How AI and Automation Combined with CRM Can Make Customer Management Easy?

Today, customer experience has become essential for a business aspiring for a technological shift, as it has become the core of digital transformation. With the growing demand and need for customer experience, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) should be central to manage the product operations. However, in the past few years AI has obviously played a vital role in CRM iterations but the advancements NLP and ML could help make customer management easier than before.

Below the highlights that exemplify how companies are using AI and other technologies like automation with their CRM platforms to enhance customer management and how companies are transforming the operation.

Saving Time

With the high paced competition around, people lack the patience to go through several clicks and multiple screens to perform any variety of work including the sales team as well.

A recent survey briefing about the top challenges of CRM tools revealed that the highest complaint was the time taken by the system to enter data and keep it up today. Moreover, around 46.5 percent of accepted that this the bigger problem that CRM platforms being expensive. This is because the old-fashioned and heavily designed software is time-consuming and difficult to use which results in outdated data, incomplete data, and unusable data.

To curb the issue, Salesforce came out with the latest iteration of AI, Einstein Search for Sales and Service. This claims to reduce clicks and page loads by 50 to 80 percent for frequently used tasks. Apart from Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 has developed a dashboard that can aid users to understand the number of time users and customers are able to save while employing AI-powered chatbots. Such data could prove to be valuable for companies to optimize customer experience and free resources in order to enhance efficiency at work.

Improving Customer Searches

According to CRM Magazine, more than 90 percent of companies with more than 10 employees using CRM platforms, the jury is still out on how effective they are in discovering the right lead or even break down accurate information into simpler forms. Here, AI could contribute while help keeps data clean, centralized, and easy to find.

Well, there are companies that are making this easier. Oracle's Digital Assistant (for CRM) platform hopes to improve this by employing artificial intelligence to make its customer searches quick and precise. Through the use of NLP, users can search phrases like "open opportunities in Los Angeles" instead of using challenging search terms like +Lead +Open +Non-converted +Los Angeles + California +My name.

Personalization 

A number of examples are prevailing in the market narrating how personalization drives sales and influences sales and customer service. With the use of AI, customer management is embracing personalized intelligence. In some companies, it is possible that contextual data will show up on a call screen before a salesperson answers the phone. This enables them to prioritize calls and talk more personally. They can even divert calls to voicemail if they know the caller is not a lead certainly. The less time wasted, enhances the potential for better monetary and customer management prospects.

However, personalization is not only about knowing customers rather it imbibes the need for knowing customers' preferences regarding company and salespeople overall. Salesforce's Einstein's newest search capabilities enable the users to optimize their preferences for search and on the other hand, AI will improve its ability to return those preferences over time.

Converting Leads into Sales

One of the most important roles of CRM is to convert leads to sales. Through huge amounts of data, AI can help salespeople to analyze which leads are the strongest. Additionally, it helps determine the types of data that implies a solid lead. AI will also guide with what actions one should take to convert that person based on their past actions, and which leads he can convert.

CRM spending across the globe is expected to reach over US$55.2 billion in 2019. Reportedly, Salesforce has around 20 percent of that market share, followed by SAP at least 10 percent. Also, Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe are making significant investments in incorporating AI into their platforms. Microsoft, SAP, and Adobe are even working to develop a common data platform as part of their Open Data Initiative (ODI). This initiative is to streamline how data can be used for AI and analytics across platforms as many companies use more than one CRM/ERP/CEM platform.

Clearly, customer management is about knowing the kind of data to collect about the leads and keeping it up to date to gain insights from it in the fastest way possible. AI and CRMs are a clear partner to make companies look forward to building a more loving relationship with customer management and their customers.

Apart from AI, automation or precisely sales automation is also essential in CRM when it comes to the requirement of handling a huge size of customer database and level of complexity to marketing-related tasks. Here too, Salesforce has software that works as a supporting system to enable salespeople and managers to achieve their work objectives more efficiently. The automation technology helps a business to collect, store, modify, analyze, and transport the sales-related data. It is a kind of strategy used to drive efficiencies in your sales processes.