Technology like conversation mining, natural language processing, and generative AI will play the fundamental role of doing the legwork while restoring people’s roles to what they were originally meant to be. Erol Toker, founder and CEO of Truly, examines the future of human-robot collaboration and how AI and robots will improve human relationships.
Ask yourself this – how much time in a given workday are you spending on tasks that move you closer to your goals? Today, customer-facing employees don’t have enough time to connect creatively with people. They’re overloaded with admin work, so no one spends enough time doing what they’re paid to do.
For restaurant workers, SoftBank has come up with one solution: creating robots that can serve tables and clean floors. By dealing with the menial, repetitive tasks, they free up workers’ time to engage with customers, which could lead to 10% bigger checks. Well, businesses should be taking a page out of SoftBank’s playbook.
Just as physical robots are eliminating manual labor, software robots can now take on time-intensive tasks for knowledge workers.Â
See More: A Guide for Introducing Robots in the Workforce
In an ideal future scenario, 100% of employees’ time is spent exploring customer needs, interacting with people, nourishing their creativity, and seeing bigger-picture problems and solutions. Here’s how robotics will help achieve that, much of which is already doable today.
1. AI to Help Automate High-value and Low-value Activities
 It’s true, we already use automation tools at work every day, but what results are they driving? Do they really eliminate menial work altogether, or are they just creating a new type of work downstream?
The problem is that today’s automation tech focuses only on the low-value tasks we hate doing. Sure, we can save time reaching the next 1000 potential customers if we use email blasts, robocalls, and lead scrapers. But because the automation hasn’t been programmed using deep customer and market insight, you’re often left with 1000 unlikely and unhappy “leads†who’ve put you in their Spam folders.
That all leaves employees with the tedious work of sifting through them, filtering out never-clients and following up with a piling amount of (ignored) emails. And the truth is, any human would have known in the first place that 50% of them will never be interested in buying your product. So while they’re saving time on the initial outreach, the flawed process means they’re spending hours on avoidable work.
Instead, we should be automating in ways that are more “human,†thinking less about the low-value activities (which by definition are our least productive) and more about how to scale the BEST work we do – things like researching prospects, matching them to the right value propositions and filtering out bad fit leads.Â
And that’s where AI bots come in – technology is now at the point where robots can perform these “human†like tasks with better accuracy than the average worker, at a small fraction of the cost.
2. Gaining a Human-like Understanding of Your Business at ScaleÂ
We can use robotics to get into the more granular details of how anyone, from users to prospects, are – or aren’t – interacting with you. They can be made to recognize nuances in human-to-human communication that better inform your strategies.
For example, when an account manager has an email exchange with a client, an AI bot can detect if the client is taking longer to respond than usual. But not just that, it can assess the language used in those emails (using Natural Language Processing technology) and detect whether that client’s pain points have changed over time or whether they’re communicating unaddressed issues, even if the AM hasn’t picked up on them. The bot can also generate suggestions for how to pivot and potentially avoid losing the client down the line.Â
You should also cast a wide net across departments to get a fuller picture of clients, prospects and products. If your sales team is finding that too many of their qualified leads aren’t closing the deal, then maybe marketing isn’t accurately conveying what the product does when they bring them in. Or, perhaps the product is too complicated to understand as an outsider, and means good-fit customers are losing interest early on. It all comes back to getting better data to better please the people behind the numbers.
This all takes a lot of programming at first to ensure the AI bots are doing exactly what you need them to – both in terms of gathering and analyzing data and then using that data to create smarter workflows. But armed with that data, you can redefine your strategies and build better customer relationships. You can create different pathways to find leads or bring them to you and give them the information they’re actually looking for. That kind of rethinking around the customer is the high-level work humans should be doing. Then AI bots can be configured to execute a large part of those processes in several ways.
3. Segregating the Kind of Work the Bots Will Be Doing
These bots will essentially step in and take over a portion of an employee’s workday. Now that you have the data to refine the commands these bots are following, you can make them do high-level tasks.
For example, you can configure an AI bot to carry out a sales rep’s step-by-step process for finding leads. First – go on LinkedIn, and filter prospective clients for very specific criteria that you’ve learnt makes them more likely to be interested in you. That can range from their role in the company (in your case, a VP may be more likely to listen to you than a product manager) to what they’ve been posting about recently and what that suggests about the company’s current needs. The bot can then check their valid email addresses and analyze what they talk about online to gauge their tech interests.Â
That bot has just saved someone X hours a week in tasks that don’t take more critical thinking than what you can code into an algorithm.
Similarly, one of our partners used AI communication robotics to field answers to customer queries, leading to an 80% ticket deflection rate (meaning 80% of customer queries didn’t have to reach customer reps in order to be answered).
Far more of these bots can be bought, or made in-house. Many of us are just not aware that the technology exists.
See More:Â Why Companies Should Invest In Robotic Process Automation
4. Employees Can Dedicate their Time to Customers
If bots are doing all these tasks for you – with better accuracy and far greater speed, your employees can divert their hours to strategizing, thinking critically about all the problems surfaced by the data, and solving problems that, for now, AI can’t.
Sales reps, for example, can get back the chunk of their day wasted away in automatable admin tasks and increase the amount of time they spend in customer meetings from a meager 14%Opens a new window to 90% or more. Employees can spend more time talking with customers and make every one of those minutes far more considerate and valuable to both parties.
After undergoing a deep data-driven analysis of my business and how we were bringing in customers, figuring out what our prospects did and didn’t want to spend time speaking to us about, I ended up totally upending my approach to callsOpens a new window . Instead of letting clients speak the majority of the time, I was talking for 60% of the call. Rather than asking open-ended questions, I was asking around 25 close-ended questions per meeting. But because I knew exactly where I was going, our results just kept getting better, increasing pipeline speed by 10% in one quarter.
The strategies that you might land on could be completely different – the important thing is that you’re leveraging the potential of robotics to gather that all-important data and handle less-important tasks so you can actually connect with those customers. Take a step back, sit with that information, rethink, communicate accurately, create, and generate spectacular results.
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