CRM Assignment: Artificial intelligence Implementation

Question

Task:The topic chosen will form the basis of a professionally written paper. Students can select topics based on their own understanding and investigations of the different types of CRM systems or applications across different industry settings. Some suggested topics might include the following:

Answer

Executive Summary
This crm assignment is based on the strategies, benefits, challenges and technologies involved in AI enabled CRM system. Aim of the crm assignment is to focus on how AI implementation can influence the CRM system. Besides, discussions on various scopes of AI technology in CRM system have been included in this report. This crm assignment majorly emphasises on the benefits which organisation can avail by adopting AI enabled CRM system for customer service along with different challenges of implementing AI. Findings of this report indicate, with the help of AI enabled CRM system, organisations would be able to provide excellent customer service and retain customer for future sales. However for mid and start-up organisations investing in AI technology could be challenging while big or multinational organisational may suffer from software malfunctions. Finally, this crm assignment concludes with the recommendations that organisations must integrate AI technology for Customer Relationship Management system for better customer service and sales growth.

Introduction
CRM or Customer relationship management is an approach adopted by an organisation to manage organisation's interaction with existing and potential customers. Under this approach, organisations use historical data of the customer and utilise them for establishing a better relationship with customers, focus on customer retention and finally focuses on sales growth. Fundamental reasons for using CRM system are- to organise, automate and track down the different organisational process, such as; tracking sales, generation of lead, marketing process, forecasting, customer service and for ROI measurement. Modern organisations are taking the interest of adopting Artificial Technology (AI) for their existing CRM system or introducing AI enable CRM system, because of its ability to the organisation, automate and track down various tasks. This report provides an overview of Artificial Intelligence in the CRM system and how it can be beneficial and challenging both. Further, this crm assignment focuses on different strategies and technologies which many organisations have adopted for the implementation. Finally, it concludes with some practical examples from industry which implemented AI in the CRM system.

Literature Review
Strategy for the implementation of AI enabled CRM: CRM system is able to offer personalised services for customer however that is no longer enough for the organisation to compete in the global market. Customers are looking for fast and smart experience in the right context. Therefore organisations are taking an interest in adopting AI for changing the context of a CRM system (Mandel et al., 2017).

Competition in the market has doubled since the time organisations started using the CRM system and so there a quick need of paradigm shift in the technology which is applied to the CRM system. Modern Customer Relationship Management or CRM is driven by various modern technologies (Deb et al., 2018). The development and usage of CRM system both are similarly dependent on modern technology. The usage or implementation of technologies like Artificial intelligence is part of organisational growth strategy. Usage and implementation of AI technology for CRM system became one of the common aspects for the modern organisation.

According to Soler-Labajos and Jiménez-Zarco (2016), the role of AI technology is not more limited to gather information and or to keep billions of records and developing a knowledge base, but AI technology is able to provide after sales support for customer and decision making. For instance, Amazon is one of the biggest online retailers with a customer huge customer base and customer data. With the application of AI technology, Amazon can manage customer data, such as product purchase by the customer, time spend on the site, customer social media activities and help customers to purchase the next product. Further, this assists the customer to choose a better product as per their need and lifestyle. Considering the competition in the global market Amazon as a global retailer decided to implement AI technology in their CRM system and helping customer with better purchasing experiences.

Business organisations are need of constant growth and a most important element for constant growth is to establish a strong relationship with the customer by offering customer better service. Besides, organisations must find their weaklings and put special emphasis on those aspects for better growth. Gacanin and Wagner (2018) opined that the implementation of AI could help CRM system in three ways and those are predictive scoring, forecasting and recommendations.

Predictive-scoring: AI enables CRM system helps organisations to understand their sale score and give a clue about how those scores have been calculated. It suggests industry get the insight of each lead score which representing how a possible lead has converted into an opportunity.

Forecasting: The capabilities of AI technology are not limited to scoring. It can also be used for the future value of anything, like the future value of a stock portfolio or some real estate investments. In the case of sales growth, the application of AI technology can easily predict when the organisation is going to meet their sales target.

