How AI-based tools in the next generation of CRM systems can now unlock intelligent, actionable insights that can help users to really understand and react to their customers.
3. Outline
How AI-based tools in the next generation of CRM
systems can now unlock intelligent, actionable
insights that can help users to really understand and
react to their customers.
info@flexrm.co.uk Stand: 1532
Hello, I’m Mark Lloyd and this is my colleague, Jason Daraz.
We both work for FlexRM, a consultancy specialising exclusively in Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions.
Our team of Microsoft CRM specialists boast a collective 50 years+ of experience, spanning 100’s of projects.
Between Jason and myself, we’ve been building CRM solutions for over 25 years and we’re both really excited about the developments in this area and the new tools that we will soon have at our disposal, to help organisations get closer to their customers than ever before.
On that note, we’re going to take a quick look at some of those new developments – focusing on the new wave of AI-based tools that are starting to appear.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Well, that’s a question that could easily fill this seminar in its own right but the short version is that AI often refers to systems that are able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as:
Visual perception
Speech recognition
Decision making
Or, more broadly, Artificial intelligence is the ability of a computer or machine to think and learn
Up to now, CRM systems have mostly harnessed Artificial Intelligence to add automation to Customer Service with AI driven chatbots, which can answer customer’s enquiries cheaply, quickly and consistently.
The best systems seamlessly pass on harder enquiries to an actual human operator and learn from their responses, improving their intelligence and decreasing the need for future human intervention. In many instances, they can answer fact based questions faster than a human can, and customers may not even realise they are not talking to a human.
However, this is often not the case for conversations. In such scenarios I suspect many Customer’s are getting savvy to the use of these chatbots, and may resent them , seeing them as a barrier or obstacle to speaking to an actual human being to get assistance. If not applied judiciously, then, AI could damage or hinder the building Customer relationships.
But in other areas, CRM systems are now utilising AI in ways I believe can bring companies closer to their customers.
The first of these areas is social engagement.
The internet is a noisy place. With a multitude of social media channels blogs, news outlets, review sites and forums. All constantly and rapidly changing and updating.
Even a large marketing department would struggle to track all this traffic - to catch those angry tweets before they go viral, causing a PR nightmare or equally to find those gems of praise, thanking an employee for going above and beyond - which could become the next, heart-warming story to trend and become a PR dream.
When your customers are communicating so rapidly and from so many directions, how can you possibly keep up?
Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 CRM solution, now offers a Social Engagement module for tackling just this issue.
It’s a powerful tool, offering the ability to monitor what people are saying on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Forums, Blogs, YouTube, News publishers and any RSS or Atom feed.
Widgets allow you to track trending phrases and monitor common tags. See trends in people’s comments and drill deeper to see who is mentioning you, where and exactly what they said.
This is undoubtedly a useful analysis tool but its use of AI behind the scenes takes it to the next level.
Microsoft Social Engagement calculates the sentiment value of social posts with natural-language processing and machine learning techniques.
These sentiment scores can then be used to highlight which posts to focus and take action on, or even automate those actions based on the detected sentiment. For example, redirecting an extremely negative post to a customer services manger or routing extremely positive ones to a specific, marketing focused team.
JASON
So as Mark has mentioned AI is already being used to analyse your customer’s data from a social perspective. But what about the data that’s in your CRM systems, well this is where Microsoft’s suite of AI features within Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement comes in. Called Relationship Insights, it continuously analyses the vast collection of customer-interaction data stored in your Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Exchange systems, and crawls the web to help you better understand your business relationships, evaluate your activities in relation to previous successes, and helps you choose the best path forward.
One of the key ways that these insights manifest themselves is through the relationship assistant. It is constantly at work, keeping an eye on your activities, records and communications with your customers. It analyses your daily actions and communications and uses them to drive insights that help you focus on what’s important today, and how to optimize your communications to help nurture healthy business relationships going forward.
