Looking forward to the year 2020, we realize that artificial intelligence is not just another popular technology, but becoming a way of life for businesses all across the world. Especially when it comes to customer relationship management, there is nothing better than artificial intelligence and machine learning that is helping businesses keep up with the pace of change of market trends along with customer demands. Organizations all across the world are readily jumping onto the idea of AI for running several of their core organizational processes.
Be it sales, product, customer service or innovation, artificial intelligence is officially taking over the world of business and changing it for the good. Looking at the pace of things in the market today, it is easy to spot a cyclic cause and effect reaction. Understand it this way- because we have new technologies like AI causing an impact in the world today, the market is changing and increasing customer expectations. And as the market is experience a shift due to rapidly changing customer demands, the adoption of artificial intelligence is becoming evident.
Why AI in CRM?
The point is that all the innovative forward leaps in the world today are seeming normal, as it should be, which is why organizations are reluctant to utilize artificial intelligence wherever they find an opportunity. If one had to pen down the key to excelling in business in today’s world, it would all come down to gaining a comprehensive and detailed perspective of the customer along with the different departments of the organization. Believe it or not but most organizations these days are following this route towards becoming successful.
Companies today have been swept off by the wave of digitization. They are under a pressing need to establish their presence on multiple digital platforms just because their customers are there. And if they miss that opportunity, the customer’s attention is bound to be held by other organizations more aggressively catering to their needs. Even retail companies being swept off by the wave of omnichannel.
Therefore, as many digital platforms as the brand established its presence, the more data is it accumulating, Customers interact with businesses in all sorts of ways. While some might shop retail, others might just visit the store and buy the actual products online. Similarly, while some may contact the customer service over the call, others might just head to the chat support option on the website.
Manage Customer and Staff
All of these generate a plethora of data, which becomes essential for a business to analyze if they want to cater to the needs of the customer effectively. Then the question of managing your staff or customer representatives effectively comes. Obviously, you can’t go on hiring people just because all of your representatives are occupied at the moment. Organizations have budget and resource constraints that must be realized and based upon which strategies must be formulated.
AI and ML- They Key to Business Success and Customer Value
A customer relationship management or CRM tool helps organizations at least see all their scattered multi-channel data on one platform. This helps organizations in many ways. On one hand, it helps them see the unseen, while on the other hand, leaves it to them to derive al that they can from this available data. Even though CRMs can show you insights and plot chats for you using data analytics, their potential seems limited. The underlying question still remains how to drive decisions with all the customer data at hand?
Coca Cola
That’s where artificial intelligence and machine learning come into the picture. Take the company Coca Cola as an example. The company has more than 100 million Facebook fans, 35 million Twitter followers, and a plethora of self-service soft drink fountains among other customer assets. It gathers data from all these sources to find insights and relevant customer behaviors. Believe it or not, but it is only because of this, that the company was able to develop the new taste Cherry Sprite.
Royal Bank of Scotland
Similarly, there’s Royal Bank of Scotland launched Luvo, a natural language processing robot that could reply and answer the questions of the customers. To everyone’s surprise, it could even perform simple banking transactions. Only the requests that Luvo isn’t able to handle are passed onto the customer service representatives.
Infosys
In yet another case, Infosys demonstrated the effectiveness of AI and ML in CRM for the healthcare industry. It is widely known that due to technological changes the healthcare industry is right now going through a paradigm shift in its operations. But, instead of backing out of it, Infosys responded to the ongoing changes with Infosys Analytics Healthcare Solution which helped industry professionals unlock large datasets, track health trends, provide advanced clinical effective practices, enhance patient satisfaction, provide operational effectiveness to healthcare providers and ultimately boost administrative performance.
Alabama Cares
An initiative by the State of Alabama, the Alabama Care foundation in the US is designed to help family caregivers, elderly and senior citizens. Established in the year 2000, it is a part of the National Family Caregiver Support Program and provides timely assistance, information, counseling, and many other services. But, the organization is not utilizing artificial intelligence to deploy infrastructure solutions and other tools to provide better and efficient care. Its integrated solution for instant care utilizes Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365 for the government. At the same time, it also uses Microsoft Azure for testing and development.
Conclusion
From the above scenario, we understand that managing customer relationships is not just beneficial for growing your organization and driving your revenue goals. But, it is also responsible for helping the customer receive value or instant care solutions in the healthcare industry. Therefore, organizations must try to keep up with these practices, and harness AI and ML for the betterment of services. Even if they are not capable of completely constructing AI from scratch, they can utilize CRMs like Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services with already inbuilt AI features.
