AI in Sales for Contact Centers: From Lead Generation to Conversion

Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay. And it’s impacting every stage of the sales process. From lead generation, qualification, and successful conversion to sales forecasting and automating repetitive tasks – AI is set to facilitate business growth while also unlocking new levels of productivity for sales teams and making life easier for agents at the same time.

If you aren’t leveraging AI in your sales processes yet, the bad news is that you’re already lagging behind your competition. So it’s just about time to have a re-think! In fact, according to Salesforce, 81% of sales teams say they already use AI today, while 83% of sales teams with AI saw revenue growth in the past year – versus 66% of teams without AI.

The good news is that it’s never too late to start. In this blog, we’re taking a deeper dive into why you should use AI for sales automation and optimization. On top of that, we’re highlighting some of the most efficient AI-driven sales automation tools used in contact centers and how they can help you drive more sales while also improving the experience for your sales reps.

Benefits of Using AI Automation for Sales Teams in Contact Centers

Investing in AI sales software and integrating more AI capabilities can truly make a difference for your contact center sales team. Here are just a few benefits you can expect:

Automating time-consuming manual tasks

You might be surprised to discover that, according to Salesforce, sales reps spend nearly 70% of their time on non-selling tasks like prioritizing leads, manually entering data, and many other time-consuming activities. AI can automate at least some of them while freeing up your sales team to focus on actually interacting with customers, building meaningful connections, and doing other higher-value tasks. For example, AI auto dialing solutions can automate the entire outbound calling process so your reps don’t have to dial numbers manually.

Optimizing proactive engagement

Tools like conversational AI chatbots and voice bots can help you boost engagement, automate lead qualification, and increase sales. AI chatbots can proactively initiate conversations with your website visitors, offer assistance in selecting the right products, and provide product recommendations based on previous purchase history. Similarly, AI voice bots can initiate outbound calls, qualify leads, set appointments, and collect feedback – all without (or with minimal) human intervention.

Easier sales performance tracking

If you’re a sales manager, you know that measuring your team’s performance without the right automation tools can be a headache. With AI speech analytics solutions, you can track a variety of performance metrics, score calls automatically, monitor your team’s performance in real time, and do so much more. You can see who’s closing the most deals and who’s struggling. And you can easily identify knowledge or skill gaps and offer personalized coaching sessions to take your team’s performance to a higher level.

AI Sales Automation Tools Used in Contact Centers to Make Sales Processes More Efficient

AI predictive dialing

If you think cold calling is dead, think again. Despite the increased usage of digital communication channels and AI-powered sales automation tools, cold calling still remains one of the most efficient lead generation and sales tactics for many businesses across different industries. Cold calling presents an excellent opportunity to reach out to your prospects, engage them in meaningful one-on-one conversations, create personal connections, and build relationships. AI predictive dialing solutions can automate and optimize the entire outbound calling process, helping you increase the efficiency of your cold calling campaigns.

AI predictive dialers predict agent availability based on real-time and historical metrics and initiate multiple outbound calls per agent even before an agent completes their current interaction. So once an agent is ready to take the next call – they are instantly connected to the prospect. That means nearly zero idle time in between calls and more calls a single agent can make, which makes predictive dialers particularly valuable tools for high-velocity sales teams.

For example, VoiceSpin’s AI predictive dialer uses AI and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to intelligently score and prioritize leads and connect them to the best-suited sales reps based on the probability of closing a deal successfully, helping you maximize conversions.

Recommended reading: Call Center Automation Trends for 2024 and Beyond

Conversational AI chatbots

In the early days, chatbots were primarily used by customer service teams, but actually, there are many ways sales teams can use them to generate and qualify leads and convert them into customers. Intercom’s report on chatbot usage found that sales is now the most common use case (41%) for chatbots. According to the report, business leaders say chatbots helped them increase sales by an average of 67%, with 26% of all sales starting through a chatbot interaction. And based on the stats from LocaliQ, 36% of businesses use chatbots to improve their lead generation strategies.

