As of October 2024, the Power AI plan has been renamed to Business. Learn more here.
More than ever, the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are a reality instead of the stuff of science fiction novels. From our personal lives to the way we run our companies, AI tools are becoming more available for a range of applications. Since AI is revolutionizing sales, marketing, and many other aspects of business, it’s no surprise that many CRM providers are also using the technology to enhance customer relationship management.
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms help businesses store and analyze contact information, track customers throughout the sales process, and automate certain sales and marketing functions to streamline their workflow. The integration of AI in CRM platforms is revolutionizing customer relationships. AI in CRM platforms enables businesses to streamline workflows and improve customer insights.
Let’s take a look at how CRMs are using AI, whether it’s worthwhile for your business to use AI in your CRM, and which CRMs are providing the best AI-powered features.
Using AI and CRM together is useful for lots of tasks, like automation, data analytics, and prediction-making. Because AI imitates the way humans learn from our knowledge and experiences, it can produce insights and make decisions based on what it learns.
Machine learning is one subset of AI that’s useful for CRMs. ML applications improve themselves through the data that’s given to them — they analyze historical data and identify patterns and trends to make decisions, forecasts, and predictions about future data trends. For businesses, machine learning systems are a game-changer for sales, revenue, and marketing forecasting, and just about anything else that involves data analysis.
CRMs are leveraging these abilities in a number of ways, including:
Reporting and predictive analytics
Because AI can quickly analyze large quantities of data, it can generate accurate and understandable reports with ease, saving your team time and effort. AI can also generate predictions based on the information you’ve been storing on customers, leads, and sales. Whether you want to score your leads or forecast sales, AI is a great tool for predicting trends and empowering organizations to make better data-driven decisions.
Integrating machine learning software into your CRM processes allows for constant sales, marketing, and customer behavior forecasting. With automated data collection through your CRM, you’ll have a constant flow of real-time, high-quality data being funneled straight to your machine-learning tool.
Writing and email
Love it or hate it, writing is one of the biggest applications of AI. Generative AI produces text for emails, presentations, marketing materials, and more. By combining AI with your CRM’s email capabilities, you can take advantage of generative AI to write marketing emails faster.
Automation
While automation and AI are two different tools, AI can be used to improve automation within your CRM. Automation is highly valuable for streamlining certain repeatable processes, like moving leads along your sales pipeline and sending marketing emails.
In addition, patterns found in customer engagement levels, purchase history, demographics, and other online behaviors can inform businesses’ creation of effective automated marketing and drip sequences that drive a higher ROI.
Segmentation
Segmenting leads and customers allows you to generate more precise reports, target marketing campaigns with greater accuracy, and use the right sales approach with each lead. AI’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities allow CRM customers to segment leads and customers more accurately based on their interactions and data.
Through customer data analysis, machine learning tools can identify patterns in customer behavior and common characteristics among customers. Through machine learning, businesses can identify customer segments based on criteria like:
Demographics
Lead and customer engagement with marketing efforts
Customer behavior on your business’s site
And more
Machine learning tools can even give insight into the likelihood of conversions with new leads and automate customer segmentation and customer profile creation.
Customer insights
AI and machine learning can also analyze conversations with prospects (whether through email, customer support chat, phone call, or video) and generate an analysis of how the customer was feeling during the interaction, providing insights into the customer’s view of your products, services, and company.
AI can also analyze customer data you’ve saved in your CRM to provide a history of the customer’s relationship with your company. An example is Nutshell’s timeline summarization feature, which summarizes the chronological record of your customer interactions to provide an actionable summary. Your team can use these insights to make better decisions to advance the customer toward a sale.
Just like customer segments, identifying customer needs through machine learning means you can create more effective campaigns that directly address customer pain points. Additionally, identifying customer needs through machine learning opens up opportunities for more effective cross-selling efforts and increased customer satisfaction.
The 6 best CRMs with AI-powered tools
More and more CRM providers are adopting AI in various aspects of their platforms. Here are the six best AI-powered CRMs and how they’re bringing their customers the power of artificial intelligence:
1. Nutshell – Business
Nutshell’s Business plan is a AI CRM tier for teams who want to use artificial intelligence to improve their sales processes. In addition to all of the features available with Nutshell Pro, Business includes several AI-charged features to give your organization better insight into its customers and leads:
Timeline summarization: Your Nutshell timelines are thorough records of every interaction you’ve had with a person, company, or lead, which can become unwieldy over time. The timeline summarization feature will provide a summary of your relationship with the contact, including important information like who they’ve interacted with the most, what tends to come up in discussions, and what products or services they’re interested in. Your team can use these insights to better understand customers.
Zoom transcription summarization: Zoom meeting transcripts are helpful for catching team members up on how a demo, sales pitch, or other meeting went. Business will enable you to summarize Zoom meeting transcriptions at the click of a button, helping you keep track of conversations.
Notetaker for voice-to-text transcriptions: With Nutshell’s Notetaker feature, you can skip the keyboard and take notes, write emails, comment on logged activities, and more using voice-to-text.
Supercharge your CRM with the Power of AI
Nutshell’s Business plan gives your team the ability to generate AI-powered timeline and Zoom call summaries — plus do everything else you can with our Nutshell Pro plan.
