent more productively. One of our goals in helping sales representatives was to enable them to focus on selling and building customer relationships without any distractions.
The area of sales strategy and performance analysis is also challenging. Customer phone calls are generally a mass of unstructured data, leaving you with guesswork about your strategy effectiveness. Was your upsell successful, or would the customer have made the purchase anyway? You can’t know for sure.
Keeping these pain points in mind, we started to analyze the market for possible solutions. Large language models (LLMs) were the obvious candidates.
Growing pains of LLMs
LLMs are nothing new, but they’ve only recently become a viable option because earlier smart models were slow. Even GPT-3.5 was too slow for real-time analysis, where split seconds are invaluable. Groq introduced lightning-fast inference, but their LLaMa 2 model lacked context comprehension. Thus, the technology was theoretically there but not applicable to our needs.
However, a few technological leaps during this project have opened other avenues. LLaMa 3 arrived on Groq, Fireworks AI, and similar services, making interfacing with LLMs much faster. A few days later, Faster Whisper v3, a text-to-speech model, was released and allowed real-time analysis.
These types of developments enabled us to make spoken content instantly analyzable and provide actionable insights, which we’ll describe later in the article, greatly increasing productivity and efficiency.
Functionality
All the insights and work culminated in a simple conclusion: we wouldn’t find precisely what we needed on the market. We needed to create our own AI sales assistant: a smart aid that can revolutionize our sales representatives’ approach toward customer interactions and sales processes.
Our AI solution is tailored to transform the crucial aspects related to customer interactions and sales management. How exactly? Let’s take a closer look.
Real-time assistance
Our PoC actively listens to customers’ hints in relation to product categories, required actions, and upsell and discount opportunities. For instance, a user can model various sales scenarios and instantly view the results regarding budget forecasts, stock levels, and customer lifetime value. It’s a proactive approach that ensures sales strategies are better planned and optimized.
Structured reporting
Our tool is powered by the latest artificial intelligence and LLMs that can transform a cacophony of unstructured discussions into structured, actionable data. This can be a transformative force that introduces precise comparisons of interactions and key performance indicators (KPIs) and creates efficient sales guides in the process. It offers complete control over the whole sales process and ensures that no detail goes amiss.
Real-time dynamic analysis with order management
The AI-driven logic identifies elements like product mentions or changes to orders in real time and immediately presents a sales representative with appropriate information. One-click actions that create or cancel orders keep hassle at a minimum and let teams drive more sales and nurture closer relationships with customers.
Results
The testing period of our PoC demonstrated just how powerful our AI sales assistant can be in taking customer service and sales efficiency to the next level. Here are the top results that we achieved:
Enhanced efficiency
With our solution, response time to client queries was drastically reduced and sales representatives can deal with more interactions at higher speeds with a higher degree of accuracy.
Improved decision-making
The AI tool made it possible to model a variety of scenarios and instantly see the results of each, letting sales teams make better decisions in maintaining optimal inventory levels while meeting the sales target.
Structured data reporting
Transforming unstructured conversations into quantifiable data enables targeted strategy development and KPI establishment for various marketing campaigns, which, in turn, improve marketing effectiveness.
A revolution in the sales process is coming
Throughout the entire project, the PoC showed that asking the right questions is a key aspect in the development of AI solutions. With this type of insight at the very center of the challenge and the power of new technologies at our disposal, we engineered a solution that responds to today's needs and lays a base for long-term efficiency and strategic growth. Our AI sales assistant is a statement of our commitment to innovation in AI technology and delivering solutions that make a difference for our clients.
At Cloudflight group, we always search for new breakthroughs in technology and deliver solutions that don’t just meet but surpass our clients' expectations. The AI sales assistant is much more than just a tool. It's a completely new approach that can shape the future of customer interaction and sales excellence.
Make sure to also check out our recent AI-related publications: “How to start with AI in your company: a checklist” and "Top tips and tricks for success with AI Sprint." Both can be your guides on how to incorporate AI innovations into your business strategy.
Published August 6, 2024
