Balto Founder and CEO, Marc Bernstein, recently sat down with Broker Brett Fulmer from The Attachment Point News Roundtable to talk about solving “the problem that every single person in sales and customer services has had” with artificial intelligence. Here are some of the major talking points from this conversation and insight into how Balto can help your business.
So What is The Problem All Call Centers Face?
According to Marc Bernstein, it’s consistency. Before you get on a call you know exactly what to do. You’ve had training and talked over best practices with management, but then when the call starts you’ve got an idea to switch things up. Sometimes this works out great, but more often than not you finish the call thinking to yourself, “man, I completely blew that.”
Naturally, the answer to this problem is getting more people involved to keep conversations on track and make sure that all major points are hit, but doing this is easier said than done. Marc shared this funny story about a manager and rep doing whisper mode to elaborate on that point.
“We’re all sitting here gathered around listening to the sales call and the customer goes, I think I just need a few more weeks. Why don’t you just try me back in three or four weeks? And the manager’s all hyped up and says, ‘don’t take that!’. And then the rep freaks out and says, ‘I can’t take that’, to the customer.”
While manager feedback can be a great tool, balancing both the audio stimuli of the customer and manager while keeping those two conversations separate can be a difficult task for many agents. Identifying this problem through that experience became a big part of the inspiration for Balto’s Real-Time solutions.
Identify Customer Interest
“Some of the best recommendations that the AI can make aren’t things that the representative should say right then and there. It’s calling out moments that are happening that you might otherwise miss,” said Bernstein.
One of the best examples of this that was discussed was identifying and acting on customer interest rather than just pushing through a list of sales points. Balto’s AI is able to identify when a customer expresses interest in a particular point and prompts agents to elaborate further. By integrating this, companies have seen approximately 30% difference in conversion rates.
Create a Digital Sales Floor
Pre-Pandemic one of the best ways salesmen learned to hone their craft was by listening to other successful salesmen and mirroring their best techniques. The world has shifted dramatically since then, and now the majority of call center employees are home. How can we bring this same peer training experience into a modern virtual world? Here’s how Balto approaches it, according to Bernstein:
“Our software aggregates that data. It takes all the best questions that guy’s asking, all the best questions that girl’s asking, all the different value propositions and positioning and closing pitches and puts them all into a playbook”
Creating this digital sales floor, your entire sales team gains sentence-by-sentence access to what the top salesmen are saying and itemized data to show why it’s working.
Improve Presentation With Speech Monitoring
“Kind of touching on sales philosophy a little bit. There’s an egotism in thinking you’re going to talk somebody into something, but usually, you can let them give you the close, I think. It’s almost a 40/60. You just want to talk a little less, then you get them talking,” said “Broker Brett” Fulmer.
Balto’s real-time AI solutions help users improve their presentation on calls by call quality monitoring two key speech metrics: pacing and ratio. What this means is that agents will be notified if they are talking too fast or if they are dominating the conversation. For example, it can say, “over the last five minutes, you’ve been talking 70% of the time”.
Can’t Miss Quotes from the Interview
Bernstein on…How Balto Works
“The AI we built is actually real-time guidance. It analyzes everything that you say as you say it, everything the customer says as the customer says it and in real-time gives you guidance on your computer screen about how you can be as effective as possible.”
Bernstein on…The Importance of Sales
“If you want to start a business, you need to go into sales because you’re either selling your first customers or you’re selling your first employees and getting them excited about what you’re trying to build”
Bernstein on…Balancing Sales Discussion
“One of the general principles that I picked up from the Sandler Sales Methodology is that it really isn’t about you as the seller. It’s about the buyer. So the best sellers are the ones that are talking the absolute least.”
Bernstein on…“Selling Ketchup Popsicles to a Woman in White Gloves”
“Selling against your product can be one of the most powerful things because that puts you on the right side–puts you on the honest side, you’re being upfront.”
Brett Fulmer on…How Balto AI Impacts the Industry
“It’s good to know that technology is being used well. They can be really targeted, smart, and direct. It kind of calls you out to make sure you’re leveling up and being clever and creative in how you’re approaching the game, building those relationships, and thinking outside the box.”
For more insights and explorations into AI, you can listen to the full podcast episode on YouTube.
If you enjoyed reading this recap and would like to hear more from Marc about how you can help your agents say the right things in every single call, we invite you to check out the Reimagining The Call Center podcast. There, Marc sits down with experts to explore new and promising strategies to improve call center operations with the integration of artificial intelligence.
