Small businesses grow in various stages, beginning with just existing. Mind you, existence as a small business is directly proportional to acquiring enough customers through excellent service and having enough cash to cover every business expense.
Once a small business starts breaking even, that's an indication for the owners to make a decision. Whether to stay stable or expand the business and turn this success into growth, it needs to maintain its small business core qualities of personalization and premium customer service.
How do you do this when there's so much going on as a small business owner or managing a small team? Such business growth requires robust tools like customer relationship management (CRM) that will turn all the customer interaction data and boost data-driven strategies for SMBs.
Now, CRMs are not just your usual customer contact database but offer artificial intelligence for small businesses. Artificial intelligence is a game changer for small businesses. With AI agents, they can save costs, easily scale their operations capacity, and make smart decisions with detailed predictive analytics.
Adapting to a Digital, AI-Driven Landscape
Customers are becoming used to faster and smoother processes with everything getting a touch of AI. The same is the case with CRMs. They are genuinely becoming not just assistants for customer-facing marketing, sales, and customer service teams but AI agents who can work as team players.
For instance, your sales team wants to reach out to past customers who made several purchases with you and need to be targeted again with a new campaign. You don't need to put someone to look for these customers, generate a list, and then craft emails based on their purchases and preferences. Make the AI do it, and within minutes, you'll have personalized emails for every customer. That's how AI is changing everything.
Enhancing Customer Service and Reducing Data Silos
The first step in becoming a more significant professional business is to have a unified data source that enables you to always provide excellent customer service. With so many customers and complex customer issues, having piles of customer data is never enough. But with more customer data becomes a greater responsibility to manage it. CRMs can effectively manage customer data, organize it and break data silos by bringing all teams together with a unified business view.
When the customer support team knows the specifics of the product sold to the customer, the deal made, and the issues being reported, it creates a streamlined process. Even when dealing with an angry customer, support teams can reference the customer's history and collaborate with the sales team to provide the best possible solutions and deals.
Prioritizing Personalized Experiences in SMB Marketing
Small businesses excel at providing a personalized experience. With just a few customers, they can truly understand every customer and pitch deals and solutions that hit the sweet spot and make them repeat customers. This is the top Small to medium business (SMB) marketing strategy.
The problem, however, is that as a small business grows, knowing every customer's history becomes a hassle. CRM takes over this responsibility and studies customer behaviors and preferences to provide a personalized experience. Marketers cherish this information and craft highly personalized emails, SMS messages, and more.
Embracing AI Across Various Business Applications
The core of personalization is having enough data to know the other person, their preferences, and what would delight them. It's the importance that you feel when someone remembers little details about you and takes care of you. CRM, AI, and data together make your customers know that they are important.
Distinct applications use this AI to make the most of the data gathered through AI. AI can speed up various processes by looking up information in the company database, pulling up customer history, drafting personalized customer messages, and much more.
AI-powered CRM features
CRMs come with AI features that assist customer-facing teams in providing faster and better personalized customer experience.
Lead Scoring
Whenever someone places a message or fills out a lead gen form on your website, CRM creates a new contact and starts tracking the conversation. With limited resources, investing efforts in all people reaching out to your business becomes difficult. AI greatly assists the sales agent by scoring every lead to highlight where efforts are to be focused to convert the highest potential lead into paying customers.
Chatbots And Virtual Assistants
Small businesses have smaller teams, which makes it their most significant challenge to serve customers. Service agents can maximize their potential with chatbots that can answer redundant customer questions 24/7, provide setup guidance step-by-step, and generate case summaries to better handle frustrated customers.
Social Media Listening
Today, one of the biggest SMB marketing trends is closely listening to what people are saying about their brand online. This gives them a unique standout as they can engage in conversations where they're being compared with their competitors, trolled on some marketing glitch, or simply praised for their product or service.CRMs can monitor social media and notify teams promptly to jump into conversations and make a marketing moment catch attention.
