One intelligence is good – a hundred is better. How AI has become an essential component of modern CRM systems

Customers are the main treasure and asset of any company. Therefore, building high-quality and efficient interaction with them is one of the top priorities. That is why a CRM system (customer relationship management system) is considered to be one of the most important tools in any organization. Moreover, artificial intelligence technologies are playing an increasingly important role in CRM.

The market offers many CRM solutions and various modifications of them. However, all of them have the same goal: to help a company turn its target audience into grateful and loyal customers. Who wins in this CRM race? One thing is for sure: the vendors who successfully and properly implement artificial intelligence technologies in their solutions have the best chances.

SMART CRM platform solutions are a great example. Since they are built on the Microsoft Power Platform, you can easily expand their functionality with the help of Copilot using artificial intelligence. This improves the efficiency of most key processes, from customer base segmentation to personalized communication with customers.

AI in CRM: there is no such thing as too much intelligence

AI and machine learning are technologies that are capable of performing tasks that usually require human intelligence. They can either completely replace humans in certain processes or require minimal human involvement. Furthermore, in many cases, artificial intelligence can exceed human capabilities. Therefore, AI is rapidly transforming from a new trend into an urgent necessity among companies seeking to gain a competitive advantage by optimizing their businesses.

AI applications do not just automate business processes in a smart way and take over a significant part of the routine that used to be performed by humans. They are also capable of thinking, learning, evolving, and generating intelligent business recommendations based on large data sets. They can significantly strengthen both customer service and marketing and analytics teams, thus expanding the intellectual potential of any company. By integrating AI technologies into CRM systems, the customer experience can be significantly improved, and potential customers can become loyal customers faster.

No wonder the global AI market is growing impressively fast. While in 2021 it was estimated at USD 59.67 billion, by 2028 it is expected to reach about USD 422.37 billion.

Moreover, it is expected that CRM, as one of the key business tools, will use this technology most actively. If the evolution of interaction with the target audience used to be based on guesswork and attempts to attract customers “by chance,” then AI-based CRM is the pinnacle of this evolution. This is a transition to a meaningful, personalized, and maximally productive dialog with each client.

How exactly does AI improve CRM systems?

Artificial intelligence can significantly improve customer interaction processes. Let’s take a closer look at the contribution of AI to CRM systems and the benefits that businesses get from artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.

One of the obvious advantages of using artificial intelligence in a CRM system is that AI can take over a lot of routine work. For example, if we talk about the SMART CRM system, trivial repetitive operations in the system that consume up to 30% of employees’ working time can be easily automated thanks to the capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform.

These operations include order processing, data entry, newsletter generation, etc. AI-based functionality performs such tasks not only faster than humans but also more accurately, eliminating the possibility of human error. At the same time, employees, instead of drowning in all this routine every day, get the opportunity to focus on more important tasks.

Manual data collection, processing, and entry are gradually becoming a thing of the past. Thanks to AI-based solutions, all these operations can be performed much faster and more reliably with minimal employee involvement.

It is important that artificial intelligence is able to process not only structured but also unstructured data by extracting it from SMS messages, calls, dialogs with chatbots, emails, images, etc. Previously, this had to be done manually. But thanks to AI, unstructured data can not only be collected but also automatically converted into structured data. Further, it can be stored in a unified format and used to train artificial intelligence algorithms.

As companies’ relationships with customers become more complex due to the diversification of communication channels and ways to make purchases, the amount of unstructured information is constantly growing. It may already reach up to 90% of the total amount of data. Therefore, the use of artificial intelligence is becoming vital for organizations.

In addition to data collection, AI also cleans it: it finds duplicated, outdated, erroneous, and incomplete data. It removes duplicates automatically and suggests corrective measures for other inaccuracies. Given that the efficiency of artificial intelligence depends on the completeness and correctness of data, the cleaning function is very important and useful.

AI also helps companies organize customer information more efficiently, using not only demographic data and purchase history but also the aforementioned unstructured data obtained through various interaction channels.

