Your sales team is tasked with a lot of responsibilities from connecting with the right people, building relationships, and turning prospects into customers. It’s not easy, they are constantly battling for time.

From productivity-boosting sales automation to tailoring customer experiences, chatbot integration and AI in CRM can help grow your sales today.

More importantly, it helps your sales team focus on things that require a human hand.

 

Take PhonePe, an Indian mobile payment service for instance.

The business employs a chatbot to quickly resolve frequent customer issues. The results? The bot resolves 60% of the queries without human intervention.

This is how AI can remove the grunt work and improve productivity of an organization. Your organization could be next in line, to ride the AI wave.

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Dig into this guide that covers how AI in CRM can help you have personalized sales chat using bots and grow your profit. We’ll also give the blueprint to implementing AI and chatbots in sales. 

From sales prospecting to lead nurturing and closing deals successfully, AI is improving the sales process in several ways. 

Nike, for example, increased their CTR by 12.5 times and grew conversions by four times by using an automated chatbot called StyleBot.

Here’s how you achieve similar results with AI in sales:

Boost productivity through automation

AI automates mundane tasks such as identifying the best leads, saving reps’ time.

Reduce lead response time

Chatbot helps quickly respond to all site visitors’ queries and capture their contact information – even proactively engage them using triggered messages.

Have context-based interaction

By analyzing engagement touchpoints, AI can help sales reps to gauge customers’ willingness to buy. They can also use it to engage prospects in contextual conversations.

Hit sales goals with a 360 view

By gaining visibility into likely-to-close and at-risk deals, AI helps reps focus their attention on hot leads and save sinking deals in time.

Get reminders, notifications, and next best actions

Finally, automation saves leads from falling through the cracks by notifying reps about pre-defined key steps prospects are taking such as visiting the pricing page. It also sends follow-up reminders while suggesting the next best actions based on past interactions with similar leads.

Harness the power of automation for delightful experiences

Essentially, sales reps spend two-thirds of their time on sales prospecting and other non-selling activities. This means they’re left with only 30% of their time for closing deals.

By taking over tasks such as lead qualification and , AI reduces the manual effort involved in sales operations. In fact, as of 2019 alone, advanced chatbots handled 68.9% of chats with prospects from start to finish.

To add, automation assists with selling beyond prospects. How? By assisting with cross-selling and upselling to relevant customers based on their on-site, in-app, and email activities. 

By studying leads’ demographic data, their email, on-site, and in-app activities, and their similarity with past closed deals, AI provides actionable insights and suggestions for the next best actions. Use them to take the most appropriate action to nudge leads forward in their buyer’s journey.

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For example, based on a lead’s past interaction with you, an AI-powered CRM suggests the best time to follow up with them. Similarly, by helping identify which leads are likely to convert, AI assists reps to focus on hot leads instead of wasting their time chasing cold ones.

To add, automation helps provide memorable, sales-winning experiences with personalized interactions as well.

Role of AI + Chat in your CRM strategy

With the variety of product and service options at your prospects’ disposal, customer experience is a key differentiation factor to wow buyers. 

Interestingly, 65% of consumers admit a good experience with a company influences their buying decision more than great advertising.

The million-dollar question then is: what’s a positive customer experience? About 80% of American consumers say it’s convenience, speed, and knowledgeable help for them according to the same report.

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Put another way, employing tech (read: chatbots and AI) to provide these benefits helps provide an exceptional customer experience.

From quickly responding leads to making useful product suggestions, bots help improve the customer experience at various touchpoints in a prospect’s buyer journey.

In fact, a Business Insider report states that nearly 40% of internet users worldwide prefer interacting with chatbots than AI agents.

By generating leads, capturing important data, qualifying them, and nurturing them using triggered workflows, AI and chatbots reduce manual work for reps.

At the same, automation provides reps essential data for allowing them to improve customer experiences further, giving you an edge over your competitors.

4 ways to include chatbot in your CRM strategy

Now that you know the role that AI in CRM and bots play, let’s walk you through how you can drive the most benefits from them.

Follow these tips:

Map your buyer journey to align conversations accordingly

Map out the steps a prospect usually goes through before buying from you. Include the pain point you solve and work your messaging around it.

Brand your chatbot

Branding your bot such as aligning its voice with your company’s voice helps you provide a consistent experience to prospects.

Fine-tune conversations

Integrating the chatbot with your CRM helps improve future chatbot experience with historical interactions. AI can polish responses to prospects based on how you’ve interacted with similar leads in the past.

