Salesforce has been teasing voice services since the last Dreamforce when they launched Einstein Voice Assistant which supports routine Salesforce CRM functions such as creating or updating customer records, getting personalized daily briefings, and exploring dashboards. This year, they announced Einstein Call Coaching, Service Cloud Voice for transcription and AI-powered recommendation services, and Einstein Voice Skills.
Einstein Call Coaching is currently in pilot and should be generally available as a Sales Cloud High Velocity Sales (SEP) service in June. Call Coaching utilizes natural language processing against call transcripts. Managers view “insights and trends within conversational data.” NLP tags keywords, alerts managers about spikes in competitor mentions, and monitors pricing discussions and objection handling. Managers can then focus their coaching based upon individual rep needs.
“Companies with dynamic sales coaching programs see 28% higher win rates, unbelievable results. And Einstein call coaching is your coach. This is an AI feature that can process audio clips to serve up those key moments for this type of coaching,” said Sarah Patterson, SVP of Product Marketing.
Being able to track keywords, discussion topics, and competitors should prove highly valuable for one-on-one and team coaching sessions and broader analytics. Sales reps often fail to record competitor and objection details (or they are trapped in notes). Even when custom fields are set up to capture these details, they are often weakly populated. Being able to track objections and competitor discussions provides improved coaching and product road mapping input. This is far better than querying sales reps to be told that they lost on price or aren’t sure who won the deal.
Product tracking and objections also assist with gathering early intelligence following a product launch. Are the sales reps balking at discussing the new offering, unable to handle objections for which they weren’t trained, or tripping on a missing feature that should have been included in the MVP?
“You launch a new product, but you have no idea whether your reps are actually comfortable selling it,” said Patterson. “Well, now you are getting the insight you need to know if they are. And if they’re not, you can lean in to guide them, to coach them, to help them. More than this, you can even customize this to look for things that matter to your business.”
Call Coaching provides “management-level visibility into key moments during a sales call” allowing the coach to listen to those moments and how the rep handled them. Those moments are then immediately available for one-on-one review or group coaching.
Call Coaching Insights include tabs for objection mentions, product mentions, talk / listen ratios, and custom topics. For State Farm Insurance (the Dreamforce demo), this includes life events.
Call Coaching conversation trends help identify market shifts, opportunities for bundled offerings, and emerging competitors.
“73% of managers spend less than 5% of their time coaching their reps, and we wanted to make the most of that time. Einstein Call Coaching helps managers more effectively coach individuals, provides the ability to scale those learnings across teams and gain deeper insights into customer needs and experiences.”
Efrat Rapoport, Director of Product Management, Salesforce Sales Cloud
“Just like athletes can sit down with their coaches and look at video clips, now sales reps can sit down and listen to audio clips,” said Patterson.
Call Coaching also supports a library of best-practice call excerpts for new hire training and sales refreshers.
Tomorrow, I will discuss the other voice tools launched at Dreamforce.