The assistant combines and analyses all of the information at its disposal, and then generates a collection of action cards, which are displayed as your entry point to Dynamics 365.
So what kind of insights can you expect to see from the relationship assistant?
For starters the relationship assistant is constantly analysing your CRM data model so that you can get alerts around when that opportunity is due to close for example or reminding you to perform a certain task like following up on an appointment you recently attended. It can even provide reminders when it looks like one of your business relationships needs nurturing due to a lack of recent activity.
By analysing the email messages in your Microsoft Exchange inbox, the relationship assistant can find messages that might be relevant to your work in Dynamics 365, such as requests for more information about a product, requests for meetings or identifying when a customer has an issue allowing you to quickly take action while in the context of Dynamics 365.
And with it’s ability to crawl the web, the relationship assistant can provide you with insights from outside of your organisations systems about your customers in Dynamics 365, such as relevant news about an organisation or updates to a prospects information on LinkedIn.
And alongside location services it can even tell you where your nearby customers are while out and about.
Relationship Insights can also help you to create more effective email messages and to learn how your contacts are interacting with them. When writing a new message, relationship insights will make recommendations in choosing the most effective content template based on previous open and reply rates.
You can follow an email, which lets you know when a recipient opens the email, clicks a link, opens an attachment, or sends a reply and with the help of relationship insights you can schedule the delivery of your email for when they’re most likely to be noticed and read by the recipients.
Finally with relationship insights analyses your email messages directly in your Microsoft Exchange mailbox, it will make suggestions about which emails may be related to the data in Dynamics 365, making the job of sharing information and building that 360 degree view of a customer even easier.
What you see here is just the tip of the iceberg, these are the first tools that Microsoft has developed to bring intelligence and insights to their CRM offering. All of which is driven by their cognitive services APIs, these offer you even more opportunity to develop intelligent apps and bring more meaning and insight to the incredible amount of data that organisations generate every day.
And not content to rest on it’s laurels, Microsoft are introducing, currently in preview it’s Customer Insights solution. Remember the “big data” buzz word of a year or so ago. Using AI Customer Intelligence makes big data easy.
Organisations today face overwhelming amounts of data, rapidly changing customer behaviours and increased pressure to find solutions and insights. Customer Insights helps users engage customers in more personalized and effective ways.
Customer Insights can connect disparate silos for a comprehensive look at your customers – collecting customer insights and interactions in a single place, offering users a true 360 degree view of their customers and all of the interactions with them, it provides a means for users to explore their “big data” using rich visuals that can be customised and organised to focus on what matters to them.
And all of this data can be embedded into an app of your choice, so these insights and information is available where and when you need it.
MARK
The real power of customer insights though is not in it’s data collection, it’s in what meaning and insight can be extracted from all that data.
Customer Insights’ Predictive Scoring tools, uses machine learning to analyse all of this data and then allows you to predict any business outcome based on that collected data.
Want to know the real likelihood of winning that opportunity, or how well your future marketing activities are going to go?
In this example, you can see customer insights is predicting account retention and the predictive scoring algorithm identified the top 5 data points that correlate with the prediction:
Activity Count – Which makes sense. If there is a high level of activity with a customer it suggests a strong relationship.
Agreement Duration – Presumably a support contract agreement – Again, long standing customers probably are less likely to move elsewhere.
Case Count
Service Activity Duration
Account Industry
It found these by itself and it will continue to revise these and their weightings, based on the actual outcome of the prediction.
In the meantime though, users are able to focus on these areas, where they can, to maximise the chance of retaining an account by ensuring they are interacting with them in the ways that matter.
Well, that was a very quick overview of some of the ways that AI is giving Dynamics Users new ways to understand there Customers. And I’m sure this is only the start of a new-wave of AI driven tools that will be added in the near future.
Does anyone have any questions?
Well, thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of the exhibition and please do feel free to catch Jason and I afterwards or drop by the FlexRM stand on 1532 if you’d like discuss anything further.
Thank you
