Maintaining fruitful customer relationships has always been the cornerstone of every enterprise’s success story, which is why over 91% of organizations today leverage a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to attain this goal. However, as the world keeps on spinning a web of new technological advancements, such as the much-lured Generative AI (GenAI), it is only usual for enterprises to expect such capabilities in their native CRM and to reap the productivity and efficiency-driven benefits of it. And this is where the trend of Generative AI in CRM emerges.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, generative AI is the successor of artificial intelligence and has been the talk of the town since ChatGPT. Although AI has been a part of CRM for some years, its next generation of GenAI is said to take over redundant tasks, giving you the creative freedom to indulge in some critical and thought-driven strategies or processes.
Here we discuss what generative AI CRM is, the opportunities surrounding CRM and artificial intelligence, and explore more about Salesforce generative AI CRM.
What is generative AI CRM?
To understand the phrase, ‘generative AI CRM’, let’s break it down into two most palpable terms, ‘generative AI’, and ‘CRM’.
Generative AI employs artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to generate text, images, audio, etc. that might seem new; however, it is a summarized version of the existing data without repeating any unique artifact of the original data. Unlike the metaverse, generative AI gained tremendous popularity across industrial verticals owing to its prowess around accelerated content creation, problem-solving, and the ability to produce diverse outputs. The big leap came when early-2023 Microsoft and Salesforce announced the enabling of generative AI to their CRM technologies and other products and services.
Traditional CRMs, predating the GenAI-era, helped businesses in effortlessly managing customer interactions, tracking sales leads, and facilitating marketing campaigns. However, the modern Generative AI CRM integrates the power of GenAI with traditional CRM capabilities to result in a solution that can analyze large customer datasets in mere seconds, provide novel insights, which otherwise would have been overlooked, enable predictive forecasting, and use that information to hyper-personalize customer interactions and experiences.
What are the benefits of Generative AI in CRM?
Undeniably, Generative AI CRM reduces the friction of going from an idea to a first draft, as said by Salesforce. Instead of spending hours on mundane tasks, Generative AI in CRM sifts and scours through the data in seconds, thus boosting productivity, efficiency and driving customer relationships. Other benefits of this CRM artificial intelligence includes:
#1: Creative freedom to take up more high-value tasks
Generative AI CRM frees you from the redundant tasks to focus more on strategic undertakings. Whether it is scouring through the available private and public data to generate actionable insights to eliminate repetitive tasks and speeding up things, generative AI CRM enhances productivity and allows you to concentrate on nurturing client relationships and creating tailor-made solutions. Overall, such CRM artificial intelligence tells you exactly what your prospects desire and customers needs, so that your front-office battalion can create richer client experiences and engage pitches to close more deals faster.
#2: ‘AI you can trust’ as quoted by Salesforce
With the declining acceptance of third-party cookies, it is no wonder that customers are on their toes while sharing their personal information, especially the concerns around how this information will be used. Needless to say, security and privacy will be the key tenants for generative AI CRM and amongst the long-standing guidelines of trusted AI. Although there are some generative AI models that employ publicly available data to generate insights, generative AI CRM utilizes a mix of public and private data while ensuring that the customer data is securely stored in the cloud. This blend makes generative AI CRM a trusted AI solution with optimal data utilization and uncompromised data privacy.
In fact, GenAI in CRM digests and learns from all your customer interactions via emails, phone conversations, meeting transcripts, chat messages, etc., (information that is made available to you by your customers) to gain insights into your customers, summarize past conversations, and details tasks that you must act on.
#3: Deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences
The struggle to deliver hyper-personalized experiences is real for merchants. Even when you have a complete knowledge of your customers, where they are on their buying journey, brands find it challenging to deliver differentiated customer experiences. Generative AI in CRM will sift through opportunities, key exchanges, message feeds, and cases to provide you real-time and contextual insights about each customer. Your front-office staff can use this knowledge to formulate targeted pitches, prepare for meetings, nail down current bottlenecks to repurpose as key talking points, etc. Moreover, generative AI CRM will even recommend follow-up actions with detailed forecasts, further deepening customer trust and relationships.
