Boost Inside Sales Success: Integrate Your Contact Center with AI and CRM

As the B2B sales landscape has evolved, so have the opportunities to leverage the value of artificial intelligence (AI) in your contact center. Inside sales teams using CRM in the contact center now have access to a wide range of cost-reducing, efficiency-driving AI and automation solutions that can boost sales close rates.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 30% of all B2B companies will employ AI to augment at least one of their primary sales processes.

But first understanding which AI solutions to invest in—and how those investments can work with proper CRM integration—is critical to using them successfully and achieving a high ROI.

Enhance CRM Data through Powerful AI

To create more personalized sales experiences for B2B customers (and support them with more proactive customer service, you need a truly holistic view of who they are—their preferences, purchasing history, behaviors, past interactions with your contact center, and more.

A CRM integration helps to provide a holistic customer view to your inside sales team, but AI solutions can enhance it. By augmenting the information in your CRM, AI solutions can deliver an even more complete, comprehensive view of the customer.

Powerful AI-driven analytics tools can use your CRM data to deliver predictive insight on customers, too. This leads to more proactive outreach by your sales team, higher close rates, and increased customer retention.

For example, your CRM may store customer account information and purchase patterns. But your inside sales team may struggle to manually enter that information and monitor those patterns. Your team may not recognize the right time for outreach or the right customer approach, which threatens your entire sales revenue strategy.

With AI integrated in your contact center, the data stored in your CRM is automatically tracked. AI-powered predictive modeling can keep reps informed and on-the-ball, so that customers are contacted with the right information at the right time to boost retention and sales productivity.

Build a Better Understanding of Your Customer’s Journey

From chatbots to natural language understanding in your IVR system, many AI solutions can also work in tandem with CRM to generate robust customer journey profiles.

For example, your team may know who a customer is, what they have purchased, or what products and services they may be eligible for, all thanks to CRM. But with AI-enabled speech and text analytics, sentiment analysis, and predictive behavioral modeling in your contact center, your inside sales team can get a full picture of your customer’s journey, how they feel about your brand, and what may be driving their engagement.

To learn how a modern cloud contact center, integrated with CRM and AI, can boost your inside sales revenue, download the new 2020 Innovation series white paper, “Amplifying the Value of AI in the B2B Contact Center.”