A sales enablement strategy is becoming essential for any business aiming to keep pace with what is rapidly becoming a highly data-driven technological era. Particularly in sectors such as finance, customer interactions are increasingly taking place online. As a result, customer service agents need to be more informed than ever on how customers react to different sales techniques, how to tailor their service, and how to protect vulnerable customers. Speech AI is increasingly providing more comprehensive data analysis to boost sales enablement and protect customers, especially over the phone and video.
Which Systems Apply to Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement strategies must be driven and informed by accurate, reliable data. Sales enablement must provide correct, up-to-date information to all customer service agents or call handlers to ensure they prioritise the most appropriate and successful sales strategies. However, backing up a sales enablement strategy with manually gathered and analysed data is rarely fast enough to ensure sales enablement can keep pace with the rapid changes in customer demands and experiences. This is where speech AI becomes essential.
A sales enablement strategy must be approached from a multifaceted direction, encompassing employee training, guidance, and materials. Voice recognition AI provides the data necessary for tailoring each area of sales enablement to the specific audience of a company.
Voice recognition AI describes the collaborative application of systems such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Conversational AI, or machine learning. Features such as sentiment, peak activity times, location, and demographics can be collected by speech AI to inform sales enablement. For example, if specific customers frequently react negatively to a particular sales pitch, it can be recommended that customer service agents avoid that method with a specific demographic. This information can also be used to compile more comprehensive customer profiles.
Semantic analysis is the most crucial feature that voice recognition AI provides. Different words, language features, behavioural indicators, and tones of voice can be detected and associated with different scenarios. AI runs this analysis in the background of calls, leaving customer service agents to focus on their interactions with a customer. This information can even be recorded for future reference if specific approaches are more successful with certain individuals.
How Can Sales Enablement Find Improved Ways to Sell to Specific Customers?
Personalised interactions are increasingly valued in finance, especially as customer interactions are increasingly digitalised. Business-wide customer profiling provides the opportunity to create a more positive, connected experience. Various demographics can have additional customer profiles to ensure a one-size-fits-all approach is avoided wherever possible.
Customer service agents need to keep in mind customers’ boundaries regarding their personal information. They should not reveal excessive information to customers—instead, they must learn to interpret AI-provided data.
Why Is Ethical Sales Enablement So Crucial in the Finance Industry?
Understanding your customer base and targeting sales pitches at specific individuals are clear benefits to the finance industry. In such a competitive environment, accurate and comprehensive data analysis could allow businesses to rise above the competition. However, it’s essential that finance-orientated businesses also remain highly aware of the ethical obligations surrounding sales enablement strategy.
Regulatory pressure is rapidly increasing in many industries. However, the finance industry is receiving more pressure than most. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has released new guidelines raising customer protection standards to include the requirement always to place good customer outcomes at the centre of business. The diverse needs of customers must also be recognised at every stage when giving financial advice or selling financial services.
Voice recognition AI systems can detect when customers are displaying an increased vulnerability, thanks to the abilities of semantics analysis. For example, AI can easily detect confusion, disorientation, or hesitancy. Customer service agents can then be notified of the potential for customer vulnerability to ensure that individuals receive additional support, resources, and guidance to ensure they are not exploited.
The issues of sales enablement and ethical regulatory compliance are closely intertwined. Businesses must ensure that when taking advantage of the significant benefits of introducing speech AI, they must also remember to provide the necessary training to employees, avoid a one-size-fits-all approach, and protect vulnerable customers.
