Personalised customer experience and personalisation were once a luxury reserved for large companies with big budgets and teams, but not anymore. Small businesses can go that extra mile for customers without compromising efficiency and their often already-stretched resources.
Hundreds of tools are now available to become an executive assistant for creating personalised experiences across all touchpoints, from your website, email, social media and in-store. Let’s explore how AI in CRM (customer relationship management) can optimise your small business.
AI Support For More Than Marketing
Managing relationships for small businesses is often a juggling act of insider knowledge, spreadsheets and reminder alerts. AI in CRM can become your trusty intern, and its ability to take a load off goes beyond marketing. Automate your data entry, lead scoring, and scheduling so your team can focus on strategic initiatives and servicing existing customers.
However, with this power comes great responsibility. Transparency and responsible use are essential, so you must obtain consent first and inform customers how their data will be used. You can also choose AI tools with built-in ethical safeguards, like bias and privacy protection.
AI-Streamlined Customer Experience and Personalisation In Action
Here’s what AI tools could look like in your business:
- Analyse customer behaviour, preferences, and purchase history to showcase relevant products related to their recent searches on your site and personalise emails accordingly
- Website chatbots to answer customer FAQs 24/7, providing instant customer support and freeing the team to handle complex enquiries
- Automated chatbots and emails to proactively contact customers about delays, reminders, scheduled maintenance or outages
- Analyse customer reviews and identify trends to curate selections that suit your audience
- Increase campaign relevance and effectiveness by dividing your contacts into hyper-specific segments based on characteristics or behaviour patterns that AI helps identify. e.g., entice customers who haven’t purchased in a while with a special offer or loyalty discounts after a certain spending amount.
Analysing Data For Powerful Customer Understanding
AI can analyse vast amounts of data from various sources, identify hidden connections, predict future behaviour, and uncover valuable insights that could remain undiscovered, meaning no more poring over surveys and spreadsheets to determine trends and patterns from purchase history, website interactions, and social media activity.
AI can analyse website behaviour to identify usability issues, and you can use AI to optimise layouts and user experience, e.g. on checkout pages to avoid abandoned carts. But it’s about more than sales. AI can analyse customer feedback and reviews to understand the sentiment and identify improvement areas to proactively address problems, improve service, and build coveted brand loyalty with greater ease.
AI Tools Small Business Can Implement
The transformative potential of AI in CRM is undeniable, but we hear you; the choice is overwhelming, and perhaps you don’t know where to start.
Here are some tool suggestions, many offering basic free plans or trials and affordable premium plans (which you may not need).
Marketing Automation
- Mailchimp integrates with existing marketing channels and uses AI to personalise email campaigns and predict customer behaviour.
- HubSpot Marketing has AI-powered features like lead scoring and social media monitoring.
- ManyChat uses AI to automate customer service replies.
Customer Experience and Personalisation Service
- Zendesk Sell uses AI to simplify sales workflow, increase sales and automate repetitive tasks.
- Drift is a chatbot platform using AI to qualify leads and engage website visitors in real time.
- Ada is an AI-powered virtual assistant for answering customer questions and scheduling appointments.
Data Analysis and Insights
- Zoho Analytics incorporates AI-powered analytics features like data visualisation and reporting.
- Matomo is an open-source platform similar to Google Analytics, with a strong focus on data privacy and control.
- Socialbakers is an AI-powered social media analytics and competitor benchmarking platform.
Content Creation and Design
- Jasper AI generates creative text formats like blog posts, ad copy, and social media content using AI
- Canva is a design template tool with AI-powered magic resize and word magic features.
- Midjourney helps you create stunning, dream-like images from text descriptions. It generates unique visuals for marketing materials, social media posts, or website banners.
- Choose one or two tools to begin and experiment with how they work with your business.
- Ensure the tools you select adhere to ethical data practices and obtain customer consent for data usage.
- AI is a powerful tool but shouldn’t replace human expertise and oversight. Use it to augment your team’s capabilities, not replace them.
Let us help you plan your AI CRM
Ready to get AI support and transform your customer relationships? Our team is here to help you identify the perfect AI CRM assistants for your business. Contact us today to find out how!
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