How businesses use Salesforce AI to their advantage
Adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer just an option. It’s a strategic imperative for businesses that want to stay ahead. And with markets, consumers, and technologies changing faster than ever, knowing how AI can benefit your business is a competitive advantage. According to Forbes Advisor, 64% of business owners believe AI can improve customer relationships. Research from the NN Group shows that AI can enhance employee productivity by up to 66%.
These compelling statistics highlight the promises of investing in AI.
Another factor that can drive us to improve is a low conversion rate. This often arises due to several underlying reasons:
- Manual or multi-step processes, creating friction for people to take desired actions.
- Lack of focus on connecting and enhancing the overall customer experience.
- The absence of tools that assist in predicting the optimal timing and channels for engaging with customers.
What if you could overpower these challenges and drive conversion faster?
Salesforce AI, better know as, Salesforce Einstein, the first “generative AI” built for CRM. It integrates seamlessly with many Salesforce products, including:
Ultimately, it helps businesses gain valuable insights. It also streamlines manual, time-sucking processes and improve personalization across sales, marketing, service, and other teams. In this blog, we will share practical ways businesses use Salesforce AI to stay ahead of others.
Smarter Sales Predictions
Einstein’s forecasting brings a whole new suite of insights to the table. It improves forecasting precision and helps sales make better-informed decisions.
How it works:
Salesforce Einstein combines all your current and historical data to find patterns and trends you might not have thought about with high accuracy. But Einstein doesn’t just give you numbers. It shows you the factors that drive those numbers, so you can take action with context.
Salesforce Einstein Benefits:
- Improved forecast visibility
- Improved conversion rate
- Enablement field to drive customer outcomes
- Improved adoption of Salesforce
- Establishing a data-driven culture
Einstein empowers you to take targeted action on opportunities and improves forecast accuracy, revenue, and operations.
One-stop data view for teams and managers
While sales reps need detailed data visualization, others, like executives, prefer a bird’s-eye view, honing in on a specific target. With AI-powered analytics and intelligent insights, CRM Analytics gives executives real-time visibility into global marketing, sales, and service performance. So, from there, executives can get a snapshot of a company’s most important metrics and apply those insights with other stakeholders. In other worlds, it enables them to be more nimble and pivot based on real-time data.
Send emails with higher conversion potential
What sets Salesforce AI apart from other email automation tools is its capabilities. When you use Salesforce, it’s not just about sending out generic email campaigns—it’s about making them as effective as they can be. While basic email automation tools can tell you who read your email, unsubscribed, or clicked through, Salesforce goes above and beyond. Einstein Engagement Scoring goes a step further by revealing how your audience interacts with your emails and reveals insights on how to improve the timing, content, and subject lines of your emails.
But that’s not all. With Salesforce AI, you can quickly set up automated email campaigns based on customer actions or events. For example, you can create automated email that goes to a customer who downloads content or takes a specific action on your website. Companies also use this Salesforce AI feature for routine tasks, such as sending reminder emails for upcoming events or appointments. Or sending follow-up emails after a customer completes a transaction or requests information. Ultimately, this saves valuable time for sales reps, so they can focus on critical tasks.
Boost sales with AI-driven cross-sell and Upsell strategies
There’s one thing more interesting than selling a product once — having the opportunity to sell again.
Salesforce Einstein does that through cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
- Cross-selling: Recommends related products that align with a customer’s purchase history. For example, if a customer buys a laptop from your store, Einstein may suggest headphones or a laptop case.
- Upselling: Recognizes segments of customers likely to appreciate higher-tier offerings. For example, suppose a customer is a loyal member of your store’s loyalty program. In that case, Einstein may suggest they buy a higher-tier item that is eligible for more discounts or rewards.
360 view of customers with Salesforce AI insights
When you have a diverse group of customers from different countries and industries, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for customer support. To meet their needs, you have to adapt to what each customer prefers—whether they like to get in touch via phone, email, or digital channels. Salesforce Service Cloud gives your customer care team the tools they need to respond effectively with a complete view of each customer. For instance, imagine a customer’s delivery is running late. Your support team can easily access the customer’s account and order details without having to send emails back and forth to ask for a tracking number.
In addition, customers have the option to schedule a call with a technical support agent using Salesforce’s Scheduler tool. Alternatively, they can use self-service resources like articles and tutorials to find quick answers to common questions. These resources are regularly updated to make sure the information is accurate. Moreover, these self-service options also help distribute the workload more evenly among your support agents, so they can handle more complicated cases instead of answering frequently asked questions.
