How AI-powered CRMs are changing the game and solving the customer relationship challenge
For sales and marketing teams, the remaining peaks and troughs of pandemic-era business suggest a challenging future for independent buyers and rising consumer expectations.
The B2B buyer group is increasingly self-starting. Almost 100% of today’s technology buyers want a self-service experience. The need for digital marketing and sales is increasing, with younger buyers likely to use digital channels to engage and to purchase.
Consumer expectations for self-service are higher than ever, led by customer experience standouts in every industry.
Sales and marketing priorities have changed, no longer all development but instead juggling customer retention and continued growth. And that puts more pressure on already taxed teams.
In this climate, sales and marketing teams must be hyperflexible—to interact when, where, and what their customers want. And they need to prioritize personalizing, tailoring experiences to meet rising expectations.
By automating tasks and providing real-time data, with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered automation supporting a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, these teams can create an opportunity -unattainable levels of efficiency and growth.
Doing More Little
In many organizations, the challenge of customer relations is meeting new needs while legacy operations and the costs of changing operations are holding back.
But investing in a CRM with AI-enabled automation can shift an organization’s repetitive tasks — composing follow-up emails, scheduling, managing social — to clean up jobs that take time away from employees’ schedules.
AI-enabled CRMs can eliminate silos by gathering data from multiple sources to offer sales and marketing teams. actionable, data-driven guidance.
When teams can offload menial tasks, they can regain the autonomy to work on value-adding, fulfilling responsibilities, such as building relationships with customers and closing deals.
And this level of intelligent automation can reduce costs. With increased efficiency and productivity, growing businesses can hire staff who can think big and capitalize on automatable tasks.
Real Relationships, Not Robots
AI-powered CRM is not all chatbots and no employees. The best AI- and automation-powered CRM gives the people who work in it the right insights to use as they believe is most appropriate for their customers so that sales and marketing teams can deliver more attractive, more satisfying experiences.
An AI CRM platform can strengthen relationship management in three ways:
- Automation removes internal friction and streamlines processes in teams and systems, with a customer-facing payoff: connected data and reduced human assistance processes faster.
- By automatically tracking any changes in the behavior of customers and prospects, sales and marketing teams can quickly understand where each account is in the buyer or customer journey and support them accordingly. AI automation can take that even further, predicting sales possibilities and triggering alerts to inform teams of customers’ needs based on their behavior.
- It can serve workers with the best combination of insights and time. Besides consolidating customer information into a single database, AI automation-enriched CRM can perform repetitive tasks such as scheduling content or following up on low-priority prospects.
Revolutionary Relationship Management
CRM platforms powered by AI automation are changing the way we work.
A sales and marketing team with easy access to actionable insights can quickly create custom reports and dashboards and measure operations in real time to drive growth. .
A AI conversational assistant get information and dictate, give an immediate response via voice or text chat. On top of that, AI-powered data mining and machine learning capabilities can provide powerful insights and personalized recommendations.
AI-enhanced data can quickly reveal conversion predictions and alert teams to anomalies that may be harder or longer to detect, such as a drop in new leads or increase in calls. These capabilities can make a significant impact: a sales and marketing team that previously had to wait for reports so that it could analyze them to change the strategy can instead receive these updates and identify anomalies- and act on it—in real time.
New Efficiencies Without New Disruptions
Sales and marketing teams are under increasing pressure to achieve good customer retention and continued growth. Productivity is the key to these efforts. But many organizations are already working as productively as possible with their current operational methods.
To serve customers and prospects better than your competitors can, it’s time to change the game. With AI automation integrated into a CRM platform to connect sales and marketing, data and customers, your organization will gain the bandwidth it needs to achieve levels of productivity and growth that are up to now unattainable—delighting your customers, leading your sector, and growing your business.
To learn how Zoho CRM can improve the productivity of your teams with intelligent automation, talk to us today.
