How to Use Conversational AI for Sales: 8 Use Cases and Benefits

Using conversational AI in sales has evolved from basic interactive voice response (IVR) to advanced intelligent virtual agents (IVA) that engage in human-like conversations. They are quickly becoming an essential part of any sales or marketing strategy and are expected to help the conversational AI market cross $3.9 billion globally by 2030.

Provided IVAs are properly integrated and optimized, they can help drive sales by identifying and engaging prospects, guiding them through their questions, making recommendations, and improving overall customer service to increase the chance of converting a lead into a sale. They also reduce overall expenses by automating mundane tasks, leaving sales leaders to focus their energy on issues that require the knowledge or expertise of a real person.

The following article takes a deep dive into the advent of AI-powered sales and how AI has changed the sales landscape for both customers and businesses. 

Conversational AI Is Not a Chatbot

Conversational AI and chatbots are designed to simulate human-like conversations to help companies provide customer support. They are, however, very different.

Conversational AI, or IVAs, are much smarter than chatbots. They utilize machine learning algorithms, natural language processing (NLP) techniques, and other advanced computations to understand text and voice inputs before generating contextual human-like responses. 

Chatbots, in comparison, are generally limited to text-based interactions that only rely on keywords to identify intent. They answer from a predetermined set of options, often leading to frustrating customer experiences because they can’t understand context. 

Conversational AI systems are continuously learning to improve their ability to understand what a customer is trying to say for accurate (and helpful) answers. Chatbots can never reach that level of intelligence and accuracy. Their conversations are rigid and bound by predetermined answers that cannot evolve if customers want help outside the menu tree. 

Transforming Sales With Conversational AI: 8 Use Cases and Benefits

Having an around-the-clock customer support service is only the tip of what conversational AI technology can do. It can be applied in various ways to lead sales campaigns, boost revenue, and improve customer relationships. 

Automated Lead Generation and Qualification 

Conversational AI can automatically improve and increase lead generation without human intervention. It identifies traffic sources, observes their online behavior, and analyzes historical sales data to qualify lead scores most likely to convert before forwarding them to the sales team.

Benefits

Depending on how deeply a conversational AI system has been integrated into an existing system, as well as what other AI tools are available, sales leaders can focus all of their energy on leads who are interested, invested, and most likely to convert. This not only saves time but is also an efficient use of available resources that can potentially result in profits.

Tailored Customer Interactions and Follow-Ups

Conversational AI can learn from past interactions to provide a tailored customer experience. For a customer buying a software solution, the IVA can share a pop-up link to maintenance tips or upgrade options. On the same note, conversational AI can also identify and improve recommendations, leading to a smoother customer experience.

Benefits

Tailored customer interactions always bring a higher chance of making a sale. It helps companies build trust and improves engagement, allowing sales leaders to focus on refining their strategies rather than having to manually follow up with every lead.

Assistance to Sales Agents

Conversational AI is an excellent system to train sales representatives by simulating real-life customer interactions. They get to learn how to handle different sales situations, make pitches, and offer guidance to potential prospects.

In addition, allowing IVAs to handle customer service leaves sales teams to solely address frequently asked questions during post-sale. This allows them to better manage future expectations and improve the AI to reduce any confusion or complaints.

Benefits

With fewer customer support issues, sales teams can look forward to directly handling qualified leads by letting customers serve themselves. This also means improved productivity and work efficiency for the sales leaders. 

Data-Backed Analysis

Something else that helps improve sales is the data recorded by conversational AI systems. Every customer conversation can be saved via automated transcriptions for a deep analysis later. This includes interactions with customers about specific products, their most frequent questions and queries, past purchases, responses to promotional offers, etc. 

Benefits

Data analysis is critical to conversational AI marketing. By analyzing customers' preferences to ensure a tailored experience, IVAs can recommend relevant products or services with a high chance of making a sale.

It Can Also Help in Sales Forecasting

In addition to better analysis and results, conversational AI can efficiently forecast sales based on collected data. Customers showing interest in a specific product through their browsing activity, or by asking relevant questions can be used to create a target pool for new sales.

Benefits

Identifying customers' needs and requirements, and how they behave to different pitches helps companies forge data-backed sales campaigns that have a higher chance of succeeding against their target audience. 

