How businesses can harness the power of AI to nurture customer relationships.
Disruption over these last few years has forced many UK businesses to rethink every aspect of their organization. Customers have also had to adapt to the uncertainty, leading to rising expectations for new products, better prices, and more personalized customer service.
To meet these expectations, businesses are turning to enterprise systems and cloud services that can provide flexibility, resilience and security. Modern cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, are designed to enable continuous change and ensure customers are supported in order to enable future growth.
With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), managing customer relationships and supporting employees has become a more straightforward and data-driven process. AI-powered cloud CRM solutions can help businesses generate sales faster by automating time-consuming tasks that help front-office professionals target, engage, and serve buyers more precisely.
Embracing technology for a solid foundation
Many businesses now rely on virtual interactions instead of meeting face-to-face. A modern, integrated cloud CRM solution supports teamwork and collaboration in this largely virtual space. It replicates the cohesion that sales, customer service, field service, and marketing teams experienced when they were physically together, providing a one-stop-shop for the latest information.
By connecting data in a cloud CRM system, employees have access to vital customer information remotely and at the click of a button. They have what they need to make informed decisions around sales, service, delivery dates, pricing, marketing expansion, new products, sales territory alignment, and more. But most importantly, having access to this information helps build accurate, customer profiles, to fully understand who their customers are.
A good CRM solution goes beyond providing a centralized place for customer information. It can also help improve profitability.
Boosting employee productivity with AI
Creating personalized customer experiences can take more time and resources than many businesses have to spare. Business leaders are struggling to fill traditional customer service roles, and many are turning to automation, digital assistants, and AI-powered technology to help meet customer needs.
With AI capabilities embedded into leading cloud CRM solutions, businesses have the tools to boost the productivity of their workforce. These capabilities empower professionals in marketing, sales, and other service roles to automate many of the repetitive, low-value and time-consuming tasks. Instead, they can focus on the more strategic tasks that drive growth and elevate how their customers interact with the brand.
What’s more, adopting these AI services shouldn’t require massive disruption to the day-to-day business operations. For instance, with Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX), AI capabilities are built-in and can be updated each quarter, so customers simply determine which features they are ready to use and can turn them on as they go. There’s no need to invest heavily in technical training or tuning new models.
Generative AI capabilities to achieve better business outcomes
As customers expect high-quality service and quick solutions to any challenges that arise, each business interaction must be personalised and informed.
With large volumes of inbound customer requests, the generative AI capabilities embedded in cloud CRM systems can help provide quick and helpful customer support. For instance, automatically creating contextually aware responses to a customer question by using previous interaction history to draft a response that is then reviewed and edited before it’s delivered. Customers benefit from faster response times and service agents can focus on responding to the more complex scenarios.
Summarizing information and creating knowledge-based content can also take a lot of time from service and marketing teams. This is often useful information that many in the business use to support existing customers or engage new buyers. Generative AI can develop new content, such as quickly writing emails and newsletters for an upcoming event or drafting a standard set of procedures for complex medical scenarios.
A final example is creating schedules for field service technicians that work remotely. AI capabilities can automatically recommend relevant jobs by considering the technicians’ availability, location, skills, billing status, and more. This can help improve overall customer satisfaction. Jobs are recommended to the technician based on factors such as the estimated job duration and travel time, so customer needs are met quickly and technicians are fulfilled throughout the day.
Towards a new era of CRM
Service resources have always been finite for organizations. However, at a time when leaders must achieve more with less, businesses need to be as savvy with their employee resources as they are with their technology.
Business leaders must be able to predict, plan, and proactively activate whichever services they can. This is exactly where a cloud CRM solution brings value: offering improved efficiency, a boost to productivity, and the latest technological advancements, including AI and generative AI.
By Guy Armstrong
www.oracle.com
Guy Armstrong is SVP of Applications, Oracle UK and Ireland. Oracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud.