RESOURCE CENTER

Your Guide to CRM Analytics for Sales and Service

Chapter 3 Power your business decisions with AI

The competitive advantage in all industries will be based on who leads in artificial intelligence to sift through customer data. AI helps automate pattern discovery in customers’ behavior, uncover deep insights, and give teams access to rich predictions and actionable recommendations to ultimately inspire more intelligent decision-making and optimize the end-to-end customer experience.

The increased adoption of AI points to the larger role such technology will play in the future of customer engagement and predictive analytics. Currently, 37% of teams across the U.S. are already using AI in their day-to-day business practices.

We’re already in a business landscape where consumers will switch from brands that don’t anticipate their needs. If AI is the key to anticipating what customers want, it needs to be infused across every human and digital customer touchpoint.

To get started with AI, try automating a few small tasks that your team has found challenging to manually manage. When these repetitive tasks shift from manual to machine, sales and service are streamlined, making it faster and easier for your entire team to proactively anticipate customer needs and create personalized experiences.

How can AI create a seamless sales experience for reps and customers?

AI plays an important role in helping sales teams predict opportunity wins and lead conversions. Those insights give reps the information they need to identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities, increase conversions, and deepen customer relationships.

Sales reps can also use AI predictions to gain better guidance for discounts, increase the probability of closing a deal, and decrease the time it takes to close the deal — not to mention securing repeat business and boosting lifetime customer value.

For sales managers, AI is a powerful tool to improve the accuracy of sales forecasts and deliver predictive analytics that can be used to optimize sales territories, set smarter sales quotas, increase productivity, and better forecast revenue.

How can AI-powered predictions and CRM analytics motivate service agents?

High-performing service teams — those who rate their performance versus the competition and overall service performance as excellent — are 1.5 times more likely to use AI than underperformers — those who rate their performance versus the competition as average or worse.

AI-powered predictions can decrease the likelihood of escalation, lower the risk of churn, and reduce both handling time and time-to-resolution (TTR). In doing so, customer satisfaction is likely to rise and your net promoter score (NPS) can improve.

Investing the time and resources in these solutions now will have a big payoff in the long run for both your teams and your customers. That’s why 71% of service decision-makers are accelerating automation initiatives.

RBC Wealth Management brought 26 different systems into one platform to exceed customer expectations.

When RBC’s advisors prepared for a client meeting, they had to reference up to 26 different systems to access the data they needed. After adding analytics and AI to its CRM platform, RBC managers and executives have easy access to the insights they need. Now they spend less time dealing with internal processes and more time helping existing clients and growing the business.

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Future of CRM analytics

Use AI to get real-time insights that can power personalized customer experiences.

Now that we’ve uncovered the potential for AI to transform your CRM analytics, it’s important to establish realistic expectations. AI will never fully replace humans, for instance, but sales and service teams can certainly benefit from the future of automation to:

Develop a better understanding of your customers and their pain points by using technologies like natural language processing.
Provide in-depth analytics on average handling time (AHT), first call resolution (FCR), and other KPIs.
Sort, process, analyze, and understand customer data in near real time.
Give AI-powered recommendations with sentiment analysis to sales and service teams while they are interacting with customers.

Learn how Salesforce can help you get AI-powered insights to deliver personalized customer experiences.

CRM analytics: the new business imperative

Your CRM can be more than just software when you infuse it with analytics and AI. It can be a powerful tool for sales and service agents to:

Guide behavior and action for more effectual decision-making.
Get a complete view of the customer for better-informed customer interactions.
Reduce the time it takes to look up data in multiple systems by bringing it all together in one place.
Infuse data that is already being collected into workflows.

In the end, your teams can spend less time “swiveling their chair” between systems and views, and more time using AI-powered insights to make the most of every customer engagement.

To learn how Salesforce can help your business implement smarter CRM analytics, visit sfdc.co/crmanalytics.