CRM Strategy: Are You Ready For AI?

Business are now realising more and more that having a competitive edge lies in building an engaging customer experience. Sounds relatively easy right? Well, unfortunately it’s not. However, thankfully we now have more affordable and accessible CRM solutions and analytics technologies. These technologies are designed to allow businesses to gain a better insight into the formation of customer experiences.

Customer experiences that are data-driven have impacted industries significantly, providing a unique advantage to businesses by allowing them to deliver personal experiences to their customer base. So how do they do it? By understanding and recognizing interests/preferences and predicting intent and sentiment, an organisation can reach an in-depth understanding of their customers. This will help to ensure that interactions bring in more revenue.

Consumers have so many more options available in this current world, so it has become vital for organisations to be able to predict needs to make sure that their business and product can meet constantly changing expectations. With the help of data analytics, organisations can now see what work and what doesn’t, allowing them to focus their energy and efforts on areas that will be fruitful.

Why CRM systems are no longer enough

There have been limitations with Customer Experience strategies up to now. Still the driving force of customer centricity in businesses, these Customer Experience strategies need to be combined with Artificial Intelligence to provide insight into customer sentiment, activities, and expectations. Only once these two tools are used in conjuncture will businesses truly be enabled to become customer centric. All employees should have any time access to a 360-degree view of customers and existing KPIs in areas such as upselling, target achievement, and case resolution.

Deploying AI is not a one-time thing. AI-driven insights is a strategy that should be viewed as an ongoing part of an organisation’s CRM technology roadmap to change decision making and bolster improved outcomes for the business.

Making sure that the AI and CRM partnership is meeting objectives, these capabilities and metrics need to form your Customer Experience strategy:

Metrics Customisation:

AI’s biggest benefit is the ability for it to adapt and learn. Machine learning is what allows businesses to review data and trends continuously and adapt their Customer Experience metrics accordingly. It can have an impact on everything from retention rates to customer conversion.

Case automation and resolution:

Artificial Intelligence is able to help businesses automate tasks that are very time consuming, extend human insights and uncover trends that may be hidden amongst masses of information. Therefore, sales employees can be guided to make sure that customer engagement is targeted.

The right escalation paths and routing can resolve customer cases faster, with quicker feedback provided to consumers, if implemented in a CRM system. Companies can therefore take their case resolution data before implementing AI technologies and measure the effectives of their AI strategy.

User Experience (UX):

To make sure that the AI roadmap is able to focus on goals and actions that bolster overall objectives, companies need to begin with an element that lies at the centre of every process and technology and those are people. Each group within the business needs to have goals, actions and responsibilities defined. Once that is done, AI can be applied to provide insight into processes and guide decision making. This will help promote and enhance customer centricity.

It’s clear that AI will allow businesses to really refine and promote the previously mentioned capabilities and target their efforts in the correct areas. This in turn will allow for more predictability and consistency. Every single contact with customers must consistently lead to proactive interactions that make sure each one has the same experience. Each metric will allow organisations to see if their goals are achieved and how AI and CRM can be configured and used to reach objectives.

Is your business ready for data analytics and AI?

Businesses that want to transform and enable next-gen customer experiences by combining their CRM and AI need clean data. This is an absolute must to make sure that strategies and technologies are applied correctly.

AI, like CRM is a fantastic innovation that enable businesses to reach new levels of efficiency, Customer Experience and automation. To achieve this however, organisations need to have a deep understanding of their customers, coupled with clearly defined internal procedures and processes to make sure that the technology is used and working as it should. AI is no longer a nice-to-have, but an intrinsic part of any businesses’ technology roadmap that will unlock continuous improvement to give an edge against other competitors.

What do you think about AI and CRM Strategy? Let us know!

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