Salesforce has developed Einstein GPT, a generative AI tool that provides insights across the entire Salesforce ecosystem. Einstein GPT’s capabilities include:
Creating AI-generated emails and conversations
Delivering data insights
Making predictions and recommendations for sales reps
Routing customer service requests to the right representative based on the customer’s tone
Einstein GPT is available in prebuilt solutions for sales, marketing, service, commerce, and data, each of which is priced as a separate add-on to your current Salesforce plan. If you have developers on staff, you can also customize your AI.
3. HubSpot – ChatSpot
HubSpot’s ChatSpot is an AI-powered assistant that responds to prompts. ChatSpot is designed to help sales, service, and marketing professionals automate tasks. The system can:
Write and send emails
Create reports
Generate other insights
ChatSpot is currently free and open to everyone, even people who aren’t HubSpot customers. However, HubSpot customers will benefit from the tool’s ability to create changes within the CRM, draft content, and direct users around the platform.
4. Zoho – Zia
With Zia AI CRM software, Zoho customers can access the information they’re looking for in their CRM even faster. Users can chat with or call Zia to get the answers they need however works best for them. Zia is a conversational sales assistant that will:
Find CRM data on command
Provide suggestions and insights
Score leads
Enrich customer data
Create workflow suggestions
Zia is currently available on all Zoho CRM plans. Sales teams can benefit the most from the tool’s predictive insights, sales forecasting, and integration with CRM data.
5. Freshworks – Freddy AI
Freshworks recently released a tool called Freddy AI, which uses generative AI to create personalized interactions with customers. As of now, Freddy AI’s primary function is as a chatbot for handling customer service requests. The feature can:
Automate customer support conversations
Analyze customer sentiment
Provide sales trend analysis, revenue forecasts, and other recommendations
Freshworks customers can also customize Freddy AI to give it the same look and feel as the rest of their site.
The Freddy AI CRM tool is available as part of Freshworks CRM accounts. Freshworks is also accepting signups for beta testing of other iterations of Freddy AI, like Freddy AI for sales, marketing, and more.
6. Pipedrive – Sales Assistant
Finally, the Sales Assistant from Pipedrive provides recommendations for sales teams to optimize their sales processes. Because it syncs with Pipedrive CRM data, the AI Sales Assistant can:
Identify the most valuable leads
Generate data-based recommendations
Send notifications to keep everyone on the same page
Sales Assistant is most helpful for sales teams, as it uses automation to save time when completing everyday sales tasks. People with a paid or trial Pipedrive account can try the feature for free.
Frequently asked questions about AI CRM software
Hungry for more about AI for CRM platforms? Check out these frequently asked questions:
Do you need AI in your CRM?
Although you don’t need AI in your CRM to gain the benefits of a CRM platform, AI can certainly enhance your experience and even help you do business better. Whether you want to improve your customer support, streamline workflows for your team, or get reporting insights faster, AI’s features can provide your organization with several powerful benefits. When determining whether to implement AI features in your CRM, consider your organization’s unique needs and situation.
Which companies use AI in their CRM?
Major CRM providers like Nutshell, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and HubSpot all incorporate AI in their CRMs. As AI becomes more accessible, more CRMs will likely start developing their capabilities to help customers streamline their workflows and save time.
Are there any drawbacks to using AI in your CRM?
While we’ve already seen all the great ways CRMs are using AI, there is definitely potential for some disadvantages to arise from its use:
Data bias: AI’s predictions and insights are only as helpful as the data they’re based on. Using inaccurate or incomplete data will lead to suboptimal insights.
Lack of human interaction: While it might be sufficient in some areas of business, like creating reports, relying on AI to sustain relationships with customers likely isn’t a good idea. Carefully consider how using a chatbot for customer support and relying on AI-generated insights about customers might impact the customer experience and use a human touch when necessary.
How do I get high-quality CRM data?
The quality of your data can impact all aspects of your business, from sales to marketing and customer service efforts. High-quality data is identified by four key indicators:
Timeliness: Your customer data should be up-to-date and timely, or else you risk inaccurate or false industry predictions and sales forecasts.
Accuracy: Error-free data improves the accuracy of sales, customer behavior, and industry forecasting.
Reliability: High-quality data collected by your CRM should be reliable and trustworthy. Make sure you’re collecting data from sources you know and trust to be reliable.
Consistency: To ensure quality, you need consistent data that doesn’t contradict other timely data
With a CRM like Nutshell, data collection is headache-free. CRM systems pull data from various sources and organize it all in one central location.
Take AI for a test drive in your CRM
Adopting AI in CRM platforms can help businesses stay competitive by leveraging predictive analytics, automation and customer insights. If your CRM platform offers AI features and tools, it could be worthwhile to try them out. Whether you’re part of a small team or a large organization, utilizing AI in your CRM can provide you with several benefits, from predictive analytics and reporting to better customer insights.
AI continues to transform the way the world conducts business, and your CRM needs to be able to keep up. With Nutshell, you can take advantage of AI, sales automation, team collaboration, and more to gain better insights into your customers and leads, improve your efficiency, and enhance your customer relationships. Try Nutshell for free to see CRM AI at work!
Supercharge your CRM with the Power of AI
Nutshell’s Business plan gives your team the ability to generate AI-powered timeline and Zoom call summaries — plus do everything else you can with our Nutshell Pro plan.
