Artificial Intelligence and Customer Relationship Management – How Does it Help?
Customer relationship management has existed in multiple forms from the beginning of time, ever since there has been a seller and a buyer. However, we have come a long way from the times when there were few buyers and sellers. The proliferation of the internet has quite possibly been one of the biggest triggers of the exponential growth of the commerce function, and with buyers and sellers meeting regularly over the internet, there needed a better way of handling customers and maintaining relationships with them. This is where customer relationship management software, or CRM software, comes in. CRM software allows organizations to organize their CRM business units so that they can handle a large volume of customer interactions easily with minimal effort.
Throughout the various steps that encompass the CRM business function, the CRM software solution acts as a supportive tool, handling mundane activities, automating several important tasks, and allowing the users to intervene only when necessary. While CRM software has also been in existence for more than thirty years, there have been several advancements in CRM technology that have improved the CRM experience for users. Many of these improvements have come in the last twenty years, and CRM solutions have incorporated the latest trends in computing, such as artificial intelligence, into the solution so that users can also enjoy the benefits of the latest trends in computing. Artificial intelligence is the intelligence that machines display, through which they learn and adapt to the tasks at hand.
By embedding the features of artificial intelligence into CRM software, service providers can offer a variety of benefits to users. AI helps reduce the variety of mundane tasks that are a part of CRM and allows users to concentrate on the activities that they can handle best — being face-to-face with the customer and handling their queries, issues, and problems.
Here are some ways in which AI and CRM software can come together to help make the CRM function better:
Auto-Population of Fields:
The customer relationship management function involves the careful maintenance of documents and records. In the absence of a CRM solution, these records have to be maintained manually, but the software will help with the auto-population of fields. Imagine you received a query in an email or received an inquiry about your products through a web form. You want to capture the details of the lead so that you can undertake the steps that need to be done next. In such a case, instead of manually entering the details from the web form or the email, the embedded AI in the CRM software recognizes the fields and the details given against them and auto-populates the records.
What this means is that as soon as you set up your web form or email for lead generation, you will receive all the pertinent details in your CRM solution. This whole chain needs no manual intervention.
Chatbot/Assistants:
We have all seen the wonders of the recent developments in AI with solutions such as ChatGPT, which allow users to perform a wondrous variety of tasks. Imagine the same being adapted to virtual assistants that help with your customer relationship management efforts.
One of the recent developments in CRM has been the inclusion of a chatbot on the home page that allows for immediate conversation between your firm’s representatives and prospective customers. Not only does this allow for the conversation to start, but it also allows your CRM specialists to gather the details of the prospect and record them for later use. If you have AI-embedded CRM software running your chat room, you can use this to your advantage. You need not dedicate multiple resources to your chat rooms; you can use the embedded AI to handle the queries. If you notice the pattern in your prospects’ questions, you can code your chatbot to mimic your employees and conduct a variety of conversations with your employees. Also, with the chatbot being automated, all the conversations are automatically recorded. Even in off hours when your employees are not present to staff the chat room, the automated chatbot will take care of the customer relationship.
Apart from the above, there are many other ways in which AI and CRM software come together to help your firm achieve customer relationship success.
