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Get free accessThe AI landscape is rapidly expanding. Valued at over $208 billion in 2023, the AI market is expected to explode to over $2 trillion by 2030. It’s not a surprise that this rapid expansion is bringing about transformative changes across multiple business sectors, including small and medium businesses (SMBs) and the sales and support teams within them.
With AI tools, sales, and support teams are already overcoming multiple challenges. For example, by rapidly transcribing call notes or achieving faster time to resolution for customer issues through AI-powered chatbots, support, and sales agents can focus on what matters most: building relationships with customers.
AI-powered tools can also analyze customer data, preferences, and behaviors to enable personalized interactions, creating a tailored experience that enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty. And on top of this, AI-powered insights are enabling teams to better understand their target audience, identify trends, and make effective, faster decisions.
While AI has long been seen as exclusive to large enterprises with deep pockets, today, every business, no matter its size, can unlock the value of AI—they just need to know where to start. That’s why the team here at Aircall created our AI Index, which analyzes the behavior and attitudes toward AI of 3,500 employees of small to medium-sized businesses across Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
We designed the report as a helpful resource that can equip businesses with actionable tips for harnessing the power of AI while uncovering a treasure trove of new insights around the current AI landscape in SMBs, the tools that are out there, and what the future of AI holds.
So, let’s take a sneak peek at what we found, and what it tells you about how your sales and support teams can start driving impact with AI tools.
Where AI can Boost Productivity
According to SMB employees, just 4.2 hours out of the workweek are spent directly on customer interactions. This is a huge problem, especially for SMBs whose main unique selling point (USP) is creating strong customer relationships. On top of this, 63% of employees recognize that having enough time to nurture meaningful customer relationships is often a challenge. So, can AI help?
The core value of AI comes from its ability to enhance team productivity and empower everyone to focus their efforts on creating more impactful customer experiences. Particularly for teams like sales and customer support, who spend a lot of time interacting directly with customers, streamlining everyday work processes with AI can lead to significant productivity gains and closer customer connections.
With competition in many markets rapidly increasing, customers now only want efficient, top-tier customer service. Companies that want to not only survive but thrive in this business climate need to exceed these customer experience expectations. This is where specific AI applications can start to be identified. Workers estimate that AI applications could save a significant amount of time on day-to-day tasks—estimates that are only likely to grow as AI technology matures and its uses become better understood.
Currently, employees are spending up to 20.8 hours each week on busy work, admin, and training. Within that, 3.2 hours are lost to manually transferring or inputting data and around three hours in meetings to recap customer interactions. Every minute employees spend on these automatable tasks, takes away from valuable time that could be spent nurturing customer relationships. Businesses should look to tools like AI to help them reduce this time. For example, using AI transcription to help them efficiently and automatically convert spoken word into written text can save workers hours of note-taking time.
Successful, future-ready, client service requires businesses to minimize wasted time by introducing productivity-enhancing technology and AI tools, allowing teams to double down on what matters most: creating exceptional outcomes for customers.
Tools Customer-Facing Teams Can Use to Get Started with AI
The term AI itself encompasses many varying technologies, so it’s no surprise how many different AI tools are out there. Companies need to find out what tools suit their specific needs. For customer-facing teams there are a number of AI technologies that have the ability to eliminate or reduce mundane and repetitive tasks, allowing team members to concentrate on more complex issues. Here are some examples of the best tools on the market.
Aircall’s AI-powered transcription
Aircall’s AI-powered transcription simplifies call and voicemail insights, boosting efficiency and improving customer experiences. It also syncs with leading CRM tools to enhance productivity and allow teams to capture real-world scenarios for onboarding and coaching.
HubSpot's Content Assistant and ChatSpot
HubSpot's Content Assistant and ChatSpot AI feature enable rapid sales content creation, enhancing productivity through follow-up emails, status updates, and prospect identification.
Salesforce's Einstein AI
Salesforce's Einstein AI streamlines lead identification and calendar/email management for sales teams, reducing administrative tasks. For customer service, Einstein answers common questions, freeing up time for complex cases.
Intercom’s AI support tools
Intercom’s AI support tools summarize support conversations, adjust message tones instantly, and generate help center articles from notes, simplifying handovers and enhancing customer experience.
Slack's ChatGPT
Slack's ChatGPT app empowers teams to swiftly summarize conversations, find answers instantly and draft messages seamlessly within the productivity platform.
Reecall's conversational AI
And finally, Reecall's conversational AI assists customer-facing teams by understanding caller intentions, providing contextualized responses and meeting their needs effectively.
Why Aircall’s AI-Powered Transcription is a Great Starting Point
At Aircall, we want to empower SMBs, especially their customer-facing teams. That's why we developed call and voicemail transcription, powered by AI. Our AI-powered transcription tool can automatically and rapidly transcribe call and voicemail audio into text. It offers significant benefits for sales and support teams, enabling them to access valuable insights that can increase productivity. With AI-powered transcription, teams can streamline their workflow, enhance customer experiences, and boost overall team performance.
One of the main advantages of using AI transcription is the ability to rapidly identify and share insights from calls or voicemails without the need for manual transcription. This saves time and improves efficiency. Not only that, but it provides valuable global insights into customer interactions, enabling businesses to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, build training scenarios, and make data-driven decisions.
Aircall‘s AI transcription tool integrates seamlessly with Aircall's ecosystem, including popular platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce. By automating the transcription process and integrating it into their workflows, sales and support teams can accelerate their processes, reduce administrative tasks, and free up more time for impactful work that drives the business forward.
AI and the Future of Customer-Facing Roles
The booming AI landscape has the potential to provide immense value to SMBs and their sales/support teams. By streamlining tasks and automating processes, AI can save valuable time for nurturing customer relationships, creating impactful customer experiences, and exceeding customer engagement expectations.
Concerns about preserving the human connection can be overcome through education and an approach that prioritizes tools that empower teams, rather than replaces them. Aircall's AI transcription tool is one example of this in action, providing valuable insights that drive closer connections between teams and customers.
Ready to learn more about Aircall’s AI transcription and how it can benefit your customer-facing teams?
Published on August 7, 2023.
