Can virtual agents play an effective role in outbound sales?

Ryan Falkenberg, CEO, CLEVVA. Image supplied

Think about it: have you ever heard someone talk fondly about receiving robocalls?

The thing is, outbound sales calls are actually an important part of the marketing funnel. Even if someone doesn’t decide to change insurers based on a single phone call, that call may plant a seed in their head that leads to them doing so down the line.

Rather than eliminate outbound sales calls or remove virtual agents from the equation, businesses should look at the problem differently.

Deploying virtual agents alongside human agents can leave prospective customers feeling positive about the call rather than regretting the moment they pick up.

Understand where the friction is

But what should that approach look like? Where should businesses deploy virtual agents if they want to give themselves the best possible chance of sales success?

How can they do so in ways that allow them to get the best possible performance out of their human agents? And how can they also ensure that prospective customers have a better experience than their competitors offer?

Key to answering that question is understanding the structure of most sales calls. Let’s return to the example of the insurance company we used earlier.

You’ll get people who decline the call (either because they don’t recognise the number or because they’re using a service like Truecaller), some who’ll hang up as soon as they realise it’s a sales call, and others who’ll actually be interested in hearing what the business has to say.

This last group is the one to focus the business’ energy on. Unfortunately, many prospects will lose interest when they realise how much longer the process is than simply accepting the pitch and becoming a paid-up customer.

For most financial service providers, including insurers, as much as 30% of call time (as much as 10-15 minutes) can be taken up reading through all the terms and conditions.

That’s not even the end of it either. If the sale is secured, the customer needs to submit documentation to complete the sale. With people as busy as they are, filling out forms and sending copies of required documents can quickly fall down their list of priorities, especially with grudge purchases like insurance.

As a result, agents can spend up to 50% of the total sale process doing follow up calls.

Improving the experience

Virtual agents can change that. Rather than using them to have the upfront sale conversation, contact centres should assign the more operational parts of the sale process to the virtual agents. This includes the reading of the T’c and C’s, and doing all the post call follow ups.

From a customer experience perspective, this works. Customers will be comfortable having the human agent tell them that they will be transferred through to their virtual agent colleague to walk them through the T’s and C’s, and to then help them with all the outstanding documentation.

And from a human agent perspective, it frees them up to spend all their time focusing on the up-front sales conversations - where they are particularly effective.

Business and customer benefits

By using technology this way, businesses can fundamentally improve sales capability with the same number of team members. But that’s not the only way that passing the grunt work on to virtual agents and reducing that “dead space”, improves things for the business.

Prospective customers also get an improved experience because the human agents are fresher and the onboarding process is easier. That, in turn, means they’re much more likely to make purchases. Suddenly outbound sales calls become more effective and efficient, turning them into a much more powerful weapon.