Einstein Call Coaching allows sales managers to build stronger teams and gain strategic AI-based insights with every sales call through a new channel: Voice.
How Einstein uses Salesforce AI Call Coaching to help salespeople become top performers
Einstein Call Coaching allows sales managers to build stronger teams and gain strategic AI-based insights with every sales call through a new channel: Voice.
At Dreamforce 2019 in San Francisco, Bill Detwiler from TechRepublic spoke with Efrat Rapoport, product management director at Salesforce, about Einstein Call Coaching. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.
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Bill Detwiler: One of the concerns with artificial intelligence is the effect this will have on jobs, and that is why I am very excited to be here at Dreamforce 2019 and to talk with Efrat Rapoport about Einstein Call Coaching. So Efrat, tell me a little bit about your role at Salesforce.
Efrat Rapoport: My name is an Efrat Rapoport; I was the CEO and co-founder of the Bonobo AI, which was taken over by Salesforce exactly six months ago. We are based in Tel Aviv, Israel. We have a great, great team. It is actually one of Salesforce’s fastest growing hubs.
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Personally, I was always fascinated by languages, by speech, by the way people choose to construct sentences. You can really learn a lot about people or about customers, in our use case, if you just listen, and today we are very, very happy and proud to unveil Einstein Call Coaching.
When we designed this product, we constantly had the sales manager in mind. Now consider yourself a sales manager – you have a team of sales people there, they call, they receive calls, they are busy with customers all day, and often these calls are the first interaction that customers have with your brand. As a sales manager, how do you ensure that you get the most out of every conversation and how do you coach and support your sales people to get the most out of every conversation?
We have talked to a lot of sales leaders in different domains and they all seem to agree that it is impossible to do this without the help of artificial intelligence, and more specifically conversation intelligence. Today we unveil Einstein Call Coaching, and this product does exactly that. It gives sales managers the insights, visibility they need for each individual call. It gives them insight into trends that arise from conversations with customers, such as which competitors are mentioned in conversations, how we position different products, how we deal with objections and much more. That is the product in a nutshell.
Bill Detwiler: This is a bit different than what people usually think of when they think of AI and Voice for customer service. It is often the caller, the customer, who has to deal with an automated system on the other side. This is really interesting for me because it uses artificial intelligence, natural language processing, Voice, to help people coach, managers of call center representatives to help make better decisions, produce better results for customers. What did you pull that path when it came to Voice instead of just developing a new automated call center application?
Efrat Rapoport: There are many different usage scenarios for speech and for speech analysis. We really think about the sales manager’s experience and as you said, we are here to give sellers what they need to become top performers. We are here to give sales managers what they need to become informed decision makers within the company.
If you look at the product – if I have to split it into three different pillars – number one, we have visibility, so that we give managers control and visibility in every single conversation. For the first time we are transferring this data to Salesforce, the number one CRM, so that you can now call and listen.
Number two, it’s not always enough, because how do you even know where to start? How to find the needle in the haystack You have so many calls every day, hundreds and thousands, and that’s why we introduce important moments, and these are the parts in the call that you don’t want to miss. They can be a competitor’s mention, cancellations, upsell options, anything that you as a sales manager are interested in, and then you can jump to the relevant 10 seconds and not listen to the entire call.
Bill Detwiler: What you are describing is a system where the AI can choose that key moment from a conversation without the manager having to go through the entire conversation and listen to the moment when you have done a good job or perhaps missed a possibility to address a customer problem to grab. Is that correct?
Efrat Rapoport: Exactly. This is exactly what we do. And then we come to number three: we can save these calls for future reference for people who want to learn and improve themselves. So now as a manager – let’s say we have a great call where we listen to one of our top sellers who are handling an objection to pricing, and we want to save this call for future reference. We can add it to a library, and as a seller you can gain access to this call, listen to how the handling of objections was handled and you are competent and better.
Bill Detwiler: Let’s talk about Voice in general. Salesforce has included Voice in so many of its products and services, its platforms. You have Einstein Voice, and now we have Einstein Call Coaching. Where do you see Voice going in the future?
Efrat Rapoport: I think Voice is the new limit. I think it was clear this morning in the first keynote that Salesforce really doubles on Voice. We have seen Call Coaching; we have also seen Service Cloud Voice, Einstein Voice, Einstein Voice Builder. These are very exciting times. There is a lot of demand from customers, and it is really good to be at the forefront and innovate for the next generation of speech.
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