With advancements in AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning (ML) technologies, chatbots have become even smarter and turned into what is now known as conversational AI chatbots. These chatbots can interact with your customers or prospects in a natural, human-like way, collecting information, answering questions, guiding users through your sales funnel, and providing product recommendations. 

Let’s take a closer look at how exactly conversational AI chatbots can help you drive more sales and revenue growth:

• Lead capture and qualification: AI chatbots can collect relevant information from your website visitors through contact forms or conversational prompts. By asking a set of predefined questions, AI chatbots can easily capture user intent and readiness to buy, qualify leads, and pass them further to your sales team.

• Proactive user engagement: AI chatbots can proactively initiate conversations with your visitors based on certain triggers or behaviors, such as visiting your product or pricing pages. Alternatively, an AI bot can proactively offer assistance to users at checkout or encourage them to finalize their purchase by offering a discount code.

• Personalized product recommendations: AI chatbots can analyze users’ browsing behaviors, preferences, and purchase histories to offer highly personalized product recommendations, acting like personal virtual shopping assistants. That, in turn, can improve user experience and increase repeat purchases.

• Cross-selling and upselling: Similarly, AI chatbots can suggest additional products to go with the initial purchase (cross-selling) or higher-priced alternatives (upselling) throughout the customer journey, helping you increase the average order value and maximize your revenue – all without getting your human reps involved.

Recommended reading: Enterprise Chatbots: Features, Benefits, and Common Use Cases

AI voice bots

Even though AI voice bots are still in their early development stage, they have been gaining tremendous popularity recently, with more businesses looking to implement these solutions. Just like AI chatbots, AI voice bots (also known as AI virtual agents) can interact with customers and guide them through issue resolutions, replacing traditional IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems. And similarly to AI chatbots, AI voice bots aren’t just great for service-related customer interactions. Sales teams can leverage advanced AI voice bots as AI sales automation solutions to streamline their sales processes.

Here are more specific examples of how AI voice bots can be used in sales:

• Automated outbound sales calls: Imagine your sales reps having to make hundreds of outbound sales calls daily and interact with cold leads who might not even know anything about your product or service. That’s time-consuming, for sure, not to mention that it can also be emotionally draining. AI voice bots can automatically reach out to thousands of potential leads, saving your sales reps a bunch of time and effort.

• Lead qualification: Through automated mass outreach, AI voice bots can help you qualify leads and assess a prospect’s interest in your products by asking a series of pre-qualification questions. Based on responses, AI voice bots can identify leads that are ready to move further down the sales funnel and pass them over to your sales team. 

• Appointment setting and demo scheduling: Similarly, you can use AI voice bots to automate the process of scheduling meetings or demo calls with your potential customers. Think about how much time your sales reps can save by automating this process. And what’s more, AI voice bots can send automated reminders before scheduled appointments or demo calls to reduce no-show rates.

• Sales follow-up calls: According to stats published by Invesp, 80% of sales require at least five follow-up calls, while 60% of customers say no four times before saying yes. Yet, 48% of sales teams never even attempt to follow up after an initial interaction, leaving valuable opportunities on the table. AI voice bots can automate follow-up calls and help you nurture leads that aren’t yet ready to buy.

• Customer feedback collection: With nearly 90% of customers being willing to abandon a brand after just two negative experiences, collecting customer feedback has never been more critical. AI voice bots can automatically collect customer feedback to help you better understand your customers’ needs and what drives them to buy. You can use these insights to improve your sales process and increase customer satisfaction.

AI speech analytics

AI-driven speech analytics solutions can greatly enhance your sales processes and provide you with a ton of insights into interactions between your sales reps and your prospects or customers. VoiceSpin’s AI Speech Analyzer is a great example of what these tools are capable of. It can monitor 100% of your calls, transcribe and summarize each conversation, evaluate the quality of interactions, help you measure your sales team’s performance by tracking specific metrics and KPIs, and do so much more.

