Utilising the powerful capabilities of AI to revolutionise your CRM software strategy
More and more businesses are realising that their competitive advantage lies in creating an engaging customer experience. Easy? Unfortunately, not. But, thanks to more accessible and affordable analytics technology and CRM solutions designed to accommodate it, businesses can gain much better insights into the formation of next-generation customer experiences today than ever before.
Data-driven customer experiences have significantly impacted industries and provided unique competitive advantages to organisations by delivering more personal experiences to customers. By recognising interests and preferences and understanding/predicting sentiment and intent, businesses gain a more in-depth understanding of their customers, thereby, ensuring interactions that lead to higher revenue.
With a wider variety of options available to consumers in the digital world – from competitors to substitute products to new trends – it has become crucial for businesses to predict needs to ensure that they can meet continuously evolving consumer expectations. Data analytics reveal what works and what doesn’t, enabling organisations to focus their efforts where they are needed.
Are CRM Systems/Programs not Enough?
Customer Experience (CX) initiatives up until now have had some limitations. While still serving as the driving force of customer centricity in organisations, CX programs combined with AI are now able to provide insight into customers’ expectations, sentiment, and activities, thereby, really enabling organisations to become customer centric. Any person within the organisation should have a 360-degree view of any customer, and KPIs in areas including case resolution, upselling, and target achievements should be available for use at the right times.
AI is not a one-time product to be deployed. The technology strategy that enables AI-driven insights should be applied as an ongoing part of an organisation’s CRM technology roadmap to transform decision making and drive improved business outcomes.
To ensure that the combination of AI with CRM is meeting objectives, the following capabilities and related metrics need to form part of your CX strategy:
Case resolution and automation
AI can help organisations to automate time-consuming tasks, uncover hidden trends among masses of data, extend and enhance human insight and, thereby, guide sales or case-management personnel to ensure targeted customer engagements. With the correct routing and escalation paths implemented in a CRM system, customer cases can be resolved more quickly and with rapid feedback provided to the client. Organisations can, therefore, use their case resolution data prior to the implementation of AI technologies to measure the effectiveness of their AI roadmap.
Metrics Customisation
The biggest benefit of AI is the ability for the technology to learn and adapt. Machine learning enables you to continuously review data and trends and to adapt your CX metrics accordingly, such as customer conversion and retention rates, to ensure that you achieve the desired outcomes.
User Experience (UX)
To ensure that your AI roadmap comprises the correct goals and actions that will drive your overall objectives, you need to start with that which is at the center of every process and technology within your organisation: people. Responsibilities, goals and actions need to be defined for each group of users within your organisations.
Then AI can be applied to provide insights into those processes and further guide decision making that will promote and enhance customer centricity. An example of this would be customer service response rates. If your goal is to improve response rates, customer query history can be analysed to see which queries can be automated through chatbot technology.
AI allows for businesses to drill and really refine the above-mentioned capabilities and focus their efforts in the correct areas, allowing more consistency and predictability. All touch points with the customers must have a consistent, proactive interaction and ensure the customer has the expected experience. Metrics enable organisations to see whether this is achieved and how CRM and AI can be applied and configured to reach objectives.
Are you ready for data analytics with AI?
CRM software and AI for organisations that want to transform and enable next-generation customer experiences by combining AI with CRM, clean data is a necessity to ensure the technologies can be applied correctly.
Just like CRM, AI is an amazing innovation enabling organisations to reach new levels of automation, efficiency and CX. However, organisations need to have a deep understanding of their clients, combined with clearly defined internal processes and procedures to ensure that the technology will be applied correctly. It’s not just a nice-to-have, but forms part of a technology roadmap that unlocks continuous improvement to cement competitiveness.
