It is an undeniable fact that the e-commerce industry has experienced exponential growth in the pandemic situation. Undeterred by this growth, one of the biggest challenges that remain for eCommerce stores is – delivering excellent shopping experiences. Moreover, digital transformation has given birth to a new breed of highly tech-savvy and socially connected customers. Even a single unpleasant shopping experience can result in losing thousands of customers as everything gets viral quickly in a matter of seconds on social media these days. Today, customer experience (CX) is surpassing product quality and price as the key brand differentiator. The best CRM software with AI features can help in overcoming this challenge.
Recent data shows that eCommerce experienced 10 years of growth in just 3 months in the early stages of lockdown in 2020. Now, in this post-pandemic era when people have got used to the “new normal” that trends remote working, stay at home, and online shopping, obviously, ecommerce businesses have a great future ahead. eCommerce businesses need to embrace new technology like Artificial Intelligence to take advantage of this growth and stay ahead of the competition.
Let’s first have a basic understanding of what exactly is AI and then will discuss how AI-powered CRM can help eCommerce companies to create better customer experiences (CX) and gain a competitive advantage.
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Artificial intelligence refers to human-like actions performed by a computer, robot, or any other machine. Artificial intelligence has been used to replace human intelligence upto a certain level by the machines for understanding and responding to a conversation, providing recommendations, capturing data, generating analytical reports, and making decisions. Artificial intelligence is all about feeding the machine with the algorithms to perform functions that a human performs, like reasoning, learning, planning, and creativity. Some of the prominent examples of Artificial Intelligence include – Netflix providing recommendations relating to movies you would like to watch and Facebook recognizing people and automatically tagging them in your photographs.
In this modern business scenario, almost every industry has embraced artificial intelligence. One of the most popular sectors that have benefitted from artificial intelligence is eCommerce. Integrating AI and CRM can benefit all areas of an eCommerce business. Here are some reasons you need to start considering AI-driven CRM for your eCommerce business.
Data Capturing
Online shoppers are now scattered across multiple channels. Omni-channel selling is the need of the hour. Capturing the customer information from different platforms like your website, social media, and other online & offline exhibits has become quite significant for higher conversions. AI-enabled CRM can help you collect the data from multiple platforms you sell on and reduce the duplication of information, keeping your data clean, flawless, and easy to use for your sales team.
Personalized Experience
AI-based CRM includes excellent tools that analyze historical behaviour patterns of the customers and predict future customer behaviour. Based on this analytical data, you can personalize the strategies and offers for your customers and increase their engagement with your store. It helps in connecting with the customers in a personalized way at different stages of their journey. AI-based CRM helps you know the exact requirements of your customers so that you can meet their needs and expectations flawlessly.
Qualifying and Scoring Leads
AI-based CRM can improve the productivity of your sales and marketing team. A traditional CRM system would have eliminated the problem of manual data entry. But, an AI-based CRM would help beyond that by enabling your team members to automate intelligent decision-making tasks when it comes to qualifying and scoring leads. It includes smart algorithms that automate the segmentation of the customers based on specific criteria and filter out the group of potential customers you would like to target for particular marketing campaigns.
Increased Customer Engagement
AI-enabled CRM allows gathering data on a real-time basis as customers interact with your online web store, application, or other social media platform. You can access the information like the time spent by the customers on a particular product or service page, and you can harness the same information to contact the customers and improve their engagement. The AI-enabled CRM can also help in understanding the satisfaction level of your customers on a real-time basis. Once you have this valuable insight, it becomes easy to tweak the strategies, make enhancements, and improve conversions.
Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
The CRM system enabled with chatbots and virtual assistants can help the sales and marketing team automate the process of understanding the prospects’ needs and improving their performance. The chatbots can help in automatically reaching out to the customers who have shown interest in your brand by downloading a whitepaper or submitting the request form on your website. The chatbots and virtual assistants analyze the prospects’ needs and pass on those leads to the human salespeople when they are ready to convert. This allows your sales team to dedicate their time to only quality leads and gain more conversions.
Conclusion
The link between high-quality customer experience and conversions is indisputable. The eCommerce businesses that use updated technology are experiencing exponential growth compared to those that don’t. If you provide great experiences to your customers, they are likely to buy more, be more loyal, and share their positive experiences with their friends and family. This is what every eCommerce company strives for. Isn’t it?
The five pointers cited above clearly depict how AI-powered CRM is driving better customer experiences in eCommerce. The businesses that have already started using AI-enabled CRM are the gainers. For the rest of them, it is time to pull up their socks and select one of the best AI-based CRM and deploy it to create unique and excellent customer experiences.
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Author Bio
| Jemimah Rodrigues Jemimah Rodriguez is senior content writer working with GoodFirms – a reliable platform helping businesses in selecting right Software Companies & Products. For further information, you can get in touch with her on Jemimah@goodfirms.com |
