CRM

Five ways Artificial Intelligence is transforming CRM

While CRM alone is a powerful tool to optimise customer-related business operations, recent developments in AI have enabled even more powerful, insightful and accurate CRM guidance. Businesses can rely on their AI-powered CRM to structure data, handle increasingly complex relationships, and create predictive forecasts.

What is CRM?

CRM is a tool that allows businesses to measure and understand relationships between their brand and customers all the way through their sales cycle. From acquisition to retention, CRM enhances the profitability of each funnel stage by creating stronger, more personal consumer relationships.

Once CRM is fully-integrated into every one of your business processes, including with your legacy tools and systems, it acts as a single source of truth from which all data about customers: purchase history, interaction map, sales funnel, and more— can be accessed.

Studies have shown that not only do 65% of an average company’s sales come from existing customers, but it costs an average 10x more to onboard a new customer than to retain an existing one. By investing more in their customer relationship tools, businesses can still hope to reduce overall costs and increase productivity.

“Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless,”

Jeffrey Gitomer

What is AI?

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is the term used to refer to a certain type of machine learning. Ranging in levels of power- often reflected in the price of the software, AI is a tool businesses and individuals use to collect, understand and analyse data. In certain circumstances, AI refers to the process by which a machine learns and adapts to new situations, but a broader definition encompasses at least one behaviour typically associated with intelligence in humans and animals:

Problem solving
Reasoning
Learning
Planning
Motion
Social intelligence
Creativity
Knowledge representation
Perception

Why is AI so popular?

AI has changed from a luxury to a necessity for business of all sizes across industries. Increasingly complicated interactions with customers across a growing number of touchpoints, each with its own presence, purpose and relationship, has meant the average corporate software tool has had to evolve to keep up. As businesses are required to understand more complex patterns of online behaviour and user journeys, AI has enabled more powerful data cleaning, collection and analysis.

Artificial Intelligence in CRM

The advantages brought about by AI usage in software have made their way into CRM, as users have become accustomed to and trended towards a preference of smarter, more intuitive technology.

Instead of a simple tool to store user data and log communication history, AI in CRM allows the software to analyse data to make live predictions about:

Trends
Customer preferences
Purchasing
Churn
Marketing

These are five ways AI has transformed CRM:

Marketing- Lead qualification

AI is important for marketing teams because it provides insight into marketing-generated leads:

Which marketing activity has generated a particular lead?
Where on the bottom line do most leads come from?
How can marketing resources be better allocated

Insightful AI reduces some of the risk inherent in creative marketing, allowing teams to more confidently run campaigns and generate a higher ROI.

Sales forecasting

Collected by your CRM, customer data remains a useless bunch of numbers until interpreted. AI works with this data to detect patterns that ultimately shine a light on customer preferences, market trends and sales predictions. This allows businesses to plan according to accurate, data-driven forecasts, make sales decisions with confidence, and optimise the sales funnel.

Predictive lead scoring

Based on a combination of data collected from prospects, contacts and accounts, AI assigns each new lead with a “warmth score”. Warmth scoring is a productivity-boosting tool that ranks a prospect on a percentage scale of 1-100 how likely they are to result in a Closed Won status. Based on this score teams can prioritise communication accordingly, assign an importance from Low - Medium - High, and patch time drains on chasing dead leads.

Customer churn reduction

Customer churn is the loss of clients or customers for any given reason, and understanding the reasons why and means by which to prevent this from happening is how businesses both large and small retain sustainable operating levels. AI calculates your churn rate in terms of percentage and lost value across defined periods of time, to forecast future losses or gains. With this information, you can reallocate resources to patch leaks in the CX or launch a relevant refocus campaign.

Data storage

Data needs to be collected, cleaned and understood to be valuable. Implementing AI tools into your data storage software allows businesses to:

Fix incomplete data
Remove duplicate information
Identify stale data in need of updating
Save time drains on manual data sorting and entry

AI converts unstructured data- which accounts for almost 90% of live data- into structured data that can then be shared and used across integrated CRM tools. AI data entry also eliminates risk from human error in data entry.

Optimiser’s CRM with AI Automations

Optimiser’s CRM utilises artificial intelligence to optimise data entry, maintenance and cleaning: saving time for teams to work on customer relationship building strategies. Studies have found that around 87% of sales teams are not completely happy with their CRM tools due to the prevalence of manual data entry and calculations in software that does not utilise AI.

It is important to consider when choosing your CRM, because even if AI software has a higher outgoing IT cost, businesses will often see it has a greater increase in productivity and time spent on value-adding activity.

Pipeline AI

Optimiser’s Pipeline tool uses AI to make predictions about a lead’s journey through the sales funnel. Based on the customer profile and historic company information, AI saves you from manual calculations on your predictive lead scoring, customer segments, and prospect analysis.

Generate live, in-depth reports on key pipelines to understand how your most valuable accounts are faring, monitor communication levels and understand what customers are doing across third party sites.

AI Analytics

Analytics assist businesses in confidently adapting strategies across the business scope from sales and marketing to customer experience and finance. By working with key business data, Optimiser’s AI Analytics create intelligent and accurate reports in the form of clear charts and graphs. Understand your customers’ purchase histories, your sales funnel, marketing campaigns and more, for increased business intelligence that keeps teams on target and future-proofs your decisions.

So if you’d like to see:

Increased sales
Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty
Reduced drains on time and financial resources
Heightened employee activity

Then you can try Optimiser’s full enterprise licence with complete AI tools FREE for 30 days. Find out how much you can grow your business in just one month with AI integrated CRM.

Optimiser is a comprehensive CRM software company, providing businesses a customisable solution to their personal goals for sales, productivity, and growth. Powerful integrated modules include lead management software, a B2B sales toolkit, automated marketing suite and more for sale under a single subscription. Try Optimiser’s CRM software demo with access to the full Enterprise Licence FREE for 30 days, and find out how you can skyrocket productivity in just one month!