How can AI help us improve human-to-human interactions?

Creating trusted relationships is critical for any business. For our client— a pharmaceutical company who develops novel products tackling chronic conditions in a unique way—the development of trust is fundamental. The sales team need to meet with healthcare professionals, experts in their field, and convince them to listen to new data and ultimately change long entrenched mindsets regarding etiology and therapy. To build this trust, our client has always focused on supporting its sales team to speak to the human, and develop strong relationships with healthcare professionals.

To ensure the sales teams have both the knowledge and the interpersonal skills they need to engage in effective and positive interactions, the company’s L&D team has invested in high quality training with an emphasis on effective communication and negotiation. These key features and personal approach are woven into to all aspects of training; who they employ, how they train, and the techniques they use in training.

More practice, for more people

This focus on outstanding skills development throughout training is working for our client. The business is growing significantly, and with that the sales team is expanding.

The field sales role is complex and challenging. Reps need a combination of interpersonal skill, clinical knowledge and adaptability, along with attuned active listening skills and quick thinking to respond to objections. They have to pass certification to demonstrate their ability to do this before going out to meet healthcare professionals.

So, practice is golden. Providing reps with lots of one-to-one practice time with a trainer was a strong feature of our clients high-quality L&D provision when they were small enough to provide it. But this isn’t easily scalable. Certification failure rates were getting higher as fewer opportunities for practice could be offered. As a growing business, they needed to adjust and work out how to scale up, while maintaining their personal approach and authenticity.

How would they continue to provide outstanding training and enough practice time as they grew?

AI Conversation Coach

Our ‘Conversation Coach’ uses AI to enable people to practice conversations.

This gives reps a safe environment where they can practice navigating conversations as much as they want, with every interaction being different – helping them get better at responding with fluency and confidence in the moment.

The Coach has a number of significant benefits:

It’s realistic.

We train the AI on appropriate clinical and contextual materials for the client, and develop personas representative of the healthcare professionals that reps are likely to meet. Personas are complex characters who have a range of characteristics, trained to show realistic personality behaviours, priorities and concerns, and reps can practice responding to different types of conversations and objections.

The customer persona will provide authentic and appropriate responses.

It’s straightforward.

Easy to access and set up to suit you: It’s hosted within a fully controlled, private and secure Microsoft Azure environment, either embedded within an eLearning module, as part of MS Teams or Sharepoint, or as a stand-alone WebApp.

It’s flexible.

Reps can select a persona, and choose to use the Coach as an audio conversation, or typed.

It’s immediately valuable.

The Coach provides feedback at the end of each interaction, with general and specific pointers on what went well, as well as areas for improvement. They can save and download the feedback (with the option to share with a manager).

(NB feedback can be limited to the human conversation and doesn’t cover product information, avoiding concerns about the possibility of potential inaccuracies in AI feedback, and also reassuring legal and regulatory teams.)

It’s repeatable and non-judgemental.

Reps can use it as many times as they like, building confidence and trying new tactics without fear of feeling awkward in front of their peers and managers. Conversations evolve building on feedback they’ve just been given in previous interactions.

It’s scalable.

It can be used across sales teams, in any region and time zone, allowing much more scalability and flexibility than with face-to-face training.

It’s informative.

Metrics and reports can be added, for L&D teams and/or managers to access via a top-level dashboard, so they can see (for example) who logged in, how many conversations they had, length of conversations, etc. Transcripts can also be made available.

But does it ‘feel’ right to talk to AI?

It might seem surprising, but reps report enjoying the conversations, and particularly having the opportunity to practice as much as they want without fear of mistakes.

Many people dislike person-to-person role play, so there has been a very positive response to providing the chance to practice solo (with the AI!).

But does it work?

Our client has reported a significant impact in pass rate at certification following deployment of the AI conversation coach.

Previously only 50-60% of new hires passed certification first time, now it is 93% and on further investigation it was found that those reps who hadn’t passed had not been interacting with the conversation coach. Reps logged on average 30-45 minutes on the tool (with each conversation being set at ~5-7 mins long).

Our client has received great verbal feedback from reps and managers too.

“I’ve only done two interactions so far and wow – this is fantastic!”

“We could fill up pages of the things we absolutely loved about these personas – this is an amazing tool.”

“Very accurate and actionable feedback.”

“The interaction felt so real!”