Will AI be the Cure-All for CRM Concerns?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a multi-billion-dollar
market globally, spearheaded by huge corporations like Salesforce and
extending the reach of some of the world’s leading enterprise software
companies such as Oracle and SAP. Led by these big players, the CRM market
is highly saturated with hundreds of companies trying to compete for a
small piece of the enormous CRM pie, with more vendors entering the market
each year.

But despite the sheer number of solutions available and the significant
investments organizations make in selecting and implementing the right CRM,
there is one critical factor that influences the success or demise of the
product in the enterprise – the end user. Unless sales and marketing people
invest the time and effort necessary to make CRM work for them, however
powerful the solution may be, it will likely remain a glorified spreadsheet
of customer and prospect information.

CRM should deliver more value than a
simple customer database and basic management reporting tool. But to
achieve that requires getting buy-in from sales and marketing teams, and
that isn’t always easy.

What’s the Value of CRM — for Sales Reps?

Getting salespeople to spend valuable non-selling time completing data
entry is tough. Management will typically try the usual approaches to
adoption, starting with active training and positive reinforcement (i.e.
incentives), with many even resorting to individual and team consequences
for not updating the CRM. But, as many sales people, managers and
executives know, it’s just not working.

Lack of user investment is CRM’s biggest problem and one that hurts the
long-term value of the platform for organizations. CFOs have already
started to question the cost of such a platform when static alternatives
can do the same job, without the hefty price tag. If it seems unreasonable
to think that sales and marketing teams could abandon CRM, think back to
the late 1990s and what happened to the enterprise portal market.

Enterprise portals were touted as the single tool that every business
needed. In 1998, Merrill Lynch published its first Enterprise Information
Portals report, forecasting a $14.8 billion market for portal software and
services by 2002 (source). This triggered a surge of portal interest and organizations invested in
these solutions for more than ten years – until users became disenchanted
and lack of use made the investment irrational. What enterprise portal
vendors didn’t count on was how the landscape would change.

It’s not hard to draw parallels between enterprise portals and CRM. Today’s
landscape is changing at such a rapid pace, even as vendors offer more CRM
features and capabilities, their value remains untouched if salespeople
don’t use them.

The Power of AI

But it’s not all doom and gloom for CRM vendors. Machine learning and
artificial intelligence (AI) innovations have emerged as key drivers of CRM
value, usage and productivity. At Dreamforce 2016, Salesforce announced
Einstein as a built-in capability to help salespeople get recommendations
about the likelihood of a deal to close, and even when to email a prospect.
Microsoft and Oracle quickly followed up with their take on the AI
revolution.

While AI-powered CRM is no doubt going to become a standard
capability for all systems, it’s important to keep the end-user in mind
when it comes to value. To not succumb to the same fate as the enterprise
portal, CRM must go beyond task-based recommendations that the sales person
can take or leave – it must empower users when they are in a direct
customer-facing situation, and help them increase their win rates and keep
customers happy.

Saving CRM

It’s clear that CRM needs a wake-up call. Forward-thinking organizations are
proactively seeking out and taking advantage of tools that are designed to
help solve adoption and usability problems, and add value to an existing
CRM deployments through smarter, content-centric approaches. These
next-generation, mobile-first tools can automate CRM data input, ensuring
that even the most basic CRM implementation will be populated consistently
with high-quality data, without weighing down sales teams with the
repetitive data entry tasks they hate.

And these tools can do more than just get data into CRM — they use machine
learning and AI techniques to understand a salesperson’s world and help him
or her improve performance through guided selling, utilize interactive
content and other key capabilities proven to improve selling success,
particularly in that critical moment when the salesperson is in front of
the customer.

Recommendation for CRM Users

Will AI be the cure-all for CRM concerns, or should businesses seek out new
ways to empower salespeople to increase CRM adoption? For now, businesses
will need to embrace both. By embracing AI and implementing support tools
that improve content access and automate data entry, CRM becomes more than
a virtual Excel spreadsheet — it becomes a powerful tool that can scale to
the millions. It’s not a permanent solution, but it’s enough. For now.