There aren’t many customer-facing fintechs that don’t already employ some kind of sales enablement technology. Designed to help businesses maximise the value of every customer contact, sales enablement strategies have become integral to corporate success. And as technology has evolved, the potential for extremely sophisticated sales enablement has been achieved. The problem is that this can leave customers at a genuine disadvantage, faced with service operatives empowered to answer their every objection, opening the door to abuse, and raising the serious question of ethics.
The problem of ethics and sales enablement technology in fintech
Finance is an area in which risk is pervasive. One poor decision can change a person’s life. Potentially taking an individual from a place of relative wealth to homelessness almost overnight. And this makes sales enablement tech a very dangerous thing, because while a persuasive sales operative equipped with powerful sales enablement technology could bring massive benefits to a business, they could also encourage ill-thought-out decisions to be made, particularly by the vulnerable.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) research states that 46% of adults display one or more characteristics of vulnerability – including increased stress levels, diminished perspective, or changing attitudes towards risk-taking – at one time or another, and identifying one in four UK adults as having low financial resilience, meaning the risk of causing inadvertent harm is high. It can be really difficult for sales operatives to identify which customers may be struggling at any given point, leaving businesses caught between enhanced performance and compliance.
The good news is that speech AI could provide a solution.
How can speech AI support ethical sales enablement?
Speech technology has been a mandated part of most financial institutions for decades. Historically used to record a random sample group of calls for compliance monitoring and training purposes, it has evolved to deliver real and near real-time analysis of sales calls and video communication, helping businesses in a variety of ways, from compliance to fraud detection. And it has the power to support ethical sales enablement.
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While speech technology enables the recording and analysis of calls, artificial intelligence (AI) can highlight speech features. And it is this that can facilitate the identification of potentially vulnerable customers, and those who may require additional support.
Through the use of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), computers can ‘understand’ human language. Not only what is being said, but why. Picking up the sentiment and intent behind every utterance, this makes it possible for anyone exhibiting any of the signs of potential vulnerability – including speech features such as hesitation, reluctance, vagueness, and disfluencies – to be automatically identified. The sales operative can then be informed that sales enablement strategies should not be deployed and allow a tailored service to be delivered to that individual.
It’s a smart and efficient way to adhere to compliance standards while doing the best for your customers. But the technology can do so much more than that.
The additional business benefits of speech AI
The same technology that enables fintechs to better serve and protect vulnerable customers, can also be used as a sales enablement tool in its own right. Helping businesses to bypass many of the more complex parts of established strategies.
Because speech technology is able to work in real-time, it holds the potential to deliver actionable customer insights, allowing sales operatives to be guided into providing the best service for each individual, without distraction, and without disrupting the flow of the call. It can do this in a variety of ways, not only guiding sales operatives to the best services or products available to meet the customer’s needs but supporting the customer’s preferred conversational style – whether they expect formality or favour a more informal approach, the type of language they are more comfortable using and more likely to respond to. This ensures delivery of the best service at the same time as adhering to all compliance requirements, and achieving the best results.
Sales enablement is increasingly important for all sales-focused businesses but there is no other sector where it is more capable of being misused or causing inadvertent harm than finance. The evolution of speech AI makes it possible to mitigate those risks and as the technology continues to progress, its capabilities and benefits will enhance too.
