Artificial Intelligence To Boost Sales
CenturyLink® is now making use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve the effectiveness of their human sales force. It is reported that they will make use of AI to automate the work of the qualifying sales leads. CenturyLink® is now working with a company named Conversica Inc. and their Artificial Intelligence agent named Angie that can quickly work through the tens and thousands of leads generated each month via varied sources to concentrate on the ones that can effectively transform into sales to generate revenue for the company.
The Software-as-a-Service Artificial Intelligence offering from Conversica has been much successful on every single dollar that CenturyLink® spends on the service. It is reported that the service generates twenty dollars in revenue for every dollar spend on it by CenturyLink®. This sales automation by Artificial Intelligence is much effective in helping CenturyLink® to economically reach the smaller businesses, where the volumes of revenue cannot justify making use of much human capital, says Gary Gerber, who is a senior director at Conversica.
“CenturyLink® gets about 90,000 leads a quarter and there is no way they can engage every one of those people in a conversation, so they cherry-pick — they have humans get in touch with the best prospects and have the conversations,” Gerber says. “But you know there are hundreds of sales leads that go untapped.”
These leads come in from different promotions through the internet, telemarketing programs, and more. Conversica helps CenturyLink® via their AI agents to enable email responses and texts that feel like normal human conversation to the leads. The best part of this automation is that every lead will get a response that is specifically tailored for the consumer.
Software-As-A-Service AI
The Artificial Intelligence agent Angie is capable of reading response and continues the conversation to the point where it is time to transfer the particular lead off to a salesperson. Angie is even capable of making an appointment.
The Conversica system is integrated into Marketo, which is an automated marketing system of CenturyLink® and as the leads come in, Angie goes to work sending texts or emails to engage with the leads. Gerber said that Angie is persistent. “She’ll try as many times as it takes,” he says.
Angie also gets smarter. Gerber says, “What we call AI is actually a bunch of AIs and some real intelligence too. There is an AI that can interpret what is the best message to send, another focused on how to generate the best response, an AI that actually reads it [and interprets it], another AI that measures intent, and another that says what is the right way to respond.”
