Whether the discussion is about consumer products or business analytics, artificial intelligence is two of the significant topics of interest in recent years.
The previous year Gartner announced machine learning as a defining technology that has the potential to score better market shares and pivot the competition in favor of the investors.
This is why the market giants like Google invested from $20 billion to $30 billion to explore the potential of machine learning.
Machine learning may seem too ambitious to a large section of people in business,but the reality is quite far from their perception.
Machine learning has organically integrated itself into the applications of daily use, the span begins from Gmail and goes beyond sales CRM.
Utilizing the potential of machine learning in the field of CRM is a decided fact due to the remarkable possibilities that machine learning brings to the picture. In modern times, enormous amounts of data are collected instantaneously.
The typical examples include feeds of interest on social media, booking rides on Uber and Lyft, watching favorite shows on Netflix,etc. The use of artificial intelligence caters all of these personalized sartorial choices.
Understanding the customer preferences is essential to every business and organization and the most significant aid available to decipher customer choices is CRM. Before proceeding with the topic, let’s take a better look at what CRM means to a business.
The importance of CRM
The digital era revolves around social media marketing, customer relationship management, search engine optimization and every other activity that results in the generation of data.
As the market’s reliance on their digital presence increases, the amount of data continues to magnify. A mechanism that eases the analysis and interpretation of this data is the need of the hour.
There is a monumental task for modern CRM solutions to fulfill. It’s role now exceeds the previous capabilities of studying eye-crossing, traditional spreadsheets.
Nowadays, CRM is a lot more than recording contact details; it is a significant mechanism that speeds up the resolution, provides customized marketing solutions an entire range of facilities that go far beyond the meager pipeline CRM people cheer about usually.
In the absence of machine learning algorithms that automate the tedious tasks, provide analytics about market trends and the continuous changes in consumer patterns, a majority of the more prominent brands would lose the competitive edge that makes them the giant in the industry.
Perhaps this is the precise reason why Gartner predicted that the analytics and business intelligence markets would progress to a whopping $22.8 billion by the year 2020.
The scope of machine learning
The most advantageous feature of every CRM is its employment of machine learning’s predictive analytics abilities. Typically, CRM was focused on the previous and present data to provide an interpretation of consumer data patterns.
However, machine learning today is capable of continually learning to give any feedback in real-time. It takes the previous customer exchanges and recommends areas that require improvement such as sales and engagement for better outcomes.
The impressiveness of machine learning will only grow stronger as it learns about the newer patterns and insights and the data pool grows richer.
A strong example is, the need to search for underlying attitudes or emotions received by customers can be comprehended and filtered through a simple application of machine learning.
A few more feathers in the hat of machine learning include the value-enhancing capability of penetrating unstructured data within free text fields.
It is an achievement that employing machine learning would interpret millions of customer records to provide essential insights in lesser time than making a simple cup of coffee.
It is easy to state with zero doubts that the buzz around machine learning’s astounding potential of becoming the game-changing norm of innovative technology is long overdue.
For it has made gigantic strides in recent years. However, machine learning still has a very long way to go before it completely integrates itself in day to day use and in every, single industry.
Artificial intelligence and its descendant, machine learning are both transforming CRM in many sectors, in a gradual yet definite manner.
The technology employed in machine learning continually improving to guide businesses to better their customer relationship and to maintain and enlarge their market share.
An example of this is the use of chatbots as customer service agents.
How to employ machine learning as CRM?
Let’s take a tiny break here. At this point, a lot of the readers might ask the obvious questions about the cost of using MI- enabled CRM.
Is it a six-digit figure product or a specific team of developers that personally create a CRM?
Both the questions of are no avail. Since the market today already offers numerous options that include the characteristics we have recently discussed.
Because of modern innovation in the field of data analytics and machine learning, these systems keep improving their capabilities each day. To add to the benefits, stiff competition in the current market has worked well in keeping the prices well maintained.
The CRM provides usually tout their recent enhancements to score more clients and develop a better market share.
A few examples of better CRM provides that utilize some semblance of machine learning are SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce and Salesmate.
Conclusion
The critical point to be noted here is that you need to leverage machine learning to understand the needs and patterns of your customers better. Allow the capabilities of machine learning to transform your CRM into a smarter predictive analysis tool.
It is a prudent decision to invest in better CRM technologies today so that your market share expands and remains consistent.
It is your responsibility to ensure whether your CRM provider fulfills the tasks of customer relations along with increasing engagement and overall customer satisfaction.
It is useless to doubt the practical implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the present and future of the world of sales. However, a lot of the people among us fear the potently widespread use of technology due to the sheer amount of job redundancies it can potentially cause.
Machine learning can someday eradicate the basic need of human invention from numerous processes and operations.
No matter which case you support, the modern times urge every business to at least try a few experiments with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and better CRM software to build and re-frame sales strategies.
A lack of participation may lead to a loss of growth in the business endeavor that one had always dreamt of in the past.
About the Author:
Alma Causey is a Freelance writer by day and sports fan by night. She writes about tech education and health related issues.
Live simply, give generously, watch football and a technology lover.
