Cloud computing has changed the face of customer management by providing every SMB’s an opportunity to unify data and communication platform without investing heavily on ‘on-premise’ IT infrastructure and staff. Now it’s the turn of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Those (companies) who adapt AI will remain in the race and those who won’t simply lag behind and eventually might lose in the longer run.
Facets those are Attracting Enterprises towards it
AI along with PA (Predictive Analysis) have potential to make all aspects of CRM better, from sentiment and intent analysis to product recommendation, upselling and lead scoring. Moreover, the ability of AI powered tools to scale the efforts of sales team by gleaning useful patterns of data, finding successful courses of action and taking care of the bulk of the work for addressing customers’ needs and grievances plays a crucial role in managing CRM operations in an efficient way.
The efficient usage of AI and PA teach organizations to do much better job in terms of targeting potential customers and decision makers by calculating which personal and professional attributes holds the maximum value. The potential of creating a system of continuous improvement for sales and marketing teams is somewhat attracting organization towards these technology, since ‘sales is the fuel which keeps the wheels of an organization running.’
Landmark Solutions that are showing Future Direction
Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and Adobe are some of the Industry giants those are investing heavily on AI and even successfully developed many landmark products and service based on AI that have the potential to change the landscape of CRM industry forever. By looking deeper into those products and services one can predict: what kind of road CRM industry is going to traverse in coming times?
Salesforce, the leader of CRM industry has last year developed a ground-breaking product Einstein, an AI assistant which has the ability of continuously process colossal amount of data which Salesforce collect from sales, e-commerce activity, emails, social media streams and others. This powerful assistant help sales representative to focus on the most promising leads based on engagement data analysis and gives advice on when to trigger email campaigns according to customer response history.
SAP, another prominent player of tech space has joins the AI race and added new AI features to its S/4HANA cloud ERP. Its tacked-on features provide automated insights into the business data which the system collects. This includes monitoring accounts, preparing chart of top vendors for an organization based on their past performance, pricing and ability to deliver.
Oracle also shown a great interest in AI and announced a distinguished project known as Adaptive Intelligence. This project will test feasibility of adding series of applications to its cloud suite. These apps have the potential to combine third-party data with real-time analytics to provide optimize decisions and recommendations. For example, AI enable app’s to merges data from the company cloud and the Oracle Data Cloud to extract meaningful insights related to individual customer behaviors and provide personalized offers.
Amelia is a bot that assist customers in resolving their queries using natural language processing. It understands customer’s queries and provides them desired answer based on data gathered from previous interactions and the knowledgebase. Generally, this bot is able to solve 55% of incidents and when it does not have the answers or senses a frustration or hostility, it passes the baton to a human operator.
Economic Impact of AI in CRM
Leading market intelligence firm, IDC (International Data Corporation) has forecasted that AI enabled CRM activities could increase global business revenues by $1.1 trillion and create eight lakh new jobs apart from two million additional indirect and induced jobs. The global market for AI powered CRM is estimated to grow from existing $7.9 billion to $46.3 billion by 2021. This huge revenue boost will lead to increase productivity and lower expenses due to automation.
According to report, the year 2018 will prove to be a landmark year for AI adoption as more than 40% companies are ready to adopt AI in upcoming future (may be within next two year). IDC further estimated that 75% of enterprises will include AI or machine learning functionalities in at least one of their business application. 46% of the AI adopters report that more than 50% of their CRM operations get executed through cloud. Therefore, cloud vendors are expected to lead the race of delivering AI solution to customers.
With all these great advancements, better functionalities and positive economic projections, it would be fair to conclude that AI and PA hold great importance in deciding the future course of action for CRM industry. But only time will tell how deeply these technologies will continue to disrupt not just the CRM sector but other businesses as whole. It will be interesting to watch how this seismic shift toward an intelligent and proactive approach will eventually plays out.
