The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has been at the forefront of exceptional customer experience journeys, putting customers at the center of business and managing the ever-changing and evolving customer expectations as well as retaining their trust and loyalty. Furthermore, any company that wants to succeed in business knows focusing on customer satisfaction and investing in CRM technology is necessary.
In the same manner many businesses are evolving by migrating from paper filing cabinets to an intelligent system that allows them to have leads’ information readily available to anyone in the company at any time of the customer’s journey, the CRM system is constantly evolving too, and new trends are coming up that will help businesses connect with customers in a more personalized way—for example, innovating with more intuitive tools, AI-powered CRM platforms, adding more functionalities in a voice and conversational user interface and integrating the CRM software with social media channels.
In this article, we will expand a little more about these new CRM trends expected to come this 2022 and how they would impact customers’ experience as we know it.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) as a key part of CRM systems
No longer part of only science fiction movies, artificial intelligence is now a genuine technology that has been slowly implemented in our day-to-day life. Even though the current AI systems are young and have a limited range of autonomy, the appliances vary, going from personalizing news feeds in social media to fraud detection for financial systems.
Besides these everyday applications of AI today, it is also used for CRM reporting by collecting better data to make quick and better business decisions, segmenting customers easier based on complex criteria, or creating customizable interactions for a better customer experience. However, AI’s role in the CRM world will only get bigger in 2022, and some of the benefits that are expected to come with the growth of AI in CRM are numerous, but the most important to look after are the following:
- Enhanced capabilities of chatbots to enable them to handle more complex queries, driving sales and maximizing out-of-hours sales.
- Making field service more efficient by specifying criteria that would automatically assign the best representative to fix a customer’s problem.
- Using predictive analytics to forecast sales, rank prospects, and predict customer questions or future buying trends by getting unexpectedly valuable data on how customers buy. This will allow your business to better target your campaigns, create the most fitting customer segmentation, and gain valuable insight to prepare your team to approach potential customers.
Voice and conversational user interface.
In this time and age, voice recognition is no longer an uncommon thing. It has become somewhat of a new norm to trust voice assistants to help us complete tasks hands-free. Being at work, at home, or somewhere in between, many of us have used voice recognition technology or voice assistants like Alexa or Siri to multitask and increase productivity. So, it is not surprising that voice technology is becoming an essential part of a company’s CRM strategy and that with the automation of conversational tools such as voice assistants and chatbots, sales reps are finding it easier to understand more deeply what a customer is asking.
We can see some of the functionalities and benefits these conversational tools will bring inside the CRM software, such as:
- It enables users to talk to the software, creating transcripts or recordings that would help your team understand how your customer speaks, tone of voice, be aware of emotions behind specific words, so they can get better data about what your customers really want.
- Make better predictions based on captured data and more meaningful insights.
- Customers can process transactions by telephone using their ‘voiceprint’ instead of passwords.
Social Media integrated with CRM.
The power of social media has grown over the last decade, so much so that it now has more than 3 billion active users connecting and engaging daily. It has grown so powerful that more businesses see the need to implement social media strategies to increase their brand exposure and bring more leads. Due to the continued increase of this trend, it is more than expected that CRM platforms see potential in incorporating social media channels and behavior tracking tools to enable sales teams to stay up to date with customers’ behavior patterns and how they interact with their business in a unique way.
By integrating social media channels with CRM platforms, we can expect some benefits like:
- Getting a more rounded profile of your audience.
- Getting feedback for products and services instantaneously.
- Allowing users to communicate from anywhere with a brand.
- Supporting businesses in gaining more traction for published relevant content.
- Empowering customer support team to provide a better customer experience.
Overall, these new CRM trends coming ahead will not only increase the adoption of CRM technology across enterprises but would also help businesses get a more valuable, more profound, and fresh insight into what the customer really wants, which will enable customer support and sales teams to create tailor-made experiences and get more customer engagement and retention.
If you want to get ahead of the game, keep an eye out for these and future trends coming up that you can implement into your CRM strategy, or connect with one of our experts and learn what other tools can help your Salesforce CRM platform be more in tune with your business needs.