“Businesses need scalable tools to make sense out of these conversations and identify the changes that are always happening out there,” says Efrat Rapoport, Director of Product Management, Einstein, Salesforce, in an exclusive interview with Talk CMO
TCMO Bureau: What is so important about call analysis?
Efrat Rapoport: Calls are a very rich source of information. So much is happening during calls – customers tell you what they want, what they think, what they care about- and yet calls are so much harder to capture and analyze at scale than emails or text messages, which typically include a lot less information.
Until now, it’s been difficult to capture insights from calls; they typically get lost in meeting notes and never documented. By using AI to scale call analysis, sales teams can spot trends, new competitors, or changes in customer needs before a single sales rep may notice and call attention to it. Sales managers can identify coachable moments to boost their team’s performance, share best practices, and deliver an overall better customer experience.
TCMO Bureau: How is voice data revolutionizing both employee and customer experiences?
Efrat Rapoport: With conversation intelligence, teams can ensure they prepare their sales reps for the specific issues, topics, products, and challenges that are happening most frequently and are top of mind for customers. Training and coaching can be designed based on the most common objections, questions, and inquiries that have been coming up recently — whether that is pricing conversations, a new product, or a new competitor.
When employees are prepared to handle these moments, customers receive a better experience — their questions are answered faster, and they can trust a sales rep that is confident and knowledgeable in the product. When questions can be answered on the call at the moment, rather than needing to follow up with changes or corrections, you’re going to sell more and have happier customers.
Also Read: Conversational AI Transforming Customer Experience Across Industries
Einstein Call Coaching also gives reps the option to ask for feedback, share their success moments with their managers and teams, and to always be learning and improving.
TCMO Bureau: What are the benefits that businesses can gain by using tools like Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing?
Efrat Rapoport: Like every technology, the question is ultimately how you leverage this technology for real business needs. Businesses are bombarded by conversational customer feedback, from every direction: calls, chat, text messages, social media, etc.
These conversations are happening at scale – there are just too many of them to see patterns. Businesses need scalable tools to make sense out of these conversations and identify the changes that are always happening out there. These tools help businesses be more than just reactive – they are helping them become strategically responsive to what customers need and want.
On top of spotting trends, these technologies help businesses find the needle in the haystack – the 10 seconds in a specific call that provided extremely valuable feedback or suggestion; or the question that came up in a call and made the manager realize there’s a great opportunity to teach the team something new that would help them sell more, etc. It’s impossible to find these important moments manually, and they have immense value to every business.
With Einstein Call Coaching, for the first time, companies can access and play their sales calls comfortably inside of Salesforce. Customers can connect their telephony vendor of choice to Salesforce. We are offering different integrations, including integration with Red Box and Tenfold, in order to enable customers to capture calls from every platform. The Red Box AI Bridge, as an example, enables organizations not utilizing a Salesforce embedded communication platform to capture high-quality call and metadata from their existing telephony or contact center platform to leverage within Einstein Call Coaching.
This means their sales teams can access specific calls based on a variety of criteria (e.g., a sales manager looking for calls made by their best-performing reps to help coach newer reps). And when listening to a call, the listener can also skip to key moments in the call – the most relevant, important parts they shouldn’t miss. These are just a few of the things companies can do with this powerful platform to truly understand their customers.
Also Read: Enterprise Digital Transformation Efforts for Enriched Employee and Customer Experience
TCMO Bureau: What role do you see for ML and AI in voice call processing? How does it add to the efficiencies?
Efrat Rapoport: Listening to sales calls can be a very manual process. Teams can have thousands of sales calls a week, making it impossible to truly grasp what is happening in these calls. ML and AI help businesses surface the most valuable calls and spot specific snippets in these calls that are of special interest – competitor mentions, pricing discussions, next steps, etc. Moreover, the technology can spot trends that a human would not be able to, for example – identify a new promotion from a competitor that’s suddenly coming up in calls.
Efrat Rapoport is the director of product management for Einstein at Salesforce. She was the CEO and Co-Founder of Bonobo.ai, an Israel-based conversational AI startup that was acquired by Salesforce. Bonobo was founded in 2017 and participated in an Oracle accelerator in August of that year. Efrat was selected for Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2017 and held an MSc in Computational Neuroscience from Tel Aviv University’s Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students.
