How will AI affect CRM in 2020?

We all know how CRM has been instrumental for the companies in the following areas or work,

• Sales Forecasting
• Competition vs. Company Product Movement in a Particular Geography
• Summary of Activities
• Lead Progress
• Revenue Against Each SKU in a Specific Geography

There are a higher number of useful pieces of information for the Management Information System, which you can derive from a CRM. CRM has been dominating the market for the last two decades. Now, when we embark in 2020 and figure out how Artificial Intelligence and Data Science are being practiced everywhere, we see a profound impact on CRM too. Machine Learning is a continuous process to build Artificial Intelligence capability in a system. CRM deals with a massive pool of data and the transactions at the database level are quite extensive. Hence, there lies a vast scope to get to learn from this enormous pool of data every day. Let’s look at some pointers that show where AI adds value addition to a CRM Software.

Analysis Based Dashboard Is Useful

• When you are analyzing your product movement over a forecasted period against the competition.
• When you want to create a sales projection with year-on-year progress or comparison.
• When you want to be predicting sales over a forecasted time.

BOT

• You have a chat assistant in-built with your CRM engine, and whenever you need a specific report or graphical representation, you only need to type in a few keywords, and the report will be in front of you. This capability will reduce much work for the CRM user to create a custom report.

Activity Reminder

• AI will understand just from the account activity status, what type of activity would be suggested as actionable.

Sales Life -Cycle Management

• AI will understand based on individual specific comments on a lead, what closure percentage would be probable. It reduces the work of the CRM user to create sales or opportunity funnel reports and thus providing the same to the management just before the emergency board-room meetings.

Social Media Data Capture

· When you want to absorb the data from Social Media and integrate with the CRM, the AI tool becomes instrumental. It ideally understands which piece of information is vital for the company and hence appends the same in the database.

Related:- Is using Salesforce a necessity for a large CRM company?

Future of CRM in 2020

When we talk about the future of CRM in 2020 and beyond, we emphasize on its data analysis part. Everything is data-driven today, and CRM is based on a lot of data stored in the networked tables to prepare useful reports for an organization. We now talk about intelligent CRM, where you will find additional capabilities. Sales and Marketing teams have started using the CRM to track sales progress, prepare projections, retain the customers, understand the competition, and perform scheduled tasks on time. As this department is mostly on the smart-phones, they use a lot of CRM related functions on the mobile devices itself. Hence, AI capability is also adapted to mobile CRM. AI quickly picks up useful data from the users’ end and trains the system to generate more helpful information for the management.

Key Points

• Nowadays, we talk more about Customer Satisfaction than Customer Experience and CRM is instrumental in the same.
• CRM with Artificial Intelligence focuses more on predictive analysis, forecasting, buying behavior, sales pattern, seasonal reports, etc.
• Fifty-nine percent of customers have the opinion that companies know more about them from past practices or trends of purchase. Machine Learning comes to be instrumental in this, as it understands previous data and creates an analysis based on the learning.
• As AI is becoming more influential in the sales space, sales reps will now be compelled to perform more customer service-oriented tasks.
• Revenue planning, discounting planning, loyalty management, product promotion everything is part of the predictions and forecasts, and you can very well understand how artificial intelligence can play a significant role in these functions.

Business Intelligence and Beyond

When we talk about Artificial Intelligence in CRM, we mainly talk about the Business Analysis part. Analytics, Big Data, Business BI, Machine Learning, and AI are the significant reasons behind today’s successful SaaS-based and data-driven CRM applications.

In customer relationship management, AI will be one of the main reasons behind the arrival of intelligent CRMs and its growth over the next four years. It will be supported heavily by analytics, business intelligence, and machine learning. More customer-experience based inputs will be analyzed to create more customer-centric support services.

Market Research: Latest Trends in CRM Software

Coca-Cola, TeliaSonera, Nestle, and other leading global marketers have already started using Big Data and Predictive Analytics to measure Lifetime Customer Value (LCV), and it is their part of Global Customer Value Analytics initiatives. This capability was brought into CRM through Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence-based functions. Leading global marketers have started using CRM analytics software and Big Data, and these add greater predictive accuracy for their marketing strategies. It gives access to the massive customer data sets they’ve been accumulating over decades of serving customers. This strategy stands to be very useful in improving omni channel and multichannel customer experiences — these two areas are challenging if you don’t take the help of Artificial Intelligence.

In Salesforce CRM, you’ll find the following Artificial Intelligence capabilities:

It will help Salesforce developers to become more predictive in concern with your customers and your business.

Machine learning utilizes previous data to predict what will happen in the future with minimal programming.

Einstein Discovery — It discovers relevant patterns in your data.

Einstein Prediction Builder — It predicts the business outcome, such as churn or lifetime value. It creates custom AI models just with a few clicks and not with the code.

Einstein Next Best Action — It delivers proven recommendations to the employees and the customers. It also defines recommendations and creates action strategies, builds predictive models, displays recommendations, and activates the automation.

Einstein Language — You can understand how customers feel, how they route the inquiries and streamline your work-flows. It provides the natural language processing into your apps to classify the underlying intent and sentiment in a body of text, irrespective of the spoken language.

Einstein BOTS — It quickly builds, trains, and deploys custom bots on digital channels that are connected to the CRM data. It enhances the business processes, empowers SalesForce developers for hire and delights customers all at the same time.

Computer Vision in SalesForce CRM

Through Computer vision, you receive the visual pattern identification and data processing to track your products and brand, recognize text in images, and much more.

Einstein Vision — You can now see the entire conversation about your brand on social media and beyond. You can use intelligent image recognition in your apps by training the system as per deep learning models, and it becomes capable of recognizing your brand, products, and more.

The Near Future

Contextually-aware, more integrated, and intelligent CRM applications and platforms will be more useful for the marketing and sales teams for defining strategies with more precision. It is now able to measure the results achieved by sales teams, which is much more advanced and useful than ever before. CRM will continue to outperform overall enterprise software growth because this Enterprise Information System is directly related to the revenue of the company and the sales team. When you talk about more Customer retention and acquisition these days, AI enablement in the CRM is a must. Hence, the future of CRM is among the brightest in all of the enterprise and cloud-based software.

Related:- Custom and Console Apps in the Salesforce Platform.