How AI-powered CRMs are changing the game and solving the customer relationship challenge
For sales and marketing teams, the residual peaks and troughs of pandemic-era business suggest a challenging future of independent buyers and mounting consumer expectations.
The B2B buyer group is increasingly self-starting. Virtually 100% of tech buyers now want a self-serve experience. The demand for digital sales and marketing is growing in tandem, with younger buyers most likely to use digital channels to engage and to make purchases.
Consumer expectations for self-servicing are higher than ever, led by the standouts of customer experience in each industry.
Sales and marketing priorities have shifted, no longer going all out on growth but instead juggling customer retention and sustained growth. And that puts more pressure on already taxed teams.
In this climate, sales and marketing teams need to be hyperflexible—to interact when, where, and how their customers want. And they need to prioritize personalization, 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 perform at once-unattainable levels of efficiency and growth.
Doing More with Less
At many organizations, the customer relationship challenge is to meet new needs while legacy operations and the costs of changing those operations stand in the way.
But investing in a CRM with AI-enabled automation can shift an organization’s repetitive tasks—composing follow-up emails, scheduling, managing socials—to clear time-sapping jobs from the schedules of employees.
AI-enabled CRMs can eliminate silos by collating 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, satisfying responsibilities, such as building relationships with customers and closing deals.
And this level of intelligent automation can significantly cut costs. With increased efficiency and productivity, growing businesses can hire staff who can think big and spend on automatable tasks.
Real Relationships, Not Robots
AI-powered CRM isn’t all chatbots and no employees. The optimal AI- and automation-powered CRM gives its human workforce the right insights to apply as they believe best suit their customers so sales and marketing teams can offer more engaging, more satisfying experiences.
An AI CRM platform can strengthen relationship management in three ways:
- Automation removes internal friction and accelerates processes among teams and systems, with a customer-facing payoff: connected data and reduced human error help processes go faster.
- By automatically tracking any behavioral changes in customers and prospects, sales and marketing teams can easily understand where each account is along its buyer or customer journey and support it accordingly. AI automation can take that even further, predicting sale probabilities and triggering alerts to notify teams of customers’ needs based on their behavior.
- It can serve the workforce with the optimal combination of insights and time. Beyond consolidating customer information into one database, an AI automation–enriched CRM can take on repetitive tasks like scheduling content or following up on low-priority prospects.
Revolutionary Relationship Management
CRM platforms empowered by AI automation transform the way we work.
A sales and marketing team that can easily access actionable insights can just as easily create custom reports and dashboards and measure operations in real time to drive sustainable growth.
A conversational AI assistant can fetch information and take dictation, providing immediate answers over voice or text chat. Beyond that, AI-powered data mining and machine learning capabilities can yield powerful insights and personalized recommendations.
AI-augmented data can quickly reveal conversion predictions and alert teams to anomalies that might otherwise be harder or take longer to detect, such as drops in new leads or an increase in calls. These capabilities can make a significant impact: a sales and marketing team that once had to wait for reports so it could analyze them to change strategy can instead receive these updates and identify anomalies—and act on them—in real time.
New Efficiencies Without New Disruptions
Sales and marketing teams are under increasing pressure to achieve both great customer retention and sustained growth. Productivity is key to those efforts. But many organizations are already working as productively as they can in their current modes of operation.
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 can gain the bandwidth it needs to accomplish levels of productivity and growth that were until recently unattainable—delighting your customers, leading your sector, and growing your business.
To find out how Zoho CRM can boost your teams’ productivity with intelligent automation, talk to us today.