You can refine and personalize bot messaging too. To this end, create user segments to group them based on their geography, site navigation, and other user properties.

Also, study users’ site behavior (example: pages they visit, reports they download) to identify patterns in their interactions. This helps you program the bot to reach out to prospects more meaningfully.

Live test your bot

Once everything is in place, it’s important to test your bot. This lets you look at instances that you may have missed out on previously. By live testing your bot, you improve gaps in customer experience and ensure that things flow smoothly when visitors begin interacting with the bot.

5 benefits of implementing  AI and chatbot in sales

Now, let’s take a look at different ways a chatbot CRM can benefit your business and help you accelerate your sales growth improve your sales:

1. Reduce prospect wait time and increase customer satisfaction

Consumers who are on your website may have marketing or sales questions and expect businesses to have a 24/7 digital experience.

Chatbots help meet these expectations by getting back to visitors’ queries immediately – something that might not be possible considering reps’ working hours.

Besides reducing lead response time and engaging leads, Chatbots can qualify leads in real-time. With Freshsales, for instance, Freddy, the in-built AI assistant,  helps you scrutinize leads for qualification based on:

  • Prospects’ interactions on your website, email, and in-app

  • Demographic details such as their job designation, geographical location and how they meet your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

  • Historical interactions with similar leads

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To add, AI helps you assess why leads are qualified by giving you a snapshot of the qualifying factors (known as scoring points) and their activity. This helps reps engage in contextual conversations with prospects.

2. Create a personalized customer experience with improved suggestions

Receiving irrelevant information hinders the experience for leads. In fact, it can even turn away hot leads.  

A proficient chatbot can prevent that by giving the most relevant answers to prospects that’ll engage them.

For example, if a lead is interested in learning your pricing, the chatbot can link them to your pricing page.

If custom pricing is something you offer, the chatbot can engage the prospect further by asking if they’d like to talk to a sales rep for discussing a custom package. Based on their reply, bots can also automatically set up a demo call with reps, move the prospect down the funnel while saving reps from having to do all this manually.

3. Set up intelligent workflows to nurture leads in your pipeline

Typically, salespeople need to track lead activity and engage them based on their journey. However, doing all this manually is time-consuming and can cause hot leads to turn cold. 

The solution? Use pre-defined automated workflows to nurture leads based on their behavior on your site, in-app activity, and funnel stage.

After a bot captures contact details of a lead visiting your features page, for example, it can add them to your email marketing funnel – starting from a relevant nurturing sequence that shares case studies on how your key features help customers grow. Not only does this keep a lead warm but it also engages them contextually.

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The cherry on top: Automation can help with out of office (OOO) detection too. This means reps need not keep notes and guess when to follow-up. 

Instead, if a lead’s response to your email communication is an out-of-office message, AI can detect it and suggest the next best time to follow up with that lead based on their past interactions with you.

4. Improve contact management and prevent churn

Keeping prospects waiting for the next available operator, particularly if your business serves a distributed audience, does little to help.

An intelligent chatbot in such cases not only offers speedy responses but useful ones too. To add, the bot can schedule demo calls for prospects interested in learning about your product.

It can also automatically upload all information related to such a lead into your CRM. This way, reps get a complete picture of how the lead has been interacting with your business.

Contact management helps reps get more information on prospects by giving them a lead profile complete with details such as: 

All this context with customer profiles assists reps in engaging meaningfully with leads, therefore, converting them better.

5. Close deals faster with a 360° view

Maximize the value of all the information you collect through bots using CRM to personalize lead engagement and improve your win rates. 

Here’s how:

(i) Engage meaningfully

Get a chronological view of your contact’s on-site and email activities. This helps you learn how they engage with you and understand their interests better.

(ii) Boost productivity

Save reps’ time and minimize the chances of errors that occur when the job is done manually. A proficient CRM can help you not just capture and update prospects’ information but also auto-assign tasks to the relevant reps. 

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(iii) Enrich contact profile

Add notes on a prospect that all reps can access and use as needed.  Reps can create tasks, reminders, and internal alerts like alerts for when a prospect visits your pricing page to engage with them at the right time.

(iv) Manage the sales pipeline better

Get AI-based contact scoring to identify hot, ready-to-convert leads based on their activity and previous engagement with you.

Conclusion

To sum up, a CRM with AI and chat integration empowers sales teams to target qualified leads, have contextual conversations with them, and close deals faster.

Using sales automation, you can also offer delightful customer experiences while improving sales reps’ productivity.

Ready to get started yourself? Personalize customer experiences at scale with AI and chat using Freshsales.

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