Conversational AI Usage in the CRM Applications – CRM Software Blog

Author: congruentX

Listening to your customers is the best thing your business can do to scale up. It is human nature that they want to be listened to and seek a response to any queries and/or issues they may be facing. Customers expect a response from any product or service provider they deal with. Faster and more relevant the response, the greater the chances of building trust and relationships. Even when human interaction is not possible, they are looking for customized solutions to their needs from chatbots. In fact, the majority of customers these days prefer using bots even for simple tasks where they need help. Why using the traditional chatbot is not enough? Traditional chatbots leverage natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) and can simulate human conversation with certain limitations. They are mainly designed to help customers navigate the business website as they are keyword focused. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI), on the other hand, can recognize speech and text and is more aware of the context and intent in addition to NLP and NLU. In fact, it can act as a voice assistant by using automatic speech recognition (ASR), advanced dialog management, and natural language generation (NLG) to provide customers with a more predictive and personalized humanoid experience. Also, conversational AI has added features for consistency, scalability, and integration. How does conversational AI work? Though AI produces a fast response, many steps are involved in the process:

• When a customer provides data to AI application, through either text or voice input, the AI application understands spoken words and translates them to text using ASR.
• Using NLU, the AI app deciphers the meaning of the text
• Dialog management and NLG help to formulate a response to this text.
• This response is either delivered as text or speech using text-to-speech (TTS).
• Machine learning (ML) accepts corrections and makes the AI app learn from each experience.

This process helps conversational AI produce more accurate responses in the future. Customer FAQs are very helpful in creating conversational AI. They provide intelligent insights into what the customers will most likely be looking for. The customer support team can help with these questions, their variations, and their solutions to create a database. These need to be taught so that AI tools can recognize them, and the AI app can answer these questions and free up the support team to focus on other major issues. Advantages of Conversational AI Cost-effectiveness: For any size business, a conversational AI tool is a cost-effective tool that reduces the costs of setting up an entire customer service department by dealing with common customer questions 24×7. This saves money spent on the salary, onboarding, and training of support staff and only a little support staff can be used for critical issues. Customer engagement: As customers get a quick and relevant solution, their satisfaction levels rise. This increases sales as the chances of purchase of products/ services rise. Scalability: Conversational AI provides you with options to deal with seasonal spikes in demand and saves money when you move to new territories as you scale your business. Why conversational AI should be a part of your CRM strategy? Though a customer relationship management (CRM) software tool streamlines and automates the marketing and sales operations of your business, a conversational AI chatbot can further enhance your CRM strategy. Here are the ways in which a conversational AI chatbot will augment the CRM activities of your business. By providing a seamless customer experience As conversational AI chatbots respond to customer queries very quickly and aptly in a way very close to human interactions. These conversational AI chatbots can use customer data and details of interactions available in the CRM to personalize the conversations further. By linking these chatbots to social media, the conversations become more customized as they “remember” previous conversations and can flawlessly verify the customers to enhance their experience. While routine and easy queries are impeccably dealt with by the conversational AI chatbots, the more difficult and unique inquiries can be forwarded to customer support team staff. This helps the customers avoid prolonged phone queues for help if their query can be resolved by the AI bot. This ensures that the customers will return to the business as they are delighted with the services. By effectively acting as the sales staff A conversational AI chatbot integrated with the CRM software can be an effective tool for your sales team as well as does the role of an extra salesperson in case of staff shortage. An AI chatbot that mimics human interaction and has a name, title and email address can be introduced to the customers as a part of the sales team when they shop online. As these chatbots don’t have subjective preferences, they can guide the customer more effectively and impartially according to their preferences. Customers trust their suggestions more than the options suggested by humans as their output is unbiased. By making the CRM smarter, intuitive, and insightful As the amount of data in the CRM increases, it becomes difficult to keep track of all the information through various tabs and screens during a sales process. It not only takes much of the time of the salesperson but may also confuse them. This is where integration with an AI chatbot can be handy as it brings in a single chat window where the customer types the message and AI captures information from the system in an easy and efficient manner. Moreover, it seamlessly records the conversation and parses important workflows to organize complicated tasks and follow up on vital activities. This also helps the sales representatives in time management. To conclude Integrating conversational AI chatbots into your CRM strategy is an effective way to offer a seamless and enjoyable experience to your customers. It scales your business by making your CRM smart and helping your customer support staff and sales staff gain more time for handling trivial customer issues and closing sales.

We can help you achieve this with Viva Sales with DialoguePrime for conversation intelligence. Set up a call with congruentX.   It only takes a 20-minute call to learn more.