Improve Your CRM with AI, a Marketer’s Best Friend

From better customer service to cleaning up your data, AI can help you get the most out of your CRM.

Typically, the first thing that comes to mind when people think of artificial intelligence (AI), is either Siri or a robotic sci-fi assistant. But AI encompasses so much more, especially for digital marketing. In fact, 81% of marketers currently use or plan to use AI for audience segmentation. And at Havas Helia, we’re no strangers to the benefits of AI, which is a robust part of our strategic data capabilities.

Why is AI so popular?

In today’s market, highly personalized, well-targeted communication is no longer just an expectation, it’s the golden rule. Consumers want to feel understood by big brands and companies, they don’t want (yet another) generic email or digital ad that seemingly has nothing to do with them.

This is where AI comes in. Like a match made in data heaven, AI and CRM work together to create highly personalized consumer experiences.

Five things AI can do for your CRM:

1. Say hello to productivity.

Meet your new virtual assistant. AI can automate small and time-consuming tasks, like managing your calendar or transcribing recordings, allowing you to focus your attention toward creating better solutions. It also automates processes like capturing data and generating customer reports, which would typically require some level of manual input.

AI can also automate follow-ups, like retargeting emails. With AI, quickly convert cart abandoners into purchasers by setting up automated cart abandonment and purchase reminder emails.

Best of all, AI can make customer segmentation a snap, automate your data entry and queries, and get to the nitty-gritty of your customer segments. That’s right, an AI-driven CRM strategy takes consumer data, like demographics and purchasing behaviors, and outputs intelligent audience segments that can drive 1:1 conversations with your consumers.

2. Improve your data integrity.

Clean, accurate data is a no-brainer for effective marketing. Anything less can throw a wrench into the sales pipeline, killing the effectiveness of our content, allowing leads to slip through our fingers, and alienating our audiences.

So what can go wrong with your data? A gradual loss of data, either mechanical or logical, is pretty standard — this is known as data decay. The average data decay rate is about 30% a year, with some industries facing as much as 70%. In addition to data decay, most data sets contain dirty data: a portion that is either inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent, duplicative, contain human errors, or is simply outdated.

Identifying and fixing the portions of your data that are effected can be a cumbersome job, but not for AI. AI is capable of keeping your data squeaky clean without the need for intensive manual labor or monitoring.

3. Give your customers the best customer service.

AI-powered CRMs can help reduce support ticket volume and improve your responses by looking at trends, identifying common issues, and recommending solutions. Also, by analyzing these trends, AI can help set up automatically prescribed steps that allow customers to easily help themselves. Kind of like an FAQ, but better.

You can also start getting a real picture of your customer’s feelings with sentiment analysis. This AI-powered tech determines a customer’s emotional state from voice- or text-based words, tone, and conversation patterns — telling you exactly how satisfied (or not) a customer is with your product in real-time. This emotional recognition can enhance interactions with customers and even avoid escalations.

Lastly, you get ahead of what your customers need. AI-powered CRM platforms continually monitor where customers are in their journey and trigger events for problems or conversions. It’ll get you the info you need — sometimes before you even realize you need it — so you can resolve your customers’ queries at the speed of data.

4. Better manage — and increase — your leads

Leads are good until your team is overwhelmed trying to manually go through them all and you start missing time-sensitive opportunities. An AI-powered CRM helps sift through the clutter and analyze lead generation patterns to effortlessly increase conversions. And since you now know what’s engaging people when you can pair lead generation with web analytics, you can build even more accurate campaigns. Talk about a double whammy.

5. Predict the future with the past

One of our favorite things about AI is that it helps us learn from the past. Set your AI programs to analyze past campaign successes and failures to find patterns — what worked, what didn’t, and what solutions you can use to keep improving.

By learning about your customers’ past, you can determine the future, too! Let your AI study past customer behavior to predict what they will do next, and personalize your communications for those predicted future interactions.

Punch the accelerator.

Having AI in the mix means we can build better relationships with our audiences through highly personalized experiences that accurately match your consumer’s interests. The time of impersonal messaging and wasted ad spend is in the rearview.

If you’re ready to kick your CRM strategy into high gear with AI, email us at hello@havashelia.com.