Personalize every interaction to strengthen customer bonds
One way to win customers’ hearts is to create a tailored journey based on their preferences, budget, and shopping habits. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the #1 tool for personalized marketing. With AI, it gets even better. You can personalize consumer journeys at scale. What’s more, you can deliver tailored messaging and offers through their preferred channels like email and social media at the times they’re most likely to engage.
Seeing what your customers are doing and what they’ve done in the past helps you serve them better than ever. Visibility into who they are, enables you to provide consistent support as they interact with different parts of your company. Use Marketing Cloud to send messages specially crafted for them. Boost engagement and provide the best customer experience across your brand. And minimize bumps that make them less loyal and happy.
AI-generated responses for non-native language speakers
Embracing diversity sometimes means you’ll need to work with employees from all over the world. . That would have been challenging in the past, because customer agents assisting native English speaking audiences might have felt unsure about how to phrase a response. Now, Salesforce Cloud Einstein provides human-like replies to every customer query. That innovation enhances agents’ confidence and reduces the time to train them. What’s more Salesforce’s AI does this within two seconds, making it three times faster than other tools.
Instant support with chatbot integration
Salesforce integrates with AI-powered chatbots, allowing businesses to handle routine customer inquiries instantly. This streamlines the support process, freeing human agents for more complex questions and cases.
Faster training and less agent turnover
AI can help reduce chat handle times for both new and senior agents. It also assists with getting new agents onboarded faster. And with AI replies, customers don’t have any reason to request specific agents as often, indicating a consistent quality of service.
Customer retention strategies
Keeping a customer is more straightforward than acquiring a new one. A known customer trusts your brand already. New ones still need some reasons to trust you.
The most common reasons companies lose customers are because:
- Customer experience isn’t a top priority
- No re-engagement strategy
- No way to quickly analyze or act based on customer behavior
Salesforce’s AI tracks customers’ purchase history, social media activity, interactions across the web to predict and prevent customer churn.
For example, AI can analyze customer behavior to spot at-risk customers, so you marketing team can step in and offer personalized offers to keep them loyal to your brand. These can include discounts or early-bird previews. With insights like these, you can develop targeted loyalty programs that reward customers. Research even says that 53% of consumers admit that discounts and loyalty points make them stay with a brand longer.
Smarter lead targeting with predictive lead scoring
Salesforce Predictive Lead Scoring assists your sales teams in identifying prospects with a higher conversion probability through machine learning. It enhances the overall efficiency of the lead management process.
For example, the Schneider Electric sales team used lead-scoring AI to reduce deal closing time by 30%.
Image Source: Salesforce, Einstein Lead Scoring
The process involves collecting and analyzing data points related to leads — identifying relevant features — and training a machine-learning model on historical data. Then, the machine learning model assigns scores to leads according to their potential conversion rate. With these scores, sales teams can prioritize more valuable leads in Salesforce’s CRM.
Efficient customer agent routing
Businesses can divide customer agents into multiple groups using omnichannel routing, queues, and case record types. They can segment agents based on their expertise and the audience they cater to.
Quick case prioritization with automation
Not all cases are alike. Some demand urgent attention, others not so much. Imagine a customer who wants to report debit card fraud case and has to wait in a queue before it resolves. They want answers now vs. someone who wants to know when a particular promotion is happening. Like in hospital settings, automation can triage cases and route the most urgent cases to agents first to minimize damage. It also ensure the most critical issues are addressed promptly and that lower priority cases don’t get missed or dropped.
Hop on the AI bandwagon (While you can)
Businesses often feel they should stay in their comfort zones. Why buck the system is things are working? But with more businesses tapping into AI to drive sales and streamline team processes, those who don’t embrace AI and automation won’t be as competitive. But they need to drive sales, and the most obvious way to signal helpfulness toward that goal is to streamline team processes — improve customer experience — gather insights for personalization — reduce friction in the customer journey.
Fortunately, AI can work across all these use cases. With every passing day, customers’ sympathy for brands that can’t meet their standards fades. There is more choice of products, services, and businesses than ever. Like a brick-and-mortar store without a barcode reader — it’s easier than ever to drift past a poor digital presence and go somewhere else.
Interested in how your business can tap in Salesforce AI?
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