Recommendations: One of the most commanding ability of AI technology is that it makes a recommendation for online purchase and assists customers with a better decision making process. This ability of AI technology ensures customer to shop for specific products which might be helpful for their future need.

AI technology is capable of helping customers with their decision making, more than any customer care executive. Besides, AI-based CRM systems are swift in delivering their services with fewer chances of flaws. Therefore the application of AI technology in CRM system can ensure better interaction between an organisation with their customers and better retention of customers.

Benefits from AI enabled CRM
According to Mohanty and Das (2018), the fundamental truth about the customer is they always look for a better deal within the market, therefore retaining existing customer require a lot of effort from the organisational end than attracting new customers. For much organisation, customer satisfaction is considered as a key measure of success. Considering this fact customer satisfaction became one of the major operational goals for many organisations. Therefore, organisations are taking a special interest in investing in CRM system and trying to reduce any gap that may exist in the CRM system of organisation. Technologies like AI are playing the key role in reducing the gap in customer satisfaction. There are some short-term and some long-term benefits which an organisation can gain with the implementation of AI in the CRM system. Some of the benefits which can be directly gained by incorporating AI technology in CRM system are virtual assistance, automate the routine task, improving segmentation, lead customisation and identification of hot leads, customer service and retention and employee training.

Automate Routine Task: Implementation of AI in CRM system helps the organisation to automate repetitive tasks which consume time unnecessarily. Various activities which are a part of the CRM system, such as data input and retrieve, updating and forecasting data and final list preparation will be done through AI. It will ensure a better understanding of customer by CRM system, and CRM system will help to identify customer's preference and recommend things based on that. The sales team can easily keep track of customer preferences through the CRM system and can invest more time to build a relationship with customers.

Virtual assistant: The basic utilisation of CRM system is to develop the production ability of employees. AI technology work as the virtual assistance of employees and help employees to become more productive (Hu et al., 2018). Being a virtual assistance AI technology is capable of handling customer responses, email, capturing data, activities and follow-ups. Being the most intelligent technology, AI has the access to various customers' data such as customer web behaviour, lifestyle information and other information. With the advanced degree of intelligence, AI utilise customer's data and conduct sales forecast based on that. Further, based on the purchasing behaviour of customers, AI enabled CRM system to respond to customer query and complaint. Chances of flaws while dealing with customer query are very less. With the help of such technologically advanced CRM system sales representative can instantly analyse data, can quickly access policies, service history, policies and customer profile and help the customer to decide customer's best action according to their need.

Improving segmentation: For any organisation, segmentation of their prime customer is very much crucial and most of the time organisation waste time and money for customer segmentation. However, with the help of intelligent algorithms of AI technology, an organisation can easily choose the particular segment of the customer based on various factors such as age, gender, location, purchase history, web behaviour and some other attributes. Previously, this was a function which was performed by marketing executives to understand the market segment; now it has been replaced by AI enabled technology.

AI enables technology help to generate the best lead for sales best on the historical data and purchase pattern. Besides after analysing data, AI enables CRM will help to identify the best lead for the sales process. AI enabled CRM system is capable of developing customised messages for the customer and choose the right channel to deliver those message for the more targeted campaign. For instance, if a customer’s previous history suggests, he or she is an active user of social media platforms, then their marketing information should be communicated through social media platform, not through any other mode. Based a recent study conducted by IBM 82% of the respondent or customers intend to use their social media platform more extensively, however, when a company decides the value of social media, most of the time they remain uncertain about the best way to approach it (IBM, 2018). In these situations, AI enabled CRM system helps the organisation to find the best way to approach social media.

Customer service and retention: Retention of the customer is one of the major problems for most of the organisation, especially for those who are competing at the global market. The organisation must develop strategies which help them to provide better customer service and retain their customers. Just providing after sales service or offering discount is not enough to retain the customer. Regular interaction with customers is very much necessary for retaining potential customers. Gathering huge customer's data, which is also addressed as big data is significant for the interaction with the customer (Westphal et al., 2018). AI enable CRM system assist organisation to collect data which are important to build communication with customers. Developing customised interaction helps the organisation to develop customer satisfaction and customer retention.

