The AI push to CRM: Why AI is a major driver for next phase of growth in CRM market. Example - Zoho & Salesforce

AI or Artificial Intelligence needs no introduction. Thousands of research articles, blogs, and papers have been published on the productivity gains, cost savings, and efficiencies that AI technologies could bring to the table. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is no alien to the disruption by Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven technologies.

The big technological advancement came in the mid-2000s when the CRM industry witnessed an increasing prominence of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) delivery model led by Salesforce. This led to the development of a new breed of companies offering point solutions which identified and solved a single pain point in the selling cycle, marketing campaign management, or customer service and at the same time integrated their offerings with the existing CRM systems thus allowing companies to extract more value from their existing investments.

The near future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) won't be defined by ushering in a race of sentient machines. While we're inching closer to the goal of AI brain mapping, the next era of AI will be more about imbuing the software and applications we use every day with deep learning, machine learning, predictive analytics and natural language processing (NLP).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the concept of having machines “think like humans” — in other words, perform tasks like reasoning, planning, learning, and understanding language. While no one is expecting parity with human intelligence today or soon, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has big implications for how we live our lives. The brains behind artificial intelligence is a technology called machine learning, which is designed to make our jobs easier and more productive.

Many of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) giant unveiled their different plans for more accessible, natively integrated Artificial Intelligence (AI) for businesses today. Salesforce comes up with the announcement of Salesforce Einstein, its "AI for CRM" technology while the other side Zoho has introduced “Zia - The AI-powered sales assistant for Zoho CRM”. These will be deployed across the cloud CRM as per the company’s offerings to analyze the mountain of automated data the platform collects -- activity data, sales, email, e-commerce and calendar, social data streams and Internet of Things (IoT) data -- and run machine learning and predictive analytics algorithms, NLP and what the industry calls "Smart Data Discovery" to offer data insights and recommendations across different business use cases within the platform.

Summarising and expanding a bit, Artificial Intelligence (AI) in CRM can, among others:

• Help in predicting/seeing where sales revenue and closing potential is most likely; yet in the end, it’s up to a sales rep to judge, for now.
• Help in mining and going through all those actions and activities and messages in the big integrated sales and marketing effort puzzle to detect interesting prospects and opportunities.
• Enhance sales productivity by removing those administrative and repetitive tasks as tackled before. Of course, it’s up to salespeople to stop hiding behind the ‘we have too much to do’ as well.
• Help closes the gap between marketing and sales, certainly in lead scoring. This isn’t necessarily a benefit of AI but it does come as a requirement if you want to use one of those larger AI solutions for sales and marketing where integration in many areas is key.
• Increase overall sales ‘intelligence’ and insights by not just going through all kinds of customer-oriented actions and activities but also getting faster insights in trends that will lead to market opportunities.

Salesforce lists out three of the most-valuable and most-used outcomes will be predictive scoring, forecasting, and recommendations.

• Predictive Scoring — When Einstein gives you a score, it will also give you insight into how it was arrived at. For example, predictive lead scoring gives each sale lead a score representing the likelihood it will convert into an opportunity. You also get the reasons behind the score — for instance, the lead source, the industry, or some other factor is an especially strong indicator that a lead will or won’t convert.
• Forecasting — The predictive capabilities of AI aren’t limited to scoring; they can also be used to predict the future value of something, like a stock portfolio or a real estate investment. If you’re a sales manager, AI can predict your quarterly bookings and let you know ahead of time whether your team is on track to meet its quota.
• Recommendations — Anyone who shops online knows that AI makes suggestions for retail purchases, but it can also make smart recommendations for any other product or service category from business software to tax consulting to cargo containers. And AI can also recommend things other than products — for instance, which white paper you should email a prospect to optimise your chance to close a deal.

Zoho has introduced Zia as AI-powered sales assistant helps make the most of your Zoho CRM account, turning sales into an easy with smart experience.

• Trend Analysis – Trend analysis makes your pipeline healthy by carefully examining the activities that go into making a sale, in the form of intuitive reports and dashboards. These analytics show a timeline of how your business is expected to grow, compared to what you're doing. Know if you're doing better, or worse than expected and get an in-depth view of how each activity affects your sales.
• Anomaly Detection – Once Zia learns the trends in your sales process, she detects anomalies. Anomalies occur when your business is underperforming, or surpassing expectations. Zia pinpoints these irregularities, letting you decide to cut your losses or build on the growth. Zia alerts the right salesperson involved, so they can address the issues that directly deal with their own performance.
• SalesSignals – The last thing Zia wants you to do is waste time with making multiple calls and emails that go unanswered. With access to your SalesSignals, such as notifications that prospects and customers have opened and replied to your emails, participated in your surveys, or on social media, Zia suggests the right time to contact each customer in your database. Cut down on the time it takes to follow-up with customers, and ultimately reduce the time it takes to convert a lead or close a sale.
• Macro Suggestion – Salespeople perform certain tasks, a few times a week, that can be automated; some reps don't know how or don't want to take the trouble of doing it. Zia learns these patterns and makes Macro suggestions to make automation faster and easier. These suggestions bypass the steps it usually takes to automate tasks. Every suggestion is personal to each user to make their CRM experience an intelligent process.
• Blueprint – For larger organisations, making everyone follow the same sales process without constant monitoring is where the biggest challenge lies. Blueprint in Zoho CRM helps build and execute sales processes from within CRM. This ensures compliance from the entire team, making the process both systematic and repeatable.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in CRM is just a tip of the iceberg. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology strengthens, CRM which is ripe for disruption is going to be the biggest beneficiary moving from being a system of records to a really helpful tool helping organisations become more efficient and productive.