The debate over whether AI will eventually replace people in the workplace generally boils down to a simple two-part explanation. AI will take over most repetitive and manual labor activities, while humans will excel at soft skills such as creative communication and relationship-building. While some of this is correct — people and computers will play to their strengths – it oversimplifies AI’s position in our professional life. We believe AI will assist people in performing better human tasks by enhancing our emotional intelligence, soft skills, and interpersonal communication abilities.
AI algorithms have improved at detecting, analyzing, and processing tone, pitch, facial expression, eye contact, body language, and dozens of other verbal and non-verbal communication features. This is only possible by combining advances in emotion detection, natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision with psychology and linguistics.
AI can take complex and often perplexing data and identify patterns of ineffective communication that aren’t visible to the naked eye by allowing it to tap into your customer dialogues, whether phone, video, or text. These technologies have uses that go beyond sales and consumer satisfaction. AI that measures emotional intelligence will enhance many professional tasks that require strong communication abilities, such as leadership, public speaking, product management, virtual therapy, education, language acquisition, and bedside manner. Indeed, the total market size for emotion detection and conversational AI will exceed $55 billion by 2026.
Success With Emotional Intelligence And Artificial Intelligence
Researchers and businesses have endeavored to demystify the art of being a “people person.” Emotional intelligence is a strong predictor of professional success in studies. Peter Savoy and John Mayer first described it as “a type of social intelligence that involves judging one’s own and other people’s emotions and guiding one’s actions based on this information.”
According to Yale research, emotional intelligence helps us make better judgments at work. In another Harvard study, emotional intelligence was more beneficial than IQ in predicting team effectiveness. And according to Project Oxygen, a 10-year Google research, emotional intelligence is more important than IQ or technical aptitude in determining a manager’s performance. Investing in emotional intelligence makes individuals and teams more successful at work, as it is as important as any “hard talent.”
Professionals who want to develop their emotional intelligence must improve their self-awareness and emotional self-management. It has to match the clients’ emotional state. It’s not only about the current encounter and how you’re reading the circumstance; it’s also about your relationship with that person and their common goals. Consumer service representatives can benefit from AI because it provides indications about the emotional profile of the customer on the other end of the line and allows you to mimic speaking with them.
This knowledge is precious in the high-stakes customer success area. The average customer success manager (CSM) oversees $2 to $5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and is frequently headquartered outside of the United States. Understanding clients’ cultural and interpersonal nuances in the United States is crucial for succeeding.
Gainsight, a renowned customer success platform based in the Bay Area, has noticed this and is currently implementing EQ analysis with one of its customer success teams in India.
CSMs can advance a win-win agenda with consumers by fine-tuning their offering in a personalized approach and meeting customers on an emotional level. Gainsight records communications between their India-based CSMs and customers in the Americas through Gong and Zoom to evaluate and understand their customers’ learning styles, emotional reactions, and personality profiles. This information is then provided into a training simulator, which assists other CSMs in preparing for upcoming conversations with clients in the area.
Emotional Intelligence And Artificial Intelligence In Action
Gong, a sales data analysis service, examines interactions between salespeople and consumers to assist salespeople in communicating more effectively and closing more deals. To design stronger pitches and adopt more precise and compassionate language, Gong uses machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to index customer emails and video chats and harvest qualitative insights from quantitative customer data. Gong isn’t a little startup evangelizing AI’s benefits. Accenture, LinkedIn, Service Titan, Slack, PayPal, Zillow, and many other companies are among its clients. Its most recent valuation was $7.25 billion.
As the epidemic caused global lockdowns in early 2020, Zillow began employing Gong to assist its salespeople in transitioning from in-person to virtual sales. Zillow made a video tour and used Gong trackers to see which key phrases helped them close more transactions. Gong’s Whisper product, which evaluates sales team members based on their performance, was also utilized by Zillow to figure out how their top performers communicated and pitched differently than the rest of the team, allowing management to institutionalize those best practices.
BenchSci is another example that assists pharmaceutical companies and scientists in advancing clinical trials. BenchSci collaborated with an AI conversational intelligence platform to gather signals from emails, support tickets, and surveys, as pharmaceutical companies cannot record online meetings due to privacy and security issues. The venue may conduct psychological and behavioral analysis of the consumer’s emotional state, allowing the customer service professional to mimic it better and reply to service tickets. Mike Egan, VP of Customer Success, believes his team must be proactive with customers, providing them with the right help at the right time to turn them into platform evangelists.
The Artificial Intelligence Feedback
Because customer contacts are so important, the topic of customer success has been fertile ground for developing a 360-degree AI feedback loop, in which insights into consumers’ emotional states are offered before, during, and after a customer encounter. We’ll go through each stage of the customer journey and how AI can aid with emotional intelligence in this part.
Before Engaging With A Consumer, Do The Following Preparations
Customer success managers should have a place to train and rehearse before speaking with customers, mainly if the interaction can be classified. Is this a new contract? Cancellation of a customer? Is there a request for an upgrade?
Suppose you’ve ever spoken with a consumer, Cyrano. AI has developed a proprietary system that analyses prior chats to establish a consumer profile. The customer’s communication style, identified priorities or goals, and even their demonstrated degrees of commitment in the previous interaction could all be included in this profile. You could adjust your presentation to your customer’s personality type and watch how they respond if you look at the moving parts of the conversation and how they create motivation.
When You’re Dealing With A Consumer
Leaders in customer service and customer success can get real-time feedback and advice on effectively closing deals, overcoming objections, and sympathizing with disgruntled customers. Cresta, for example, employs AI to provide real-time feedback to call center personnel via text prompts so that they know what to say to clients in the most typical scenarios. If a consumer objects, the system provides a step-by-step guide to assist salespeople in overcoming it. Is there a dissatisfied customer? The technology suggests phrases or words that will help the customer relax.
Cresta was utilized by EarthLink, a privately held internet service provider (ISP), to update their contact center operations and assist their agents in connecting with more empathy. EarthLink reported an 11 percent reduction in average handle time (AHT) and a 124 percent increase in value-added services conversion rate within the first month of adopting Cresta, which is a massive win.
Following A Customer Engagement
The real strength of AI comes from insights gained after a customer engagement because AI can read earlier talks with the consumer and provide improvement recommendations. The more AI is employed, the better the feedback grows, much like a virtuous loop.
Reciprocity, a prominent risk and compliance platform based in San Francisco, allows for precisely that scenario as part of their tech stack for their CSM team. While their customer meetings are recorded in Gong, they analyze them with a conversational and emotional intelligence platform. It provides a personality profile of its customers’ stakeholders based on previous conversations and uses Natural Language Generation (NLG) to advise CSMs on working with specific people. The program can also match CSMs to customer stakeholders based on personality and communication style similarities, reducing friction in the buying or upselling process and allowing customer-focused people to speak more genuinely and effectively.
Conclusion
Companies would be prudent to look into AI solutions that might assist their employees in becoming more emotionally intelligent communicators. Indeed, AI can help us improve our emotional intelligence by increasing our self-awareness and assisting us in managing critical professional connections. We become more efficient, productive, and empathic as we strengthen our emotional intelligence and communication abilities. Although the technology is far from flawless, it is becoming more intelligent every day as platforms’ data, scale, and sophistication grow. Thanks to technology, our employees can become more emotionally intelligent, and our businesses can become more successful and profitable.
If you wish to learn more about artificial intelligence, contact the ONPASSIVE team.
