What is Generative CRM — And What Will It Mean for Your Business?

Imagine you’re a sales rep today and you’ve just been assigned a new account. How many hours would it take you to find a company overview, catch up on the latest company news, find the right contacts, or draft an email? Now, picture your customer relationship management (CRM) platform doing all this in seconds, so you can fine-tune that email and send it sooner.

This is the promise of generative CRM, which will combine the power of generative artificial intelligence (AI) with your customer data to make your teams more productive. No wonder 81% of executives worldwide feel the urgency to integrate generative AI into their organisations.

“Generative CRM is the e-bike version of CRM,” said Vala Afshar, Salesforce’s Chief Digital Evangelist. “You could ride traditionally, but why would you ever want to go back to a traditional bike?”

So, what exactly is generative CRM and what will it mean for your business?

The role of generative CRM

Generative AI has sparked a lot of discussion and interest since the public-facing introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022 — using machine learning and algorithms to create content such as text, audio, images, and even code. This technology is poised to reshape CRM across departments, promising to help companies quickly and easily create AI-generated content across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interactions.

For customer service teams, this could mean automating the creation of smarter, more personalised chatbots that can understand, anticipate, and respond to customer issues. In fact, 61% of salespeople globally say generative AI will help them better serve customers. If you’re a marketer, generative CRM can help you quickly generate product descriptions that are accurate, compelling, and optimised for search engines.

What’s generative CRM?

Generative CRM combines the power of generative AI with your customer data to enhance your productivity and efficiency. It can perform countless functions like answering queries, teeing up conversational text, crafting an email, and at the end of the spectrum, it can even help address challenges in human disease and the environment. The more people who use it, the smarter and faster it’ll get.

It can perform those tedious everyday tasks, freeing up your time to focus on more important projects. And because it can scour the internet and find relevant data in seconds, it can help craft better responses. For example, within customer service interactions, it can write knowledge articles based on current and past interactions.

“It really reduces the friction of going from an idea to a first draft,” said Jayesh Govindarajan, Salesforce Senior Vice President of AI and Machine Learning. “That could be writing a document based on six meetings you’ve had. Or it could be summarising several conversation streams to look for one or two insights that you can use to improve your approach.”

How can generative CRM boost productivity, efficiency, and customer relationships?

Every day, we spend hours performing mundane tasks just to get our jobs done. We sift through data and research, bang our heads against the wall trying to come up with a fresh ad for a new social marketing campaign, write and rewrite what we think is the perfect email pitching a prospective client, and scramble to find the right balance in conversations with angry customers. What if you had a tool to streamline all of that, no matter what industry or department you work in?   

With generative CRM tools, such as Einstein Copilot, this will soon be possible. Einstein Copilot is a new generative AI-powered conversational assistant, baked seamlessly into the flow of work to drive significant productivity gains. Here are some of the ways it can boost productivity, efficiency, and customer relationships.

1. Reduce time to value

While AI has been around for some time and Salesforce’s Einstein already delivers more than 200 billion predictions daily, generative AI products are helping people across industries work more efficiently. So how can this affect and help you, especially with building and maintaining customer relationships?

“Ultimately, the superpower of generative AI for CRM is to reduce time to value. The technology will help filter out the noise many of us encounter on the internet”, Afshar said. Generative CRM will be smart enough to know what to search for if you ask it the right questions.

2. Free up humans for high-value work

Say you’re trying to land a great new client. You spend hours going through data to beef up your sales pitch, and it ends up being outdated. You then scour your network and the company’s website trying to find that perfect person to help get your foot in the door, only to find they left the company two weeks earlier. These are all repetitive and mundane tasks you’ve exhausted precious time on instead of building a new relationship.  

“Think about all the typical tasks done in a CRM — a lot of those are repeated and automated,” said David Berthy, Senior Director, Salesforce Futures. “The idea of speeding up these things makes you faster and more productive. Then hopefully it gives you more time to work on building relationships with people you’re selling to.”

3. AI you can trust 

Security and privacy will be key to generative CRM, which will build on long-standing principles for trusted AI with guidelines that specifically address concerns with generative AI.

While some generative AI models rely only on publicly available data, generative CRM will be rooted in secure, private customer data. That’s a key part of what will make the technology impactful for businesses — and also why trust is such a critical issue.

“To work in the enterprise, the technology has to be grounded in the data available in that organisation. Being able to blend public and private data together is what makes this a more trusted, more valuable experience for our customers” Govindarajan said.

What will generative CRM look like in action?

Here are more examples of how generative CRM can be put to use:

1. Service

Generative CRM can create knowledge articles, improve response times, analyse customer feedback, and respond to frequently asked questions. Imagine you’re having a virtual chat with a customer. While they’re messaging you, Einstein is scouring thousands of web pages and data to help craft the best reply. As the agent, you can edit the reply to ensure it sounds like they’re chatting with a person not with a machine, but with a person, which they are.

2. Sales

Generative CRM will be able to enhance lead generation, predict future sales trends, analyse sales data, and create personalised communication. For example, it’ll find the most updated information on a company and can target the appropriate contacts within it. It can then draft an email and give you the latest news, plans, and personnel changes to help you prepare for a meeting.

3. Marketing

Generative CRM can design visually appealing, personalised ads to target specific audiences based on browsing and purchase history, build predictive models to forecast customer buying behaviour, and create influencer campaigns. For example, a new shoe store is opening at your local shopping centre. Generative CRM can design a targeted promotion for social media that describes that area and then target customers most likely to visit that store based on past purchases or their social media posts and comments.

“This is the power of how generative AI will use data to help guide us in real time,” Afshar said. “The ultimate Holy Grail is prescriptive use of analytics, the generative power of a real-time CRM.”

With generative CRM, your workload is streamlined, your capabilities are amplified, and your productivity is taken to new heights. With Einstein Copilot, you can give your teams a trusted advisor right in the flow of work. So, regardless of sector and role, you can speed up every team’s business tasks with AI you can trust.

Ready to take the next step with generative CRM?

For more information on how Salesforce can help you get the most from your AI, see here.