Employee training: AI integrated CRM helps the organisation to develop roadmaps for lead and deals and help the organisation to take the next strategic steps. The intelligence algorithm is helpful to analyse historical sales data, customer account, and customer profile and develop the best strategy for individual interaction. This was not possible with mere human intelligences. Organisations like Amazon, uses CRM system to analyse customer call by listening to the tone of customer and prepare a customised message for the next follow -up.

These are some of the benefits which organisation can enjoy after the immediate implementation of AI enabled CRM system. However, there are some other benefits which might not be visible immediately after the implementation but can be felt in long-term process. IBM is one of the global company which supply AI enabled CRM system that assists clients of IBM with better customer engagement, decision making, marketing.

The technology involved in AI enabled CRM
Market experts are an optimist about the fact that within the next 5 years AI technology will be able to rule the business world. From marketers to decision maker all are becoming highly dependent on the technology that is involved in AI. Global leaders are considering AI technology as the key technology for organisational growth. Some technologies which are involved in AI enabled CRM have been discussed below;

Natural Language Generation: Natural Language generation is an AI technology which helps to convert data into text and allow computers to communicate ideas accurately (Verma et al., 2018). It is being used in a CRM system to generate reports and market summaries. Companies like SAS, Narrative Science offer this technology.

Speech Recognition: Speech recognition is one of the unique technologies which have been identified by AI technology. It can transcribe human language and help the organisation to understand customer data.

Virtual Agents: A virtual agent is capable of interacting with Humans. One of the most popular examples of this technology is chatbots. These chatbots are capable of interacting with customers and assist them with their query.

AI-optimised Hardware: Implementation of AI technology makes hardware user-friendly. New graphical presentation, centralised processing units are capable of performing special AI enable tasks makes the customer service and customer retention an easy process. Companies like Google, IBM, and Intel provide such AI optimised Hardware.

These are some of the technologies which are gaining popularity and majorly integrated into CRM systems. The experts expect that very soon organisations will be completely dependent on AI enables CRM platform to perform organisational tasks.

Potential challenges with AI enabled CRM
AI technology has some definite effect on the human life however it comes with few inevitable challenges. CRM system was a tool which was majorly used by the organisation for better sales. However a paradigm shift can be found in the way organisation look at the utilisation of CRM system after the implementation of technology. AI enable system can be used for some major purposes like customer relation, engagement and retention along with sales growth (Stoica et al., 2017). However, there are certain major challenges with AI technology which must be taken into consideration while implementing AI enabled CRM system.

Employee Training: Training employees before the implementation of AI enabled CRM system are not feasible in most of the cases. As a result, employees struggle to deal with the new system and defective product results.

Investment: Adopting AI enables CRM system to require a lot of investment which is not possible for mid-level or start-up the organisation.

Software Malfunction: There is no technology in this world, which can works perfect. System downtime or system malfunction is the biggest challenge with AI. Organisations can lose valuable time of customer due to system malfunction. An organisation which uses chatbots for replying customer due to system malfunction can increase the number of complaint from customers. It is may be one of the reasons for poor customer services as well.

Missing empathy: The golden rule of customer service is to be empathetic towards customers. Customers always look for organisations which are capable of understanding customer emotion and experience which is not possible to detect through AI enable CRM system. Only a human or customer care executive can understand the customers' emotion and reply. Therefore, operating the whole customer service unit through AI enable CRM system can be bit challenging.

Conclusion
The objective of the crm assignment was to understand strategies, benefits, technology and challenges associated with AI in CRM. From the above discussion, it can be found that gradually AI technology is replacing the need of tradition CRM system in which human representatives were highly involved. AI enabled CRM system is more dependent on technologies and machines. With the help of AI technology, CRM system are capable of performing three vital tasks to maintain interaction with customers, and those are predictive scoring, forecasting and recommendation.

