Artificial intelligence has been a fascination with science fiction nerds for many years, and it’s been typified in classic entertainment such as Star Wars, Star Trek, and even the Jetsons. As AI advances and as we explore its practical applications, certainly fear of an impending “Matrix-like” future occupies the minds of many.
Many people understand that AI has moved from an outlandish topic for nerds and science fiction enthusiasts to an approach employed by the few rich and powerful companies who can afford to employ their own team of researchers and scientists. However, what many people fail to realize how accessible AI has become for companies who are like the rest of us.
A small, or mid-sized growing business just looking for competitive advantage that will allow them to offer an improved customer experience, reduce costs, or even improve employee morale. Take a closer look and you may find that in reality …an intuitive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system enhanced with Artificial intelligence will give your employees just what they need and you don’t need to be Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to achieve it!
Leveraging AI, a CRM can:
- Help to inform prospective customers and direct them to the right team so they are quickly engaged and connected to the solution they seek
- Optimize the user experience to cater to place the most frequently needed information at their fingertips during a live customer interaction.
- Help your people to determine the next best action for each customer interaction, based on intelligence gathered from thousands of past communications.
AI through machine-learning is capable of pulling data from traditional sources i.e. customer profiles, sales data etc. and non-traditional sources i.e. social media posts, emails, call center recording etc. Based on data gathered by the system during each customer interaction, the system may be able to accurately anticipate the most relevant information and make it accessible in real-time.
Staying Engaged
Your employees stay engaged with clients focused on their needs and informed by the sum of all the intelligence gathered during the entirety of your organization’s interactions with them. However, it brings refreshing continuity to the customer relationship historically crippled by impersonal communication and inefficiency.
Data Points
AI in CRM continues to grow with some looking to add voice technology to the software next following the popularity of similar systems like Siri and Alexa. AI is also evolving to pull from more data points coming straight from the customer’s device, which will give your employees even more information.
However, Artificial intelligence is only as good as the data sets it can acquire it works by studying the patterns and behaviors that arise from data in order to cut down on manual processing time. As a result, if you don’t set it up with the best data, the AI can’t do its most efficient work. When your CRM’s AI has robust data sources it can drive valuable insights and learning. They will be able to process large amounts of this data quickly becoming increasingly more sophisticated.
CRM Providers
We are seeing different approaches to AI by different CRM providers. For instance, Salesforce is one of the most widely adopted CRM systems in the world have focused their efforts on their own brand of AI, called Einstein. Einstein’s uses algorithm-based learning to determine which emails customers are most drawn towards based on the recommended products they promote. Einstein can also be used to predict the best time to send a piece of marketing.
SugarCRM offers smart solutions such as Sugar Hint. By using just the name and email address of a business or individual enriches your lead, contact, or account record with the latest news insights, address, phone, and a wealth of other helpful information.
This insight eliminates the need for both research and data entry reducing several hours of work to just seconds. Instead, your employees can use that saved time to create productive relationships with customers and leads using the data provided.
Built on Amazon’s robust cloud infrastructure, Sugar plays very nicely with what may be arguably the most complete set of “ready to run” Artificial intelligence-based web services available. See https://aws.amazon.com/ai/
Ways We Are Using AI at MasterSolve
Sentiment Analysis
- Leveraging Amazon’s Comprehend service, Sugar is able to interpret messages and notes and determine with amazing accuracy the sentiment of the communication.
- Allowing us to run analytics and monitor customer satisfaction not just through surveys and customer loyalty, but now through the measurement of sentiment. This allows us to be much more responsive and in tune with customer needs. Demo Here
Chat Bot
- Using Amazon Lex, customers and prospects can interact intelligently over webchat and gain helpful direction and get transferred to a live agent as needed.
- This improves responsiveness, reduces wait times, and improves employee morale by replacing eliminating redundant and repetitive interactions with more meaningful conversations handled by someone with the correct skillset. Demo Here
Value of AI in CRM
CRM is revolutionizing the way businesses make decisions and improving customer experience. It provides insights that enhance the way employees interact with customers. At MasterSolve we believe that AI has made it’s move from C3PO to CRM.
Before the age of AI, many companies viewed CRMs as a technology used to store their data. But a modern CRM system can offer so much more, especially to businesses with high levels of customer engagement. Check out our blog here!
In conclusion, we suggest that when exploring your next CRM solution, consider how it might leverage AI to help your team focus on what they do best. To find out which CRM system may be right for you, reach out to one of our CRM experts below!
