For a customer’s experience, AI is the new UI. That’s why businesses are looking to harness the power of AI for their customer data to deliver highly-personalized experiences. Across industries, regions, and functions, the opportunities for AI are unprecedented. Accenture predicts that AI will double annual economic growth in 12 countries by 2035. Businesses that fail to catch this next wave of innovation will be lagging behind, while those who succeed will lead in their market.

One example of a company that has harnessed this power to create powerful customer experiences is Black Diamond Equipment, an online retailer of high-end skiing and hiking equipment. Using AI within their CRM and commerce platform, they're able to create an online shopping experience that is not only personalized but also intuitive. Their site relies on sophisticated analysis of the customer's past purchases, current weather conditions, and other important pieces of data, in order to present to the customer highly-tailored product suggestions. Black Diamond has found that because of this, purchasing is up by 10% and there has been a significant drop in cart abandonment rates.

How AI in CRM Drives Value

What is AI in CRM exactly? It all starts with customer data. Intelligent systems collate customer data into one central location, which could include previous communications, purchases, complaints or browsing history. AI uses this data in order to correctly anticipate customer needs.

The biggest challenge faced by all businesses is consolidating this data and sifting through it for relevant information. Businesses tend to store customer data over several disparate systems, including a CRM, marketing, and a customer care app. Bringing this data into one central location and gleaning meaning from it is difficult at best. In this scenario Big Data looks like Bloated Data, impossible to penetrate or navigate.

How Salesforce Einstein Provides the Full Picture

With a unified customer success platform Salesforce is the heart of key customer data for most businesses. Bringing Salesforce Einstein, an intelligence layer, to the platform that can also easily integrate additional data from 3rd party systems, sidesteps the problem of customer data silos as a first step. Next, to eliminate the need to build AI models from scratch, Salesforce Einstein brings sophisticated data analysis and pre-built predictive models to the builders of apps and business processes, without the complexities. This fosters the ideal environment for building various apps and experiences, not just for customers, but for everyone in the organization. Using the same data model, business logic, and the experience layer that powers the CRM — combined with the simple, point-and-click way of creating apps — both IT and business users can leverage a boost of intelligence to deliver AI-powered experiences and a 360 degree view of the customer to anyone.

Using a consumer shopping experience as an example, AI models embedded within the CRM system's personalization engine take into account the catalog that any given shopper sees and the context on how the merchant is engaging with that shopper, and then rank every product for that buyer in terms of relevance from search results, making for the most targeted and personalized results ever. This is done at scale, constantly refining shopper recommendations based on learning.

The data for such recommendations include both historical and real-time click-stream data from multiple sources. By selecting a champion-challenger model algorithm, each experience becomes more personalized and intelligent because the algorithm “learns" from past data and is able to produce results with higher accuracy. The end results of accurate recommendations is that customer conversions skyrocket and the value of your inventory goes up.

These advanced AI algorithms are also able to enhance both employee and customer experiences by using tools as speech recognition, sentiment analysis, intent, content summarization through natural language processing, and question answering based on tables of data.

The key to the embedded intelligence layer within the Salesforce CRM is the point-and-click capabilities for enabling AI for any app, without the need to have a team of data scientists on standby. Everyone in the organization — from programmers to business users—can collaborate to create the right customer experience using iterative, rapid prototyping.

The Salesforce Platform's no- to low-code programming environment brings traditionally no-tech teams onboard, such as customer service and marketing teams, who can actively participate in creating a truly intelligent customer experience. This allows IT to take a coaching role to empower teams right across the organization to create their own AI powered solutions.

Want to create a truly intelligent customer experience? Interested in empowering your entire organization Salesforce's new AI technology? Download Harnessing the Power of AI in CRM to learn more.