With all of the stories and reports in the news about AI, it may feel like AI is everywhere. In fact, as of 2023, more than 80% of global companies have reported adopting AI to improve their business operations. This means that if your company is not yet using AI to build your relationships with customers, you are at risk of getting left behind. The good news is that your Salesforce CRM already has a lot of AI tools built into it, ready for you to use. In this article, we will take a look at how you can use the combination of quality data, AI and your Salesforce to start building more meaningful and longer-lasting relationships with your customers.
How Does Salesforce Use AI?
You can use various functionalities that are built into Salesforce to create customizable, predictive, and generative AI experiences to fit all your business needs. One of the biggest AI tools you can use is Agentforce, which allows you to build and customize autonomous AI agents. If you have a lot of jobs that need to be done on a regular basis and not enough people or staff to do them, then this can be just the tool you are looking for. For example, if you do not have an in-house customer support agent, you can use Agentforce to create an AI service agent to deflect incoming support cases by responding intuitively and in a conversational manner. Not enough sales reps? No problem! You can create an AI sales agent that will comb through records and contact leads, respond to their questions, and schedule meetings.
Another huge functionality you can use is generative AI in Salesforce. According to a survey by KPMG, 77% percent of executives believe that generative AI will have a bigger impact on broader society in the next three to five years than any other emerging technology. So, how can you use generative AI to improve your business? Well, Saleforce uses tools like xGen, an in-house LLM designed for generative text applications, to learn, understand, and generate human-like text. You can also use it to generate original visual content based on existing data or user input, which could be used for creating new fashion designs or even producing synthesized realistic human faces. Developers can use this capability to improve user experiences by automating the creation of visual assets for applications, resulting in dynamic and personalized imagery and compelling visuals.
Generative AI can also change the way your users interact with and consume data. Complex data can now be presented in user-friendly formats generated from natural language prompts. These formats include visualizations, charts, and graphs highlighting all the hidden insights and patterns in the data. As a result, any user can easily comprehend the findings and, in turn, teach others.
How Can You Use AI to Improve Customer Relationships?
AI will completely change business models, the way we work, and how customers interact with companies. The combination of quality data, AI and Salesforce itself can help you connect with customers in new ways. Here are some of the ways you can start leveraging your data, along with AI and Salesforce to become an intellligent customer company.
- Offer the “Wow” factor: Salesforce, powered by AI, allows you to analyze vast amounts of customer data to understand individual preferences and deliver customized experiences on a large scale. This can allow you to deliver the “Wow” factor to your customers at every interaction. Salesforce offers AI functionalities built into the Data Cloud product to help you analyze all customer records across various applications, like Sales, Marketing, and Service Clouds to identify commonalities in the data to identify individuals that exist in various systems and bring that data together into a single customer profile. This information will allow you to connect with customers in new ways that feel personalized to each individual.
- Make Customer Centric Decisions: While companies nowadays have more data than ever before, they often use that data to assess the health of their business, instead of focusing on the health of each customer relationship. Rather than looking at what’s good for your business today, Salesforce AI can help you get recommendations on how to improve your customer relationships over the long term. Consider a customer who contacts your support team about an issue with a product you offer. In Sales Cloud, you can manually input text of the conversation, and AI will provide resources and suggestions to resolve the customer’s issue by using the transcription – automatically in real-time. You can also use data from Tableau to see user satisfaction rates and other metrics to make personalized decisions to improve the experience of every customer.
- Streamline Sales Workflow: Imagine one of your sales reps gets an issue from a customer and to get an answer, the sales rep may need to open the account in Salesforce, or review some documentation, or reach out to another SME for help. All of this does not allow your sales reps to focus on other tasks that require their attention, which can result in customers feeling like they are being left behind. Task switching and using multiple applications allows for many opportunities for customers to fall through the cracks. This is where AI in Salesforce can offer a lot of value. It can help you automate many repetitive and manual tasks such as data entry, appointment management, and report generation.
Challenges You May Encounter on Your AI Journey
Despite the many benefits, integrating and adopting Salesforce Einstein may present challenges. Organizations must consider factors such as existing technology stacks, data readiness, user training, and change management strategies to ensure a successful rollout:
- Data Readiness: For Einstein to provide accurate insights, high-quality data is vital. Ensuring that data is clean, well-structured, and up-to-date is an essential prerequisite for leveraging Einstein’s capabilities effectively.
- User Training: Providing comprehensive training to users is key to successful adoption. Salesforce Einstein requires teams to feel comfortable using AI-driven recommendations and insights in their daily workflow.
- Change Management: Integrating AI into existing processes may require a cultural shift within an organization. A change management strategy that addresses this shift is crucial for successful adoption.
- Continuous Learning: AI technologies are continuously evolving. Organizations must prioritize ongoing learning to stay current with new features and functionalities and continue to derive value from their Salesforce Einstein investment.
Importance of Data Quality When Using AI Analytics
Data quality is crucial in artificial intelligence because it directly impacts AI models’ performance, accuracy, and reliability. High-quality data enables your Salesforce to make better predictions and produce more reliable outcomes, fostering trust and confidence among users and customers. Ensuring data quality also means addressing biases present in the data, which is essential to avoid perpetuating and amplifying these biases in AI-generated outputs. This helps to minimize unfair treatment of specific groups or individuals. Remember, the old adage of “garbage in, garbage out” very much applies to your Salesforce data. This means you need to think of the following important data quality factors:
- Accuracy: This is the degree to which data correctly represents the real-world events or objects it is intended to describe, like destinations on a map corresponding to real physical locations or more commonly, erroneous data in a spreadsheet.
- Duplicate Data: If you have duplicate records, AI tools in Salesforce will not be able to provide you an accurate analysis of your data. For example, if you are looking to create a report of your sales activity, duplicate data will cause you to have inflated forecasts.
- Consistency: Data consistency means that the data stored in a data storage environment is accurate and consistent. This guarantees that all users accessing the data (concurrent or not) get the same data version, thus avoiding conflicting data.
- Completeness: Data completeness refers to the extent to which a dataset contains all the expected and required information without any omissions This means that there will or won’t be any missing values or gaps in the data.
- Timeliness: Data freshness plays a significant role in AI performance. Outdated data may not reflect the current environment or trends, resulting in irrelevant or misleading outputs.
- Relevance: Data relevance is about how much data fits what an organization needs or what a specific use case needs. This data is relevant and directly contributes to reaching desired outcomes and provides valuable insights for making decisions and solutions.
Artificial intelligence can not only strengthen relationships with customers, but also enrich your data condition using methods of data validation and cleansing. Most of the tools and techniques used to clean data are slow and require knowledge about data exploration, handling anomolies, filtering data and other skills. However, data cleaning could be facilitated, eased, and accelerated by the use of AI. With centralized clean data, your teams are able to work better and more efficiently, making data driven decisions. It is the use of a subset of AI known as machine learning that is frequently the most used in data cleaning projects. The more data that goes into these systems, the smarter they become, which makes them more reliable.
The Future of CRM: AI-Driven Customer Engagement and Business Growth
The integration of AI into Salesforce is revolutionizing customer relationships by offering businesses the ability to engage with customers more intelligently and effectively. AI is helping automate repetitive tasks, enhance decision-making, and make way for more personalized communication, predictive analytics and so much more to deliver better—and often more seamless—customer experiences. And with AI-driven innovations continuing to move forward, businesses that engage with this technology will not only build stronger customer relationships but also help you get a competitive advantage. The future of CRM is here and it’s smarter, faster, and more customer focused than ever.
