You want to enhance customer interactions. How can you use technology to automate and streamline the process?

Integrating AI with your CRM system can significantly enhance customer interactions by providing real-time insights and personalized experiences. AI-powered CRMs analyze customer data, including past interactions, purchase history, and preferences, to generate tailored recommendations and predictive insights. This lets you offer proactive support and personalized solutions. It can also automate routine tasks within the CRM, ensuring data integrity and freeing up your time to focus on customer engagement. Additionally, integrating AI-driven sentiment analysis into CRMs helps understand customer emotions, allowing for more empathetic and effective responses.

When choosing a CRM, integration to other systems/tools is imperative. In this day and age, customer related data points must not sit or be stored idly. A data analytics mechanism that produces actionable insights is compulsory.

AI is fantastic, BUT, it is like an intern on steroids. You may give them a bunch of tasks, they might be incredibly efficient, but you wouldn't send them on stage to represent your company at a keynote without checking what it is they would say, first. If you decide to leverage AI, start by setting a frame: these are the topics the AI can cover, anything outside these topics, please refer to a human agent. Once you've done that, train your bot on such topics, test it, push it to its limit and make sure it doesn't hallucinate. Once you are confident it is ready to face customers, launch it to a limited pool of users, monitor it, and make the necessary improvements, before opening it in waves until you feel confident enough.

Some frequently asked questions are good to map into the chatbot flow. Customers need real time responses, sure! But not at the expense of useful information. Beyond a certain point, transfer to a human agent!

There is a rule on Social Media - don't post things on a channel if you are not equipped and willing to respond to your customers on this channel. If you start posting, and customers ask questions and your answer is "please call XXX or email ZZZ", you got it wrong. Social Media is about horizontal communication, not vertical. Also, if you can't handle critics and negative comments, stay out of it, because you will never please everyone, there will be negative comments, and you should be ready for it.

I'm big on analysing solicited and unsolicited feedback. I'm bigger on obtaining actionable insights that drive cross-functional collaboration in solving for customer's needs and preferences. I'm biggest on closing the loop with internal and external stakeholders concerning actions taken, and reporting business impact!!