What influence does AI have on customer management

Customers expect a personalized customer experience and follow-up communication that is fully tailored to their needs. If companies fail to meet expectations at one or even several touchpoints, the competition is often just a click away. In order to master the flood of data and draw intelligent insights from the information collected, it is therefore becoming increasingly important for companies to invest in CRM systems that integrate artificial intelligence into these toolsets. This is because the data collected comes together in the CRM - from the ERP, the web store and all other external services that are connected to the CRM. As a result, CRM is increasingly developing into a holistic platform for interacting with customers. And with the help of AI, patterns can be derived from the collected data that help to link customer data, improve customer loyalty and expand the business by focusing on the right and profitable measures.

CRM has always been data-driven. While it used to be enough to rely on the "gut feeling" of sales employees, today it is essential to analyze the existing customer data in its entirety and combine it with data from other systems such as web stores or contact networks such as LinkedIn and Co. in order to achieve a true 360° view of each customer and prospective customer. And this is exactly where artificial intelligence comes in. Effective AI can link data from a wide variety of sources, analyze it and derive forecasts from it. This detailed and individual information about the customer or prospective customer makes marketing activities more personalized, which in turn leads to better quality lead generation. Or it can make the sales process more efficient by classifying open sales opportunities according to their probability of closing.

One practical example is the prioritization of leads or sales opportunities. AI-based lead and sales opportunity scoring is used to evaluate CRM data on customers and prospects. This is used to identify patterns and similarities from successfully processed leads or sales opportunities. These are then matched with the open leads and opportunities. In this way, the AI provides marketing and sales staff with predictions as to which of these leads and sales opportunities are most likely to close successfully. 

However, AI not only supports companies in the customer acquisition process, but can also provide useful support in after sales. This is because the new technologies also make it possible to analyze emotions and moods in messages, among other things. This is called sentiment analysis. The service case can now be prioritized based on the sentiment analysis.

Of course, sentiment analysis can not only be used in service, but also offers marketers useful use cases, because in addition to correspondence with the company, posts and reviews in the entire digital universe can also be evaluated, which in turn form a sentiment picture about the company and the products and services in general.

Artificial intelligence marks a turning point in customer management. Repetitive tasks such as data entry, analysis of customer behavior, lead qualification or even answering customer inquiries can be automated with the help of artificial intelligence. This leaves employees with more time for strategic tasks.

In addition, AI enables better personalization of customer interactions by analyzing data to identify individual preferences and behavioral patterns, which in turn lead to tailored offers and recommendations.