As CRMs connect to social media, they can identify customer segments based on their interests, demographics, topics they follow, etc. They can also identify potential customers based on repeat website visits, product views, products added to the cart, and more. An automated task can be set for AI to generate a personalized marketing email for interested customers with offers and more to convert them into buyers.
Data-Driven Strategies
AI supports small businesses in analyzing customer data and picking patterns to make better strategic decisions. As for the SMB marketing strategies is all about adding personalized based on understanding real customer needs and then crafting compelling messages to boost conversions.
Data Collection And Analysis
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) collects data from various sources. Since this application is connected to websites, social media, surveys, forms, and more, the data collected via these sources automatically reflects on the CRM. The CRM then compares and contrasts data to identify gaps and provide suggestions based on insights on customer segmentation, purchase patterns, and more. SMBs can then confidently make strategies based on this data.
Predictive Analytics
CRM has access to plenty of data to predict upcoming business trends accurately. This can include alerts on changing buyer preferences and suggestions for new products based on what customers have asked for in comments, emails, feedback, etc.
Additionally, it can review production scales and inventory levels and make accurate calculations for required inventory levels to match upcoming demand. Small businesses greatly benefit from such insights. As small business owners or teams, they already have a lot on their hands, and this could be a great help in keeping them prepared for what's coming.
Data Visualization
Small businesses are constantly learning and growing, and they can't know everything about business numbers. Here, data visualization is their best bet. AI can create custom dashboards with all the necessary information and reports that genuinely matter.
Complex data information is broken down into understandable stats to make informed decisions. After all, small businesses often just have one decision-maker, and having strong stats makes him all the more confident in making decisions.
How AI agents make a difference for small businesses
AI Integration in SMBs is not just in the form of applications enabling a few AI features here and there; it is more than that. Powerful CRMs like Salesforce take this a step ahead, or more appropriately, where it truly saves manpower, which is in the form of AI agents.
These AI agents evolved from the basic technology of Einstein AI, a chatbot that was available to agents to extract information from company databases about the company, products, or customer history simply by chatting with the bot. These were of great assistance to the service and sales teams. The AI evolution took a sharp turn with autonomous AI agents, which could do specific jobs based on the job description and assigned tasks.
Such artificial intelligence in small businesses is a transformative breakthrough, bringing down business operations costs, the need for human resources, and speeding up redundant and mundane tasks.
AI Agents Cost Analysis
Digital transformation for small businesses is always a positive step but it comes at a cost. Similar is the case with AI. Though CRMs that offer AI tools can be affordable, as we have listed here, having CRM AI agents is different. They are certainly far more efficient and accurate in their jobs, but developing them can be costly.
Some CRMs require custom AI agents or workflow development, which adds to the CRM costs. CRM experts who can proficiently develop AI solutions apt for small businesses are required.
Salesforce CRM recently launched Salesforce Agentforce, with which you can create a digital workforce of AI agents for every type of task. Setting it up is simple: Explain the job to the agent in plain language. The agent will break it up into steps and do the job by sticking to your set guardrails. Salesforce calls it the AI breakthrough, and we have broken down the cost for your small business, which you can read in detail here.
The crux is that it may seem like a high cost, but when you don't have to employ a human agent for redundant tasks, you save a lot of employment costs.
Conclusion
Small business technology adoption rates are often higher than those of bigger businesses, as anything that makes their jobs easy can significantly enhance efficiency and productivity, enabling them to compete more effectively in the marketplace. The effect of using artificial intelligence in small businesses is similar.
Artificial intelligence is very beneficial for devising data-driven strategies for SMBS. Furthermore, it enhances customer experiences by personalizing based on data collected from various sources, including websites, social media, etc. All of this reduces the burden on small businesses' limited resources and maximizes operational efficiency and productivity.
However, implementing these AI solutions comes at a cost that is not just about investing in the tool but also includes implementation, development, and customization costs. For instance, to leverage your CRM for AI and data to drive growth, you can seek assistance from CRM experts like RT Dynamic. We can offer consultation and help you develop the best AI solutions for your business. Contact us today.