Here’s how exactly sales teams can use AI speech analytics solutions alongside other sales tools:

• Understand customer sentiment and intent: AI speech analytics solutions can help you track customer sentiment right during the interactions. They analyze the speaker’s tone, words, pitch variations, intonation, and other variables and categorize conversations as positive, negative, or neutral. Positive sentiment might signal a prospect’s interest in purchasing your product or service so you can prioritize follow-ups more effectively.

• Automate QA and agent performance monitoring: AI speech analytics tools can summarize calls and monitor the quality of interactions based on specific metrics. Sales managers can then use these insights to evaluate their team’s performance without having to listen to live calls or call recordings. What’s more, they can easily identify skill or knowledge gaps and deliver highly targeted coaching.

• Monitor compliance during sales calls: Non-compliance issues can put your team in real trouble. If you’re in one of the highly regulated industries (like healthcare or finance), AI speech analytics tools can help ensure your sales reps follow compliance guidelines during calls. These systems can track specific keywords and key phrases and notify managers through real-time alerts so they can take action immediately and prevent compliance violations.

AI agent assist solutions

AI agent assist solutions are also worth mentioning among other sales AI tools used in contact centers. And they are incredibly helpful during sales calls just as much as during customer service calls. AI agent assist tools can operate in a slightly different way based on the contact center software provider. But overall, they are built to help agents handle interactions with customers or prospects more effectively by providing reply suggestions right when interactions are happening. 

More specifically, here’s what AI agent assist solutions can help your sales reps with:

• Real-time guidance: AI agent assist tools can offer real-time reply suggestions to agents based on the context of the conversation. That may include answers to frequently asked questions, relevant product information, pricing details, or anything else to help sales reps provide quick, accurate, and efficient answers without having to search for this information manually and put customers or prospects on hold.

• Better objection handling: Handling objections is vital in closing deals successfully. But that can also be tricky for sales reps. AI-powered agent assist tools can provide agents with real-time guidance on how to handle objections effectively based on previous successful interactions. That can help your team members handle sales objections more confidently and ultimately improve conversions.

• Automated CRM updates and note-taking: In addition to providing real-time reply suggestions, AI agent assist solutions can also summarize key points of each conversation, automate the note-taking process, and update customer records in CRM systems. That helps you ensure that no critical information slips through the cracks and saves your reps a bunch of time by automating admin tasks.

Maximize Your Sales with VoiceSpin’s AI-powered Sales Automation Solutions for Contact Centers

While AI isn’t a silver bullet, it can still be a game-changer for your sales team. AI can make your sales reps a lot more efficient, shorten your sales cycle, boost your conversion rates, and help you drive more revenue. And considering the ongoing progress in AI technology, now is the right time to adopt AI sales automation tools. VoiceSpin’s AI contact center solutions have been designed to empower sales teams to connect with prospects more strategically and convert faster through tools and features like:

• AI predictive dialing: VoiceSpin’s predictive dialer uses AI and ML algorithms to automatically score your leads and connect them to the best-suited sales reps based on the probability of making a successful sale, while features like local caller ID, automated voicemail drop, and number reputation management can help you improve the efficiency of your outbound calling campaigns.

• AI Messaging: With VoiceSpin’s AI Messaging, you can connect multiple digital communication channels (including email, live chat, social media, and WhatsApp) and manage interactions with customers or prospects across all the connected channels from a single omnichannel inbox. With built-in AI reply suggestions, your reps can respond faster and provide more accurate answers.

• AI chatbots: By integrating VoiceSpin’s AI-powered chatbot and training it on your knowledge sources, you can engage with your website visitors proactively, automatically qualify leads by asking them a series of predefined questions, and optimize your inbound lead qualification process while ensuring your sales reps only focus on interacting with high-quality prospects.

• AI speech analytics: With VoiceSpin’s AI Speech Analyzer, you can measure your sales team’s performance by tracking custom metrics and KPIs, stay on top of customer sentiment, assess the quality of sales calls by reviewing AI-generated summaries of every interaction, and maintain compliance through keyword detection and real-time manager alerts.

Book a demo call now to learn more about VoiceSpin’s AI contact center software solutions for sales teams and how they can help streamline your sales processes.