Further it can be identified that AI enables CRM systems are capable of regular task such as data collection, storage and analysis in an automated manner and assist customer care executives to manage their task. The ability of AI technology to store and analyse customer purchase history, customer social media profile help organisation to produce personalised the message for the customer. From this crm assignment, it can be identified that AI enables CRM system are capable of mapping customer data with organisational sales strategy and produce better sales results. Some of the useful technologies, which are associated with AI enable CRM, are natural language generation, Speech Recognition, Virtual agents, AI optimised machines. Global giants like Google, IBM, Intel offer AI optimised hardware to their clients and help clients to run a smooth business by offering the best customer care service. Based on the discussion, it is highly recommended that an organisation must integrate AI technology for Customer Relationship Management for better customer service and sales growth. CRM assignments are being prepared by our online management assignment help experts from top universities which let us to provide you a reliable my assignment help service.

References
Deb, S.K., Jain, R. and Deb, V., 2018, January. Artificial Intelligence?Creating Automated Insights for Customer Relationship Management. In 2018 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering (Confluence) (pp. 758-764). IEEE.

Gacanin, H. and Wagner, M., 2018. Artificial Intelligence Paradigm for Customer Experience Management in Next-Generation Networks: Challenges and Perspectives. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.06254.

Gartner, I. (2018). Review. [online] Gartner. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/reviews/review/view/286389 [Accessed 19 Sep. 2018].

Hu, T., Xu, A., Liu, Z., You, Q., Guo, Y., Sinha, V., Luo, J. and Akkiraju, R., 2018, April. Touch Your Heart: A Tone-aware Chatbot for Customer Care on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (p. 415). ACM.

Ibm.com. (2018). IBM Services | IBM. [online] Available at: https://www.ibm.com/services [Accessed 19 Sep. 2018].

Mandel, E., Georgescu, V., Patterson, J., Brydon, A.F., Fama, J., Golubock, S., Tessier, J. and Hsu, S., Directly, Inc., 2017. Methods of AI Based CRM. U.S. Patent Application 15/488,429.

Mohanty, A. and Das, S., 2018. Customer Retention Strategies of Indian Telecom Service Providers.

Nguyen, B., Simkin, L. and Canhoto, A.I. eds., 2015. The Dark Side of CRM: Customers, Relationships and Management. Routledge.

Soler-Labajos, N. and Jiménez-Zarco, A.I., 2016. Social CRM: The Role of Social Media in Managing Customer Relations. In Managing Public Relations and Brand Image through Social Media (pp. 134-159). IGI Global.

Stoica, I., Song, D., Popa, R.A., Patterson, D., Mahoney, M.W., Katz, R., Joseph, A.D., Jordan, M., Hellerstein, J.M., Gonzalez, J.E. and Goldberg, K., 2017. A berkeley view of systems challenges for ai. arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.05855.

Verma, D., Cirincione, G., Pham, T. and Ko, B.J., 2018, May. Generation and management of training data for AI-based algorithms targeted at coalition operations. In Ground/Air Multisensor Interoperability, Integration, and Networking for Persistent ISR IX (Vol. 10635, p. 106350U). International Society for Optics and Photonics.

Westphal, M., Rafaeli, A., Yom-Tov, G., Ashtar, S., Altman, D., Natapov, M. and Barkay, N., 2018. Big Data and Customer Emotion Dynamics: Automated Analyses in Chat Services.

Appendix
IBM has been an excellent partner for many organisations for customer lead generation. Organisations, which are relatively new in customer lead generation heavily, rely on the product and expertise offered by IBM (Gartner, 2018). IBM offer AI optimised hardware, which is capable of the process and executes AI oriented tasks. Bias is one of the serious concerns for AI technology. Some research shows that AI technology refuses to recognise non-native US voice or African American faces. IBM launched could base automated services that continually provide insight into how AI is making their decision. It scans signs and recommends adjustment such as algorithmic tweaks, which can reduce their impact. Further IBM assured that this service could be tailored as per individual, organisational workflows.