#4: Practice modern automation
Unlike traditional automation models that focus only on repetitive tasks, modern systems in-built with automation capabilities push these boundaries further. Generative AI CRM systems like Salesforce turn static workflows into dynamic ones, learning along the way. Rather than executing pre-defined actions, this new CRM artificial intelligence identifies potential bottlenecks, suggests process enhancements, and even refines strategies in real-time. With such capabilities, enterprises can not only operate at peak efficiency but even stay agile and focussed towards changing market conditions.
#5: Accomplish the true business value of digital transformation
Achieving digital transformation is easier said than done, especially with ever-evolving technologies and changing market dynamics. Implementing generative AI CRM takes you one step forward towards achieving digital transformation. As it studies datasets, generative AI CRM also generates insights in real-time, forecasts trends, and even suggests tailored strategies and recommendations based on every customer’s behavior, needs, and preferences. This way, enterprises can stay ahead of market changes and customer needs and strengthen their market positioning dynamically.
Use cases of generative AI in CRM
Although the use cases surrounding generative AI in CRM are immense and bountiful, it is imperative for enterprises to explore the right use cases to invest in. Undoubtedly, generative AI when paired with traditional CRM (packed with AI capabilities) will take over the burden of daily mundane operations across departments, enterprises need to prepare a generative AI CRM roadmap that fulfills the guidelines of privacy, trust, security, and ethical usage of data.
That said, the following are some use cases that can be explored in a generative AI CRM platform.
#1: First-party data collection
One of the biggest selling points of a generative AI CRM system is that it marries private and public data to suggest actionable insights without charting across the heated territory of data security and privacy. As people say less and less yes to third-party cookies, it becomes challenging for merchants to obtain customer data from accurate sources and use it for hyper-personalized experiences.
As mentioned above, generative AI CRM employs both private and public data to provide actionable insights. Generative AI when integrated with your CRM helps in auto-populating fields without spending hours in extensive research. Once a company name is entered into a CRM field, generative AI CRM can scour the database to provide details like possible connections, latest company news, number of employees, locations served, primary focus, any challenges or bottlenecks they’re currently facing, draft first email, etc. Such data collection assists sales and service teams to boost operational efficiency by reducing time-to-value, enhancing the productivity of your teams, and recommending the right outreach strategies and next steps.
#2: Personalized customer support to close more queries and effectively answer requests
Generative AI CRM comes in real-handy for your service reps. Such powerful platforms consume data such as email transcripts with the customer, message exchanges, phone conversations, buying behavior, preferences, most-viewed content on the internet, and their entire customer journey to help you improve response times and close more queries. Tools like Salesforce Einstein AI reads the magnanimous datasets to suggest solutions that your customers desire. They can even craft the best reply for you to send to your customers, while making sure that it doesn’t sound bot-ty. Generative AI CRM can even function as knowledge bases for you to analyze customer feedback and improve your sales and service responses.
#3: Automating lead nurturing and qualification
Generative CRM artificial intelligence can be leveraged in lead generation and qualification. For sales, generative AI CRM can help analyze and respond to lead inquiries in a contextual manner, taking into consideration their current requirements, bottlenecks faced, and solutions expected. This way, sales people can engage in hyper-personalized lead interactions, conduct more fruitful conversations, and eventually close more leads. As for marketing, generative AI for CRM helps in strategizing highly personalized lead nurturing campaigns backed by data-driven content, thus boosting conversion rates. Moreover, the integration of such generative AI algorithms to your CRM result in real-time lead behavior analysis to result in more targeted engagement.
As for sales-marketing combined, generative artificial intelligence in CRM can even work for unstructured datasets, suggesting information to enhance lead quality, providing more insights into preferences and expectations to tailor messages and strategies (even generating full-fledged content) accordingly.
#4: Improved predictive intelligence and sales forecasting
Sales and marketing have always struggled with predictive lead generation or forecasting to improve an existing pipeline. The generative algorithms deeply analyze historical data sets and compile them with current market situation and consumer behavior to generate dynamic and predictive sales forecasts. Even small macroeconomic changes are studied by the CRM artificial intelligence tools to generate accurate estimates such as the lead generation numbers or the likelihood of a customer completing a purchase. Such predictive analytics can also be levered for strategic planning, hiring, resource allocation, etc. to maximize ROI and productivity levels.
