AIA®
Augmented Intelligence Assistants
With Augmented Intelligence Assistants (AIA®) you can transform your sales force into an agile, intelligent and efficient Sales 4.0 team. Time-consuming organizational challenges that take time away from individual customer care are a thing of the past. Optimize your internal coordination processes as well as communication with your customers. Guide your customers through a customer-centric customer journey.
AIA® extends the CAS Merlin CPQ product landscape with intelligent assistants that support sales teams in achieving the perfect configuration for the end customer. On the other hand, they make communication and corresponding workflows around the sales process more efficient. As augmented intelligence assistants, they do not make their own decisions, but expand the knowledge of the users. Our CPQ + AIA® solution helps you to digitalize your sales and also perfect your entire sales and quotation process along the customer journey – data-based, agile and customer-specific.
Highlights of AIA®
Increasing efficiency in sales
Intelligent recommendations
Tips and recommendations simplify workflows during configurationFocus on customer requirements
Customer criteria are jointly weighted and transferred 1:1 to the configurationOptimized workflows
Improved communication and faster internal coordination with customers and colleaguesSuccess with Augmented Intelligence
The digital customer journey with AIA®
With the help of intelligent assistants, you can optimize the individual customer journey of your end customers. Thanks to the smart functions, your sales team can be relieved of repetitive tasks. There is more time for individual customer requirements, which means you can develop new leads into satisfied customers. All of this means a significant increase in sales efficiency.
With the help of Customer CPQ, the customer finds the right product
The online configurator guides the end customer through your product landscape and supports them in finding the right product from the entire product range. The end customer enters their requirements for the product in the respective desired variant and sends a product inquiry to your sales department. Consequently the whole process is significantly accelerated, starting with the support from your sales department, the sales process itself and finally the resulting offer to the end customer.
The sales department configures a technical solution
As soon as your sales department has received the customer inquiry including the desired requirements, your team adds technical details in consultation with the potential customer and optimizes the desired configuration with the help of Guided Selling. AIA® provides support here, for example, by drawing on empirical values from previous configuration solutions: By asking which variants have been put together for similar requirements in the past? Which products are high runners and which are low runners? How often has a particular variant been sold?
Independent of your sales teams’ own decisions based on experience and expertise, the assistants enrich their knowledge by providing additional key information. For example, the sales team gets a preview of feature combinations with pricing and sales figures. Based on the preview, the team can make transparent, informed decisions and find the ideal solution for your end customer.
Analysis of the solution space & individual optimization
In a personal sales meeting, you establish the end customer's core requirements and rank them in terms of their weighting to the customer (for instance the criteria of sustainability, price and delivery time). With the help of AIA® and the CPQ software, your sales department determines the possible solution space. Optimization is possible under several, individually selectable aspects, whereby the sales representative does not need to have precise knowledge of the perfect combinations of features – instead they receive a recommendation for optimally matching variants.
The intelligent assistants support the sales department in precisely recording the complexity of the product variants. A quotation document is created and sent as a digital quote in the form of a link to the customer or colleagues. Since all employees have access to the data, no knowledge silos are created among individual experts according to the principle of the single source of truth, and customer requests can be implemented optimally by the entire team.
Live interaction between the sales department and the customer
In the next step, you and your customer work together to find a quick and customized solution for the end customer. The potential customer can add notes in the form of comments in the Digital Quote and is thus actively involved in the process. Direct feedback in the digital quote also saves a great deal of time, in terms of sales workflows are optimized and internal processes are accelerated and made more efficient. Using the Sales CPQ interface, the sales department can use AIA® to specify the status of the configuration and define who is responsible for the next step. If, for example, the sales team wants to grant a greater discount or obtain approval for technical feasibility, they no longer need to make lengthy arrangements. Instead, they can request approval digitally via direct input fields.
Thus, the responsible person is notified in case they have to issue a separate discount approval and, if necessary, you can inform the engineering department if a configuration has to be checked. This results in a flowing, transparent end-to-end process in which all relevant internal and external stakeholders are digitally involved. Once the configuration has been successfully completed, the CPQ + AIA® software automatically transfers the data to the desired third-party systems and ensures it is available for further processing.
Augmented Intelligence Assistants
Functions and advantages in detail
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