Have you ever noticed how everyone in your company is always busy? In any organization, you’ll find departments struggling to get the job done with too few resources, not enough time, and a seemingly maddening need to juggle dozens of projects at once.
While technology drives team efficiency in some ways, those same technologies also ramp up expectations. Customers, contacts, and prospects—in particular—demand attention right now. This applies to Marketing teams educating and engaging with new leads, Sales teams hammering out opportunities and acquiring new customers, and Customer Success teams supporting and building trusted customer relationships.
To accomplish these tasks with speed, accuracy, and care, customer-facing teams need to be on the ball 24/7—and that’s why everyone in the building is so very, very busy.
Breaking Down the Problems
The challenges facing teams evolve as they move across departments.
For instance, Marketers feel a great deal of pressure to supply qualified leads to the Sales team. So much of their time is spent generating initial engagement via various channels, including digital, webinars, virtual events, and more, based on their background research, people-profiling, and ICP vetting.
By the time Sales receives leads, Marketing shifts their concerns to ensuring a lead is worked to its full potential. Closing a deal tends to take a long time. After all, conversion from prospect to customer isn’t a quick process. So, it’s easy for a potential lead to be forgotten or for a red-hot prospect to consider a competitor because of a lack of attention.
And even after the new customer is onboarded, there are numerous questions to answer, supplementary information to provide, and advice to impart. Within the Customer Success function, the problem is coping with the influx of inquiries, sorting out the “low-hanging fruit,” and spending the appropriate amounts of time helping and guiding the customer.
When these three Customer Success activities come together, customers become brand advocates, which is great news. Unfortunately, with excessive workloads, Customer Success Representatives might not have time to foster these healthy relationships. This, in turn, results in customers walking away from your business or worse, publicly expressing their dissatisfaction.
Finding a Better Way
At first glance, the solution to these problems around heavy workloads seems obvious: Just hire more people to lighten the load. But as simple as that sounds, it’s simply not cost-effective to bring on new employees at will—especially in this economy.
So, if hiring is off the table, what can businesses do to alleviate workloads while also delivering the attention leads, prospects, and customers the attention they need?
More and more companies are adopting Intelligent Virtual Assistants that act as a virtual team member to deliver two-way, personalized communications at scale to drive towards the next best action. By handling repetitive and redundant tasks—such as asking a lead if they are ready to talk to Sales or scheduling those account reviews—these solutions augment the workforce and allow for employees to focus on high-value tasks that drive greater productivity and performance..
Early adopters of Intelligent Virtual Assistants are getting fantastic results—results which are putting them streets ahead of their competitors.
An Intelligent Virtual Assistant from Conversica can fill multiple roles: From delivering the first touch for Marketing teams, to elevating hot leads for Salespeople, or even driving customer health for Customer Success teams.
This solution is far beyond traditional chatbots which consist of simple sets of code that trots out rote answers. Intelligent Virtual Assistants, on the other hand, feeds on the data from both customers and the company’s existing databases to learn as it goes. Better still, an IVA can autonomously handle millions of interactions, only looping in your employees when the contact or customer is ready for that next step—such as booking a product demo or scheduling a quarterly business review.
Here are a few pointers on what an IVA can do for organizations today:
An Intelligent Virtual Assistant is a part of an Augmented Workforce in which business professionals and intelligent automation technologies work together towards the same goals and best outcomes. An example is using an IVA to touch every incoming lead to discover more handraisers from your existing pipeline.
Intelligent Virtual Assistants prevent pipeline leakage. Avoid missing revenue opportunities by persistently following-up and qualifying leads with an IVA.
Intelligent Virtual Assistants alleviate capacity issues by automating repetitive tasks that occupy an employee’s time. Sales and Customer Success teams, for instance, spend a lot of time chasing down routine customer meetings and delivering educational materials via personalized emails. An IVA can do all of this so your reps can focus on proactively managing customer concerns.
Do Something Meaningful with Your Data
As your customer-facing teams interact with contacts via an Intelligent Virtual Assistant, the data from these interactions is collected and used to further its capabilities. The intelligent automation platform that powers the IVA brings together communications using data from existing systems including martech solutions, sales and aftercare CRMs, enterprise-wide ERPs, and even highly localized databases found in all corners of the modern organizations.
Artificial intelligence and deep learning use these data points to improve the IVA over time. A good example is in updating the thousands of conversational templates to ensure that the messages delivered to contacts are always driving to the next best action. Along with NLP (natural language processing), Conversica’s Intelligent Virtual Assistants understand sentiment and react accordingly by automatically sending messages internally or externally, alerting personnel, and adapting over time to new and more challenging circumstances.
The conversational library that ships with the Conversica solution is already vast and rich, but the AI engine can be adapted and improved, and of course, it scales seamlessly as demand grows.
Conclusion
This article has only scratched the surface of what’s possible with the new generation of AI-powered Intelligent Virtual Assistants. The technology can free up a great deal of overworked staff’s time, remove much of the heavy-lifting preventing employees from focusing on high-value tasks, and finally puts to use the data goldmines that most of us are sitting on.
To learn more, check back on these pages in a few weeks, or, if you can’t wait, head on over to the Conversica site to learn more.
Watch this video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5vxRC8dMvs