The Benefits of Combining Artificial Intelligence with CRM
Let’s get one thing straight: artificial intelligence does not mean that robots will take over the world. For all we know they may one day, but as of right now we don’t have to worry about thousands of Arnold Schwarzenegger death robots terrorizing us.
Instead, we’re left with useful, non-apocalyptic artificial intelligence. For the most part, we see AI in assistants (Siri, Alexa, etc), autonomous vehicles (Tesla), and in predictive analytics (Watson). The whole purpose of AI is to unleash the best capabilities of a machine by “teaching” it how to learn.
If you’ve seen the 1983 movie War Games with Matthew Broderick you might understand this concept at its basic principles. In the movie, Matthew Broderick’s character unknowingly challenges the first “AI” to a game of “Global Thermonuclear War” – pretty terrifying stuff. The only way to get the machine to stop playing the game (which it would have definitely won) is to teach it that there are no-win scenarios, like war. Broderick simulates an infinite amount of tic-tac-toe games to the AI, which are unwinnable, to teach the machine that in war, the only way to win is not to play. This act of training the computer and having it make up it’s own mind, is the same way we train AI today.
What is Voice Activation?
Voice activation has been around for a long time, and it’s the ability to talk to a computer instead of typing. One of the first big players in voice activation was Dragon Speech Recognition, which allowed people to talk into a microphone and their software interpreted your voice and transmitted it to text (hence the term “voice-to-text”).
Today, we use voice activated products all the time. If you’ve ever used Siri, Google Home, Alexa, the voice enabled system in your car, you’ve used voice activated products. In fact, over ⅓ of the US population uses a voice activated product monthly.
A Happy Marriage: AI and CRM
CRMs, or Customer Relationship Management platforms, are extremely powerful when paired with artificial intelligence. From statistics, projections, and the ability to quickly find social media profiles, AI helps salespeople digest mounds of data and navigate through all the noise.
Essentially, AI can analyze terabytes of historical and real-time attributes (demographic data, geographic data, activity data and behavior) to determine a specific outcome, like a customers’ buying readiness. Marrying AI with CRM systems, AI can ultimately analyze wins & losses in sales to detect trends that can inform predictive lead scoring methods.
Voice Activation and saving you time
The major issues with CRMs today is the amount of time spent using them. Data entry is so exhaustive that according to Forbes, “Less than 40% of businesses report a CRM adoption rate in excess of 90%.” On Top of that, 50-80% of CRM implementations ultimately fail to meet expectations because data entry is expensive and time-consuming.
We’re already seeing the amazing benefits to voice activation when it comes to Quality of Life Assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa. The same way Alexa makes your life easier, voice activation tied with your CRM will make you more connected, and significantly more efficient.
What’s working now and where are we going?
Imagine being able to use simple spoken sentences to tell Riley about a client. Then Riley puts all the relevant data in the correct fields in your CRM system and augments that data with all the available social data that client is sharing with the world. All you have to say the next time you see the client is, “Riley tell me the name of that guy I met at my favorite Italian restaurant.”
Searches like – Show me all the Mets fans – Show me all the clients I have who like Formula 1 auto racing – or – Show me the top 10 clients who are most likely to buy today. That’s what’s possible with Riley – as we continue to blend AI and voice we should have more transparency on our network than ever before. And that’s not scary, it’s pretty cool.
