Your CRM is a treasure trove of information waiting to be used to enhance your sales, marketing, and customer service efforts. There’s a lot you can do with your CRM and customer data, but you can get even more from your data, by incorporating AI tools and machine learning capabilities into your processes.
What is machine learning?
Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that focuses on building systems that learn from experience and improve themselves through the use of computer data and algorithms.
All of this is done with little to no human intervention. Rather, machine learning 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. But the kicker here is the data you give to machine learning systems in the first place. If you input low-quality data, you’re going to get low-quality results.
How to use machine learning for CRM
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.
Machine learning tools can give you powerful insights into your business like:
Sales performance monitoring for anomalies that indicate holes in the sales pipeline
Sales forecasting
And more!
With this stream of data insights, your business can stay ahead of the curve with accurate sales, marketing, industry, and customer behavior forecasts.
How to collect high-quality data for machine learning systems
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.
Benefits of using machine learning for CRM
When you have quality data flowing into your CRM and access to machine learning capabilities, you’ll have a few benefits coming your way, including:
Creating customer segments
Identifying customer needs
Automating marketing campaigns
Create customer segments
Through customer data analysis, machine learning tools can identify patterns in customer behavior and common characteristics among the customers themselves. With this information on hand, businesses can create key customer segments based on these patterns.
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
Customer segmentation is a key benefit of using machine learning for CRM because it allows businesses to create more tailored marketing campaigns that appeal to specific customer groups. Personalized marketing campaigns like these are much more effective in converting leads and can encourage a higher return on investment (ROI).
Whether those campaigns are refitted to be more accessible to customers who exhibit certain online behaviors or adjusted to reflect the ideals of a specific customer segment is up to you and your business’s overall goals.
Better identify customer needs
Customer behavior patterns reveal how people engage with different aspects of your business. Through these interactions, machine learning algorithms can unearth customer needs and pain points.
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.
Customers reach out to your customer service team because they need assistance with something. When your teams are more acutely aware of customer pain points, your customer service reps can provide better, more effective customer service that leaves a positive, lasting impression on your leads and customers.
Automate marketing campaigns
Through patterns found in customer engagement levels, purchase history, demographics, and other online behaviors, businesses can use this information to create automated marketing and drip sequences that are effective and drive a higher ROI.
Drip sequences are automatic email campaigns that are designed to deliver marketing messaging to customers over time. These messages are triggered by specific customer actions outlined in advance by businesses.
For example, if data analysis assisted by maching learning reveals that your blog is attracting high-value subscribers, you can set up a drip sequence that’s triggered by new subscribers. Drip campaigns are designed to deliver the information your customers and leads need at exactly the right time.
Automated marketing campaigns like drip email sequences are effective strategies for nurturing new leads and increasing engagement among current customers, further driving a better ROI for your marketing and sales efforts.
Get more from your data with Nutshell
At Nutshell, we understand the importance of customer data. That’s why we created a CRM platform that makes collecting and organizing customer data simple, because that’s how it should be!
Whether you’re in sales looking to keep track of leads or a business owner looking to keep track of current customers, you can benefit from the perks a CRM brings to the table. Have we piqued your interest? Contact us online to learn more about what Nutshell can do for your business, or attend a live demo today.
