Employee Story | Ayesha Hande

Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
Francis of Assisi

How true is that?

I believe it’s cent percent true.

Let me just share a quick experience with you, yes a real-life experience to demonstrate how this quote came to life for me.

Just a couple of months ago, I got this exciting opportunity to join a project which would be based on #ConversationalAI.

Not a chatbot that could use some static commands and drive a flow; it was supposed to be a real-time, human-like assistant that would help drive customer queries and decisions in the righteous direction.

The concept and capabilities were drawn, it was just the time to build and execute.

My teammates from the CoreView team were putting every ounce of effort together to bring out that human-like feel, so was I!

Then came a moment, that twisted my flow of thinking and triggered the need for innovation.

When it comes to selling, it’s an art that has multifarious facets such as up-selling, cross-selling, etc.

I was just revolving around the thought that, how can I handle the negation and cross-selling, for the AI program, the sales assistant.

What if the user throws a straight “NO” on the face of the sales assistant when it’s making an effort to cross-sell?

Well, if he says no to vanilla, we can still offer chocolate, butterscotch, strawberry, and what not?

Here’s the breakthrough!

What we did was quite subtle; if a user says no to a cross-selling deal being offered, the sales assistant would try and fetch the latest goods of the same utility or other items that could complement what the user just purchased.

That’s the way the “IMPOSSIBLE” came to life for me.

What has been your experience dealing with the IMPOSSIBLE in your life?