AiThority Interview with Dan O’Connell, Chief AI & Strategy Officer at Dialpad

Last week, a leading customer intelligence platform provider, Dialpad published a report on the AI trends influencing sentiments and attitudes at modern sales organizations. The key highlight of the report was the ability of the sales and customer service professionals to quickly embrace AI-powered tools and practices in their current roles. As per the report, Dialpad found out that 70% of sales and customer service professionals don’t fear AI will steal their job one day. With so much happening in the AI marketplace, we chose to double down on our research and analysis for the benefit of our readers who belong to the Sales and Customer Service industry. We spoke to Dialpad’s Chief AI and Strategy Officer, Dan O’Connell to understand how customer service leaders should prepare their organizations for a full-blown AI adoption.

Here’s what Dan said to us.

Hi Dan. Welcome to the AiThority Interview Series. Please tell us why Customer Service leaders should take a strong stance in support of AI applications in their organizations.

Every business is focused on increasing revenue by selling more or churning less. In an ideal situation, it is hopefully a combination of both.

We’re at a moment in time where AI can help businesses mine and access data faster than ever before, giving brands the ability to analyze customer conversations like never before, enabling them to identify specific insights and apply categorization to future customer interactions. Implementing AI leads to more efficient, cost-effective, and productive teams, allowing companies to better understand their customers’ journeys to ensure a best-in-class experience.

Despite the positive adoption rate for AI in customer service and sales, why are agents still feeling overwhelmed and out of place? How does a platform like Dialpad solve these problems for the agents and sales reps?

Customer service agents are faced with an overwhelming volume of customer inquiries, often leaving them unable to resolve tickets and provide customer care promptly and accurately.

As a no-code/low-code platform, Dialpad makes AI easily accessible to customer service and sales professionals. Its AI functions, like live sentiment analysis, automatic call transcription, real-time agent coaching, automated follow-ups, and customer insights, all help to build better customer relationships and improve agent workflows. These features help empower digital agents to solve requests faster through assistance and automation, leading to more positive customer experiences and more efficient turnaround times. It has the power to immediately surface the best answers for customers, make it easier for agents to track customer conversations across channels, and solve problems with greater accuracy.

Recommended AI and Machine Learning Blog for the CMOs: AI Revolution in Sales: 8 AI-Powered Sales Intelligence Platforms for 2023

How can sales organizations scale their AI adoption?

The first step that sales organizations can take is to identify potential applications for AI.

I think some of the most obvious cases for sales fall into three categories: assistance, automation, and/or insights. For example, every sales organization struggles with the coaching and enablement of their teams; there are fantastic opportunities for AI to deliver real-time guidance of sales methodologies as calls unfold, provide suggested answers to questions or competitive intel, and even identify purchase intent to help reps and managers improve forecasting and what opportunities to prioritize.

That said, it all stems from an organization’s willingness to identify opportunities and its propensity to embrace new technologies.

Do you think business leaders need better training and orientation when it comes to working with AI tools like BARD and ChatGPT?

Small business leaders are some of the most skeptical when it comes to AI implementation. Even though employees have started embracing AI, business leaders often lack the budget or have a misunderstanding of the time it takes to get the right software up and running.

Business leaders need to educate themselves on the ROI that AI advancements can deliver so they can develop a better understanding of its risks and limitations and leverage them to benefit their workforce. Once leaders choose the right AI solution for their company’s needs, employee adoption should quickly follow suit.

What is the AI roadmap for sales and customer service in your organization? Please elaborate for our readers.

In April of this year, Dialpad announced plans to roll out a series of 12 major generative AI advancements over the next year. These advancements will transform how companies communicate, collaborate, and sell, and help employees become more indispensable to their organization.

For example, our new Ai Scorecards will help improve an agent’s day-to-day performance with specific AI instructions and constant support around any interaction, and our Coaching Hub will better serve the workforce by discovering which team members need help the most and which skills. Dialpad will also be rolling out Ai Playbooks, which will provide agents, sales professionals, and recruiters with real-time guidance and tracking against predetermined sales processes and questions they are expected to ask, and Ai Recap, which will generate short summaries that capture the main ideas and topics of a conversation and define the call’s outcome, purpose, and action items.

Thank you, Dan! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.