Uses of Proactive Communication

Since conversational AI can be used to collect and analyze customer data from various sales channels and campaigns, sales teams can proactively change their sales techniques accordingly to improve their chances of success. This also means that IVAs can be designed to proactively communicate with customers likely to convert rather than waiting for them to initiate the conversation.

Benefits

Proactive communications allow businesses to recognize potential drop-off leads and re-direct their efforts. Communicating with customers who are already interested is likely to build a relationship of trust and loyalty, leading to sales. 

Conversational AI Can Schedule Appointments

Customers are guaranteed access to important product details and features by automatically scheduling appointments with conversational AI systems. This includes scheduling sales meetings, booking product demos, setting live calls with sales representatives, or locking down a call-back for any other reason.

Benefits

Streamlining the process of scheduling appointments is another way conversational AI can drive sales. For large-scale companies and businesses, particularly ones that traditionally rely on human intervention to answer complicated queries, this means catering to hundreds of customers and queries at once with improved customer satisfaction. 

Integration With Other Systems

Conversational AI is easy to scale and integrate with several existing customer relationship management (CRM) systems such as websites, mobile applications, or any other communication medium. They can work around the clock to guide customers through their favorite channels, ensuring fast and efficient service. 

Benefits

In addition to instant responses around the clock that reduce wait times, deploying a conversational sales platform on an existing CRM system significantly reduces the cost of hiring (and training) human customer support agents. The personalized interactions lead to improved customer service and satisfaction, which builds customer loyalty.

How to Use Conversational AI for Sales, Best Practices

While an automated system that uses machine learning to evolve, conversational AI still requires you to know how to implement its AI tools and use its features for desired outcomes. Below are some of the best practices all businesses should follow for effective conversational AI-led sales. 

Decide Which Conversational AI Platform Is Right for You

Conversational AI is not a one-platform-fits-all solution. Several aspects must be considered before choosing a premium conversational AI that perfectly aligns with your business requirements. Consider how much you are willing to spend, what type of AI tools you need, how easily the AI platform can be integrated with your current infrastructure, what flexibility it offers for scalability, and the level of customization needed.

Ensure Proper Integration With Current Systems

A conversational AI is only as good as its integration with current systems. Ensure that your chosen AI platform is completely (and seamlessly) integrated with all existing systems and tools, including CRMs, sales, and communication channels. This guarantees maximum benefits and efficiency, allowing sales teams to leverage critical AI data for sales.

Train Your Staff to Improve Effectiveness

Conversational AI can only help improve efficiency and generate sales if a highly trained staff is at the helm. Businesses should ensure that their sales teams are trained to take advantage of an AI-powered platform. This includes defining clear sales objectives to align with AI initiatives, monitoring performance metrics, using AI-analyzed data to handle lead prospects, and prioritizing efforts on targets most likely to convert. 

Note that not every task needs to be automated. Some customers prefer human interaction even if it may seem inefficient and time-consuming compared to an chatbot. Your staff should be trained to identify and handle such audiences.

Craft Scripts for Natural Conversations

Ensure the conversational AI platform is programmed to give human-like and user-centric responses. If the AI has trouble comprehending a query, it should ask follow-up questions to seek clarification from the customer politely and emphatically. If the AI already has enough information on a returning customer, it should avoid asking for the same details again. Instead, the conversational AI should be programmed to provide responses tailored to the customer's specific needs or case. This enhances the customer experience. 

Feedback and Improvement Loop

Remember that conversational AI can only learn and evolve on the go if it is fed enough data. This is an endless loop, which must be continuously monitored for performance and improvements. Every AI platform has its own quality metrics depending on the business requirements. However, some common AI optimizations to keep an eye on include the accuracy of its replies, the satisfaction of customers, and how else to improve the AI responses to your prompts.

Better Sales and Conversions With Mosaicx

With conversational AI becoming a must-have solution for online businesses, we invite you to consider using a premium-grade AI platform like Mosaicx to drive your next sales and marketing campaign.

Combining over three decades of experience in self-service, contact center support, and intelligent data insights, Mosaicx delivers proactive and predictive messaging to manage customers and business messaging. 

Request a demo for yourself to see how a conversational AI solution tailored to your business can streamline the whole sales process while being simple to use.