#5: AI-powered marketing activities
For marketing, there are ample opportunities available with a generative AI CRM. From designing visually appealing and personalized ad campaigns to tailored messages and social media posts, artificial intelligence in the CRM system nails down where exactly the marketing team must direct their efforts and improves all associated strategies. For example, it can create a targeted social media campaign for your eCommerce stores, targeting specific audiences based on their interests, buying behavior, liked products, amount spent in a given timeframe, purchase history, wishlisted products, etc. It helps forecast sales, allocates the right budget to a marketing activity, and even recommends strategies to boost brand loyalty and overall revenue, all in real-time.
#6: Stay agile and adaptable to changing trends
To survive and thrive in today’s dynamic and competitive ecosystem, enterprises need to be watchful towards changing market conditions and evolving customer demands. Generative AI CRM is a great tool to ensure this agility and adaptability. Across departments, generative CRM artificial intelligence automates tasks, reads through detailed transcripts to suggest actionable points, creates engaging content, drafts effective marketing campaigns, provides customer support responses, and assists sales with everything they need to close a deal.
Its algorithms keep on digesting and learning through market trends and customer demands to tailor sales, marketing, service, and other action pathways accordingly, improving adaptability, scalability, and agility in the long run.
#7: Streamlining content creation
Lastly, let’s talk about the much popularized role of generative AI, content creation. Oftentimes, sales, marketing, and service find themselves spending abundant time to draft the perfect pitch, marketing message, or response. Generative AI when embedded in CRM systems helps you break free from it. From scripting an entire contextual email, spearheading marketing outreach ideation, to suggesting a desirable response to a customer query and identifying the patterns which would otherwise be overlooked, generative AI takes away the manual indulgence from your CRM, empowering enterprises with limitless automation, actionable insights, and the ability to accomplishing digital transformation the ‘smart’ way.
Salesforce generative AI CRM: Einstein leads the way
The talks around generative AI technology can’t be concluded without talking about the world's first generative AI CRM, Salesforce Einstein AI. Across, sales, service, marketing, commerce, IT, and more; Salesforce generative AI CRM - Einstein delivers AI-driven powerful capabilities to transform every aspect of customer experiences.
While Salesforce talked about their plans for generative AI technology in-depth during Dreamforce 2023, Einstein AI unites Salesforce proprietary AI models with generative AI to allow the free flow of data once created in any app across other Salesforce applications and third-party systems. With Salesforce Data Cloud embedded to the Einstein AI platform (now called the Einstein 1 Data Cloud) across Salesforce’s metadata framework will result in automation with dynamic data from Data Cloud – real-time data, and data from various different systems to build AI applications, automate data flows, and analyze data at scale.
Here is how Salesforce generative AI CRM - Einstein will look like in action.
- For Sales: Generative AI CRM in sales will enhance lead generation, analyze sales data to predict future trends, and craft personalized messaging. It will even explore the most updated information for a company to improve targeting, draft sales pitches to boost lead conversion rate, and provide you with the latest company news and stats to help prepare for a meeting.
- For Marketing: Generative CRM artificial intelligence will design visually-appealing, personalized ads, and outreach campaigns to target audiences based on their purchase history, browsing, and preferences. It can even build predictive models to forecast buying behavior and create effective campaigns.
- For Service: Salesforce generative AI CRM empowers service reps with details they require while attending to a customer query, even crafting the best reply. This results in improved customer satisfaction, higher number of closed support requests, and boosts brand loyalty.
- For Commerce: From developing more effective pricing strategies and promotional offers to AI-driven product recommendations, higher upselling and cross-selling opportunities, generative AI Salesforce CRM helps you personalize experiences for every customer in real-time.
Going forward with Salesforce generative AI CRM
While there are several other use cases of generative AI in Salesforce, it is well-understood that generative AI CRM is the future. The only thing left for now is to understand how to leverage this technology to improve your enterprise’s KPIs. As world’s #1 CRM technology, Salesforce leads the generative AI tech race and is most preferred by global enterprises across verticals.
While the prospect of implementing Salesforce generative AI CRM is overwhelming, with trusted consultants and a Salesforce Partner by your side, you can soon turn it to reality. As an award-winning Salesforce Crest (Gold) Partner, Ranosys has been following every trend related to generative AI and has been assisting enterprises with adopting, optimizing, and scaling their Salesforce CRM systems. Reach out to us if you wish to discuss generative AI CRM in great detail.