Based on this array of customer information, artificial intelligence is able to find their behavioral patterns, perform more accurate and sophisticated segmentation of the customer base, and create comprehensive customer profiles.

Accurate and detailed segmentation of the customer base allows you to make communication and customer service as personalized as possible. For example, it becomes possible to properly customize email campaigns, send the exact content, and offer the goods or services that the recipient is really interested in.

AI-powered chatbots also communicate with customers based on their comprehensive profile, providing truly relevant answers and significantly reducing the workload of the support team. As a result, quick responses to queries combined with useful answers from the bot significantly increase customer loyalty.

Artificial intelligence can also help support staff provide the most relevant answers and valuable advice, which again contributes to increased customer satisfaction.

Predictive lead scoring is a very useful AI feature that allows you to determine the customer’s readiness to make a purchase based on all the data about them, including their buying behavior. Accurate lead qualification allows you to optimize interaction with them and target marketing efforts more precisely. After all, customers with high and low readiness to buy, as well as those who are hesitant, require different approaches.

The loss of customers, especially a massive one, hurts the business and requires additional efforts and funds to attract new ones. Moreover, the reasons for customer churn often remain unknown. Artificial intelligence can identify these reasons by analyzing patterns in customer behavior. The results of this analysis enable companies to take appropriate measures to reduce churn, retain existing customers, and increase their loyalty.

We have already mentioned chatbots, but they are worth mentioning separately. They are valuable primarily because they significantly relieve the workload of customer service employees. At the same time, thanks to the NLP (natural language processing) function, they are able to communicate with subscribers in the most natural way possible.

Using all the necessary customer data, they can maintain personalized communication and be really useful to the interlocutors. What is very important, they respond to requests instantly, and customers do not have to wait in line, which undoubtedly increases their loyalty and satisfaction with the service.

Integrations with other products to expand CRM capabilities

SMART CRM solutions can be easily enhanced with Microsoft’s Copilot AI-based functionality to expand the system’s capabilities. For example, on the Dynamics 365 platform, AI is used in such a solution as Customer Insights. By the way, it has recently been implemented for the largest premium cosmetics chain, BROCARD, by the SMART business team. This is the first time it has been implemented in the Eastern European region. Another reason why this solution is interesting is that it is able to analyze the tone and content of customer reviews about the company and its products on social media. This allows you to get direct access to the real opinions, real perceptions, and real mood of the target audience, which is very difficult to do through surveys and research.

Another interesting AI-based solution that can complement your CRM is SMART Demand Forecast. It analyzes large amounts of data from both internal and external sources and finds trends and correlations, including those that are not obvious to analysts. Such analysis helps to build a fairly accurate forecast of demand for certain products over a given period of time. It allows you to adjust marketing activities, sales department work, pricing policies, etc.

Artificial intelligence and CRM: easy automation and fast development of AI applications

The combination of AI and a low-code approach allows both developers and employees without deep technical knowledge to easily create applications and automate processes, allowing to expand the CRM functionality. Examples of solutions that allow you to easily integrate AI functionality into your system are the products of the already mentioned Microsoft Power Platform, which is the core of the SMART CRM platform.

For example, the Power Apps solution allows you to easily build professional-level AI applications without any programming using artificial intelligence. Power Automate helps automate routine processes without writing any code. And Power Virtual Agents allows you to quickly create chatbots without manually creating dialogs and scripts.

All this functionality has become even more accessible and convenient thanks to the AI Copilot solution, an updated version of which was launched by Microsoft in March 2023. To use this smart assistant, an employee only needs to describe the product they need in ordinary language. Based on this description, Copilot will independently create a solution, which can then be adjusted by describing it in everyday language. Copilot will even suggest how to improve the created application or bot.

As you can see, the use of AI in CRM can significantly increase the productivity of marketing and sales teams. In addition to speeding up and automating routine tasks, AI solutions can generate business insights that help companies interact with customers more effectively, retaining existing customers by increasing their loyalty and attracting new ones.

If you would like to learn more about how AI technologies can optimize your CRM system, request a consultation with our experts.

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