Selling a product or service has never been easier. Ironically, it has never been tougher at the same time. Attracting new customers has been a constant challenge, retaining existing ones is a different story altogether. In today’s world, marketing has pushed sellers into doing more than producing and selling a product. While production solves demand and selling differentiates companies from competitors, the concept of marketing has revolutionised the art of satisfying consumers, right from grabbing their attention to convincing them in purchasing their product. But this is not the 1900s where hard selling and other personal skill sets were the ways of carrying it out. This is the 21st century, where the race has got its participants improving themselves every day. With Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the picture, the race got interesting.
The Natural Way of Artificial Intelligence
AI has an integral presence in today’s free-market. Just like humans, it collects, reads and understands the consumer’s behaviour that goes into buying a product. And that’s not all, it understands trends, creates reports and finds room for improvement when it comes to enhancing customer service & satisfaction for existing as well as prospective buyers. Customer Relationship Management, or CRM as we know it, plays a huge role in online consumer interactions, analysis and development for a smoother way of handling customers, their ever-growing needs & wants. With the right kind of planning & strategies, CRM also measures the performance of a company in the market. For multinational companies (MNCs) like Apple, Coca-Cola & Amazon, and their AI backed CRMs are the most efficient software that record, analyse and implement millions of customer interactions. With such massive data, they improve ways to retain already satisfied customers and tap untouched areas that have great potential.
In the early 2000s, the majority of data recorded by companies were unstructured since AI was not integrated enough into CRMs to receive relevant information. Skip to 2021, AI backed CRMs are now able to extract more relevant information through structured data. The software, through machine-learning, form behavioural patterns and inferences that are insightful for the businesses past, present and future performances. Although the data is large in numbers, they create detailed solutions for the company with hardly any errors.
There are few points which explain how AI can be implemented in CRMs and what they can be used for -
1. Sales Call Analysis
The sales department of a company can have AI record calls and messages from customers for further analysis. This narrows down the problems at hand, creates insights and ways of improving future sales and performance.
2. Lead Generation Campaigns
Lead generation software through AI collects data like personal information which is later on compared with previous sales & marketing strategies. These lead to the improvement of customer relationship with better insights for the company
3. Categorisations of Customer Care
Since the Customer Care departments of most companies receive different kinds of enquiries, CRM through AI helps in categorising these enquiries as per their concerned departments which later on is solved either by human interaction or the AI software continues with respect to creating reply templates
4. Natural Language Processing (NLP)
An extremely revolutionising feature for CRM, NLP analyses & interprets human language for the computer’s understanding. It creates entities like chatbots and assistants for better search, insights and recommendations. This eliminates large manual data entry and makes the company-customer relationship an interactive one.
5. Digital Servicing
Certain AI powered CRMs have the ability handling operations without the hands of a human. For common tasks & requests, digital assistants are used in delivering solutions to customers, such as registering new accounts, clearing doubts. When an interaction turns out to be different from the quintessential ones, the AI transfers the chat to a human for a more personalised service, but that is the last resort after the AI has run out of answers.
6. Effective Sales Techniques
AI provides value & creates logical decisions by measuring the leads & engagement by customers. It identifies the different sales behaviours amongst representatives and creates better guidelines for new employees. It also acts as a module to increase data entry in CRMs and the adoption of CRM as a whole.
7. Speech Analytics
Global companies having global customers can’t rely on a particular language when it comes to CRM. People coming from different countries, having different languages and accents must feel comfortable in experiencing seamless services. Which is why AI has the power to learn almost all languages to provide solutions to the customer in his/her preferred language.
8. Self-servicing of Customers
AI backed CRMs to go through their knowledge bank for relevant solutions to common problems. They learn from the previous issues raised and create automated solutions by comparing them with new issues raised. With every new & automated solution, the scope of common issues decreases, leaving complex & specific issues for human representatives.
9. Analysing & Optimising Calling Experiences
AI backed CRMs can analyse speaking patterns, behaviours & other factors to determine the customers’ mood & emotion and in turn, provide guidelines in real-time to representatives for a quick or amicable resolution. The guidelines include - slowing down speech; understand the emotion of the customer; giving the customer more space to explain his/her grief or enquiry. Such calls are also recorded for future references and customer service scoring.
The revolutionary AI
Key AI vendors such as Adobe Sensei, Oracle AI & Salesforce provide highly intelligent software for an ideal customer experience. They chalk out consumer behaviours; provide tailor made experiences; engage customers in sticking with the brand; improvise on better Scope of Work (SoW); predict the Emotional Quotient (EQ) of the customers and act accordingly, even figure out when to send mails and other communications to the targeted demography at convenient timings.
Nothing short of a novel revolution, this has led to better sales, decrease in costs & time wastage, and has taken company-customer relationships to greater extents.
