The surge in business adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is compelling companies to consider their own AI deployment strategies. However, when IT teams and leaders are tasked with implementing AI initiatives, they often struggle with identifying the technologies and applications that will derive the most value for their business. Technology is evolving so rapidly that it can be challenging to understand where to begin, which tools to select, and how to apply them effectively.
Here are three use cases for AI that can create immediate benefit across your business, including sales, support, marketing, and operations.
1. Gain New Customer Insights
AI capabilities within your cloud communications solution provides actionable insights to improve customer interactions within the contact center. While it’s no secret that knowing and understanding your customers is vital to a successful business, the challenge lies in pinpointing the right data at the right time.
In the Contact Center, the multitudes of conversations between agents and customers can potentially yield rich insights, but the data is usually siloed and not organized in a way that enables easy analysis. Without the right tool sets to access this static data, organizations can miss out on opportunities to enhance support, sales, service delivery, and product development.
Our AI Infused Contact Center, RingCX, gleans insights not only from structured data – which is generally unambiguous – but also from unstructured data as well. This allows contact centers and sales teams to capture a more complete set of conversations, providing a holistic view of the customer journey.
Another use case for application of AI is, RingSense for Sales, RingCentral’s AI-powered solution, designed to help sales teams, reps, and managers by making their work easier, providing new customer insights, and giving them the tools that they need to close deals more effectively. It analyzes interactions between sales teams and their prospects to identify and organize key insights. From there, it provides AI-driven performance measurements that give sales leaders a view into overall pipeline accuracy and coverage.
These benefits extend beyond the sales organization to other functional teams, allowing them to draw new insights from conversations and inject the voice of the customer across the organization. Enablement teams, for instance, can use RingSense to track sales activities and see what’s working, while customer success managers can review account activities to track concerns, topics, and follow-up action items. By tying this into the AI-driven learning that comes from agent interactions with customers, sales teams will have richer capabilities to target prospects, prioritize leads, and convert them into new customers.
Data also plays a central role in evaluating marketing success and informing future strategies. For the marketers, in our RingCentral Events product, our AI-powered analytics empower event organizers to derive actionable insights from vast amounts of event-related data, ranging from attendee feedback and engagement metrics to social media interactions and sentiment analysis. By harnessing the predictive capabilities of AI, event technology platforms can anticipate trends, identify areas for improvement, and optimize event outcomes in real-time.
2. Save Time and Improve Efficiency in Support
Ask any sales rep, contact center agent, or general knowledge worker, and they’ll tell you that manually taking notes and logging calls is a chore But if agents don’t write up notes and call summaries in a timely manner, recollections can become uncertain, leading to incomplete or and even inaccurate records. Note-taking also takes focus off the customer during interactions,diverts time that could be spent on higher-value tasks, and takes away from time on the phone with customers increasing average speed of answer.
With RingSense for RingCX, RingCentral delivers AI capabilities before, during and after customer conversations to automate repetitive tasks. In fact, AI can save time for organizations and customers by automating the entire call altogether. For contact centers and support teams, AI-powered intelligent virtual agents (IVA) use natural language processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLM), and speech recognition to assist customers and callers with their queries, without the need for live agent assistance.
When a call is advanced to a live agent, RingSense helps the agents by automatically taking notes on key information such as agreements reached, questions, action items, and how many times a product or competitor was mentioned and in what context. This provides coherent, detailed notes on each call, and saves time that agents would otherwise spend jotting down the notes themselves. They can focus completely on the customer, rather than splitting their focus.
Additionally, many organizations use customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, which require reps and agents to log each call with their notes attached to each customer. AI solutions that integrate with CRM solutions can instantly log each call, including notes and transcripts from the conversation. This not only saves time but also eliminates a tiresome and time-consuming task.
Similarly, AI can handle many routine tasks for marketing event organizers — from copywriting and caption translations for global audiences, to Q&A management and post-event marketing outreach. Think of all the time savings that allow organizers to focus on things that matter most to them.
3. Improve Sales Win Rates
It doesn’t matter how fast and efficient sales reps are if they’re not closing deals. And while AI can’t replace sales employees, it can certainly help train and guide them to close larger deals or close deals in a timely manner.
AI solutions designed for sales teams can help reps by providing guidance and helpful information during calls, as well as call scoring and insights afterwards. With AI being adept at pattern recognition, it can hone in on the best practices among top-performing reps. For example, the RingSense for Sales intelligent scoring capability provides call summaries and scores to identify key moments as well as reps’ strengths and weaknesses. Managers can then use these insights to improve their coaching and guidance, make sure each rep is performing at their best, and shorten the learning curve for new reps.
RingSense also can help identify risks and understand when and why a deal is about to stall. This information can be used to provide input and guidance to the sales reps, allowing them to focus on saving the deal.
All of this information can, in turn, be used to create custom playbooks based on real sales moments, and build libraries of best practices. With these tools, organizations can give their reps training and guidance to boost their win rates.
Making the Most out of AI Today
The above are good examples of how AI is being used today to make marketing drive higher ROI from marketing, contact center agents more effective with existing customers, and to make sales teams more effective for landing new customers. Not only are these capabilities in the market today, but AI-based applications will continue to improve over time – and we are just beginning to see what’s possible.
To learn more, read our recently published paper, Navigating AI With RingCentral.
Originally published Mar 09, 2024, updated Aug 07, 2024
