The debate over whether artificial intelligence (AI) will make it to the future is long settled now.
AI has become a key part of most industries today. In fact, the AI market is projected to cross $826.70 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 28.46% from 2024 to 2030.
While it may not replace humans, AI can enhance human productivity and help businesses improve their ROI.
The growing integration of AI across various sectors is proof.
Customer support service is one of the top fields leveraging AI. However, it is not just beneficial for support teams. Its benefits extend to sales teams.
In this post, we will explore how AI in customer support is transforming sales teams.
First, let’s discuss how customer support teams are harnessing AI.
AI Transforming Customer Support Teams
From handling customer inquiries to managing long wait times, customer support teams had to juggle multiple challenges.
The outcome? Agent burnout, frustrated customers, and operational inefficiencies.
With the introduction of AI tools in customer support, things have changed drastically.
Here’s how -
- AI-Powered Response: AI chatbots and virtual agents can simplify tasks, such as answering common queries. The customers don’t have to wait for a response from the company.
AI-driven instant responses ensure customers get the help they need, even outside business hours.
- Personalized Interactions: AI-driven data analytics tools can analyze historical customer data and deliver personalized support. They can help identify customers’ needs, preferences, and previous issues and offer tailored solutions that improve customer satisfaction.
- Forecasting Capabilities: AI’s predictive capabilities allow customer support teams to identify potential issues before they arise. This helps prevent problems from escalating and improves the overall experience.
- Self-Service Option: AI-powered self-service tools like knowledge bases, FAQs, and virtual troubleshooting guides allow customers to find answers to their concerns without human intervention.
This reduces work pressure on support teams while empowering customers to resolve issues independently.
Simply put, AI has made the customer support team’s job easy. Now, we will understand how leveraging AI in customer support can further empower the sales team.
How AI in Customer Support Can Revolutionize Sales Teams
Like the customer support team, the sales team is a crucial part of any business. Plus, they share a close connection.
Support teams have always shared customer insights to help sales close more deals. For instance, if a customer keeps asking about specific product features, that’s a lead for the sales team.
On the other hand, sales teams provide feedback to the support team. For instance, they share details on what’s confusing customers. This helps the support teams fix the issues.
Now, with AI in customer support, this back-and-forth is faster and smarter.
Let’s find out how.
1. Streamlined Workflows with AI Automation
The customer support team holds valuable data and insights, such as customer key concerns, frequently asked queries, and more.
When shared with the sales team, these insights can help them gauge customer purchase intent.
However, manual data sharing often results in workflow inefficiencies, delays, and miscommunication, leading to missed opportunities. Besides, repetitive tasks like ticket assignments or routing queries could be draining.
AI-powered workflow builder tools solve these challenges by automating repetitive tasks and streamlining collaboration between support and sales teams.
These tools can automatically route crucial information, such as customer purchase intent or frequently asked questions. This ensures quick and effective communication between the teams.
For instance, consider a customer repeatedly inquiring about specific product features. So, an AI tool can flag the customer as a potential lead and share relevant details.
This way, AI adoption eliminates manual handovers, shortens response times, and ensures work efficiency.
2. Enhanced Customer Engagement
Sales teams often struggle with customer engagement because of the lack of detailed customer insights.
Poor engagement can ultimately lead to the loss of potential leads, impacting the ROI.
Centralized AI tools that store and share critical documents, such as Instructions For Use (IFU), can significantly streamline this process.
For instance, when a product is launched in the service market, businesses provide IFUs to customers. This helps them guide customers about the product’s intended use, installation, and any precautions to take. The IFU document thus has crucial details that can help sales and support teams help customers.
The teams can access the document details and guide users without having to connect to some expert. They can promptly engage users and improve satisfaction.
That’s not all. AI tools with predictive analytics capabilities can help teams analyze customer behavior patterns to forecast intent.
For instance, if predictive AI detects that a customer visits your pricing page or downloads product documents, it can flag them as a high-priority lead.
The sales team can then reach out with a personalized offer and improve the chances of conversion.
3. AI-Driven Lead Generation from Customer Support
Studying customer support interactions and identifying potential opportunities takes time and effort.
The crucial customer insights can get buried in manual spreadsheets. This can waste massive time and lower the sales team’s productivity.
In such instances, advanced AI-powered chatbots that integrate with internal CRM can prove to be a game-changer. The chatbot can help track conversations and identify high-intent customers.
Here’s a quick use case.
Consider a customer who asks about product pricing or advanced product functionality. This reflects their interest that the chatbot can gauge. The AI can identify this customer as a high-priority lead and send the details to the sales team CRM.
This way, the sales reps can reach out to the customer promptly and leverage the information to create a pitch that helps convert.
AI-driven lead generation can thus reduce the burden on support teams and streamline the sales pipeline.
4. Improved Sales Performance through AI-Driven Insights
Sales leaders require monitoring multiple factors, including their reps’ team performance, to ensure everything is on track.
However, doing this manually is not feasible. They need to identify gaps and implement strategies to improve their team’s performance.
Here, leveraging AI tools like Convin.ai can be the best bet. This AI-powered tool provides the necessary data to make informed decisions and drive team success.
It allows sales leaders to increase customer lifetime value (CLTV) by ensuring high customer satisfaction. It enables them to closely monitor customer intelligence reports, helping them unearth new opportunities and recognize risks.
The tool also helps track customer patterns, behaviors, and actions to identify potential areas where repeat purchases could be impacted. This enables the team to intervene early and ensure positive outcomes.
What’s more? Its comprehensive dashboards can help track and audit agent performance, compliance issues, and deal progress in real-time. This gives sales leaders the ability to spot emerging problems before they escalate.
These data insights can be equally valuable for customer support teams, thus improving overall customer satisfaction. A win-win for sales and support.
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Summing Up
AI in customer support has vast potential. It can empower sales teams by offering insights and improving productivity and efficiency, as shared in the post.
What’s more? According to McKinsey, generative AI could add $0.8 trillion to $1.2 trillion in productivity to sales and marketing by 2030. This means industry leaders are adopting AI and will continue to increase its use.
Whether you are a sales leader or a business looking to achieve your goals, implementing the right AI tools will fuel your success.
So, go ahead and embrace AI for your business.
