5 Reasons to Make Artificial Intelligence Your CRM's Partner in Crime

1. Your very own virtual assistant (that won't ask a million questions).

Customer Relationship Management with AI capabilities will enable your employees to become more productive and efficient. It can help them manage calendars, schedule meetings, make phone calls, take notes, do follow-ups and assist them in every routine manual task.

Basically, we're taking all the annoying, administrative duties that debilitate workflows and removing them from the table. Then we're taking what we removed from the table and liberating those tasks from human error.

Examples

• Listening and note-making tools capture all the discussions during your sales meetings. You don't have to fret over missing any crucial point.

• Call analytics software from CRM Salesforce records calls and meetings, gathers transcripts, captures time-stamped notes and even highlights references to topics or phrases of specific interest.

• AI-based calendar management tools set up the meetings automatically and also manage the calendars.

2. Segmenting customers and taking names.

AI-driven CRM can help you become more granular in your customer segmentation approach. With the help of intelligent algorithms, you can segment customers effortlessly on the basis of demographics, purchasing behaviour, likes and dislikes.

You can study the past data on customer behaviour and predict their future behaviour to provide personalized engagement messages or experiences. The more targeted your marketing and outreach becomes, the more leads you'll be able to nail down.

Examples

• Utilizing big data to target a particular set of potential customers instead of a large, broadly defined group.

• Automated segmentation engine that can create detailed segments and execute targeted campaigns from a single data hub.

3. Simplify lead management.

It is quite likely that sales reps may not follow up on a lead because either they forgot or are overburdened with work. It happens (all the time….).

If the volume of leads is higher, it becomes manually challenging to sift through all of them. Having said that, every lost opportunity is lost business. You can't ignore leads, especially the qualified ones. When we combine artificial intelligence and CRM tech, we get a lead-gen powerhouse. This unstoppable duo lets us increase out outputs without comprising quality of interaction, revolutionizing the way we engage, nurture, and qualify and follow-up with leads.

AI is the sealant in our pipeline, patching up all the leaks we lost qualified leads to in the past.

Examples

• AI tools replicate sales agents, acting as the first point of engagement between a lead and organization through emails or SMS messaging. Once the lead is qualified, a sales rep takes it over to close.

• Search tools generate leads from various mediums whenever a prospective customer shows a buying intention.

• Predictive analysis that prioritizes accounts and contacts based on their probability to engage and purchase. This helps sales reps to focus on the best and most qualified leads first while building a better pipeline fast.

4. Enhance Customer Engagement and Retention

AI-enabled CRM software can create tailor-made experiences and interactions by determining their emotional state of mind through their text-based or voice-based words, tone and conversation pattern.

This technology can even do a sentiment analysis and image recognition technology to understand customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction with your product in real-time. When you get this insightful data, you can take identify potential problems quickly and take action to respond to customers.

AI and CRM integrations can track data from all customer interaction touchpoints and give you an accurate forecast of their behaviour and intentions.

Examples

• Parse through online feedback or review submitted by customers and determines their general tone.

• Predict caller intent, increase case resolution speed and lower the escalation cases through speech analytics.

5. Close more, lose less.

AI-based CRM can study different sales scenarios where the deals were rejected and closed. They provide useful insights and make intelligent recommendations during various stages of sales funnel to advise sales reps on the next best course of action to close the deal.

It can also help them to identify which buyer has the true intent to buy and speed up the sales cycle, determining instances which had both positive and negative impact on the pipeline to manage the next pipeline more efficiently.

A Harvard Business Review article titled 'How AI is Changing Sales' states that AI algorithms can influence five core areas of sales – price optimization, forecasting, upselling & cross-selling, lead scoring and performance management.

If you bring AI and Customer Relationship Management software together, it can provide comprehensive information on all these parameters and result in a higher number of closes.

Examples

• AI Salesforce gives smart suggestions, elaborate insights and forecasts so sales reps can incorporate these elements into lead management, quotes and sales pitch.

• AI-driven software puts similar products in a group, optimizes local list prices from sales companies/dealers/distributors, and also considers discount offers, incentives and payment terms to arrive at dynamic and optimized pricing.

Both artificial intelligence and CRM systems are here to stay and play a pivotal role in the way we function. A marriage between both of them is the best way to improve the sales intelligence and boost revenue.