Artificial Intelligence as the ideal partner for your CRM

We have always heard that a company’s first objective is to gain profit. Well, that usually means they have a good product to offer and a strong customer relationship. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps us fulfil our daily tasks such as customer liaison, improving team productivity, and keeping customers’ information organised. But there are always improvements that can be made, namely to combine the CRM system with the power of Artificial Intelligence. That is what we are going to talk about in this article: how to bring both components together and get the best out of it for your business. In a nutshell, how to combine Artificial Intelligence and CRM and get the best out of both worlds.

We will discuss Marketing; Sales; Customer Support; Field Service. So let’s get started!

As we all know, the goal of the marketing team is to generate and strengthen relationships with leads in our business, in order to feed the commercial teams with potential future customers. Nowadays, marketing solutions already allow a high level of autonomy and automation, however, by adding artificial intelligence, we are further increasing the capabilities of the system such as:

• Improving content classification, by having artificial intelligence automatically assign tags to the content in question, and thus deliver the best content to our leads;
• Improving the communication provided to potential customers, using chatbots so that they identify the persona associated with the lead and thus provide a better user experience of our channels;
• Improving the lead score models, using existing patterns in the system data and in the AI algorithm itself, in order to pass the leads with the highest probability of conversion onto the commercial teams;
• Recommending the most suitable products/services for each lead, according to their interaction history and persona. This will increase the probability of closing a deal.

Sales teams will also be able to take advantage of the artificial intelligence features of CRM solutions to increase the likelihood of closing opportunities. Some examples of this are:

• Improving the forecast predictability by allowing AI algorithms to evaluate the company’s data history and deliver more reliable results. This way, teams can focus on their work and know how they are doing pursuing their goals;
• The assignment of scores to opportunities, indicating to the sales team which opportunities they should focus on in order to close deals more effectively;
• The advice that the platform suggests so that those responsible for the opportunities can work on them more effectively. These tips are provided by rules defined by organizations, reminding them of actions that would help close deals.

It is not possible to talk about CRM platforms without talking about the customer support component, where the whole relationship is managed, from post-sales assistance to the clarification of doubts about products/services/company. In this scope, artificial intelligence will play a key role in:

• Answering more effectively to customers, through chatbots, which identify the needs of stakeholders and respond accordingly. This allows the time spent by service teams can be reduced so that they can focus on more critical tasks;
• Analyse customer sensitivity, through text analysis, understanding whether they are more or less pleased with what they are talking about and allowing the agent responsible for the ticket or chatbot to act in the best way possible to resolve the situation and have the customer satisfied;
• Interpret problems reported through images, such as damaged products, in order to reduce the analysis and response times of requests, improving SLA times and customer satisfaction.

As the last topic was chosen, we have on-site teams, which are no less important than the others, and where artificial intelligence proves to be absolutely key. Some of the advantages that companies can take advantage of with these technologies, concerning on-site teams are:

• Improved efficiency by prioritising tasks to be carried out, so that teams can respond to the most critical issues as soon as possible;
• Automation and better performance in allocating resources, according to the skills and experience required, thus providing a better service to customers;
• Obtaining more efficient routes in order to avoid unnecessary wear and costs, through route optimisation algorithms, combining the needs of service and their locations.

In summary, although CRM systems already allow a great improvement in the performance of teams/companies, adding artificial intelligence allows:

• Further improved productivity
• Greater team autonomy
• Better predictability of results
• Optimization of human resources and routes
• Better customer relations and satisfaction

Although we have only looked at four areas, AI is spreading across all modules of these platforms, such as eCommerce and Portals, among others, but these topics will be explored in another article.