Course Project

Information System for Managers

On

Integration of Artificial Intelligence and

Customer Relationship Management

Submitted to:

Prof. Rohan Mukherjee

Submitted by:

Group 11
MBA20061 Adityaroop Pathak
MBA20063 Ahire Ajinkya Suresh
MBA20070 Bhawana Mutneja
MBA20074 Debopriyo Roy
MBA20117 Zulfaquar Ali Haider

Date of submission:
December 17, 2020

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We would like to express our sincere gratitude towards the following as being idealistic channels
and fresh dimensions in the project completion.
We take this opportunity to thank Indian Institute of Management Jammu for giving us the
opportunity to do this project.
We take this opportunity to thank our Coordinator and Course Faculty, Prof. Rohan
Mukherjee, for all his support and help.
We would also like to appreciate dynamic efforts taken by all team members for contributing to
the preparation of this project.

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 CONTENTS

S.No. Particulars Page No.

1. Problem Statement and Objective 4

2. Introduction 5

3. Need for the Integration 5-6

4. Functions 6-7

5. Benefits 7-8

6. Industrial application 8-9

7. Salesforce Einstein 9-12

8. Future Scope 12-13

9. Challenges 13

10. Conclusion 14

11. References 15

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 PROBLEM STATEMENT and OBJECTIVE

Regardless of what industry a company operates, the one crucial focus of each one is to serve the
customer in the best possible way. For every organization customer is the lifeline. Therefore, it
becomes essential to maintain them by catering to their needs. However, owing to failure of
initiatives of customer relationship management, more research and development has been
happening in this area. Today's customers are knowledgeable, are well informed and have variety
to choose from, so their expectation is increasing which is a concern as well as an opportunity for
salesperson knowledge, depth and breadth of communication with customers, service/product
offering, speed and effectiveness of response. Organizations also struggle to efficiently manage
data essential for meeting customer service requirements. The solution to all these issues is
integrating AI into CRM. For overall organizational success, integrated AI with CRM system is
becoming a marketplace reality.
The objective of this report is to study how the integration of Artificial Intelligence with the
Customer Relationship Management software has emerged out to be more effective tool for
better customer satisfaction and customer retention. This latest trend in CRM software is being
seen as a future of CRM. The report also deals with the need behind this integration as well as its
industrial applications and benefits. The report also contains the analysis of Salesforce Einstein,
an AI integrated CRM software. This report also focused on the future and challenges of the
CRM software with embedded Artificial Intelligence technology.

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 INTRODUCTION

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a type of information system which aims to

manage customer relations of an organization effectively to help in customer retention. CRM
keeps a database of all the past and potential customers in order to manage interactions with
them. Every organization focuses on its customers in order to prosper. This information system
helps the organization to build customer relations to increase sales, customer’s satisfaction, and
profitability of the business. CRM is a mix of technologies and strategies which is generally used
by the organizations maintain healthy relationships with their customers in order to retain them
throughout the whole customer lifecycle by enhancing their satisfaction and experience . The
various activities done by the system are keeping customers details, keeping track of the
transactions by the customers, their feedback, and complaints etc. The introduction of CRM
smoothens the function of managing customer by automatically performing the task which
needed to be done manually by the management. CRM manages huge data of its customers, so
the customers need not provide details for every new transaction. Although installation of CRM
requires huge investment, but the benefits reaped by the organization are greater than its cost.
The use of CRM started a way back but there were certain shortcomings of the already existing
CRM and to cope with those shortcomings, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been integrated with
CRM software. Integration of AI with CRM is a recent advancement for better customer
experience and to increase the profitability of the business. Artificial Intelligence is an area of
computer science which aims to create machines which can perform tasks that usually needs
human intelligence. AI emphasizes upon creation of intelligent machines which can perform
tasks like human do. AI can replicate human minds in machines to act like humans. So, Artificial
Intelligence can simulate the human intelligence into machines.

Need for Integration of AI with CRM

There have been various enhancements in CRM software after introducing AI with CRM. Why
was there a need for the integration of Artificial Intelligence with Customer Relationship
Management?
 Increasing volume of unstructured data: There has been an increasing trend of
unstructured trend i.e., data is not well defined. So, AI powered CRM help in structuring
the data which is not feasible without the use of Artificial Intelligence. AI enables the
processing of unstructured data to structured data in a very less time.
 Increasing complexity of relationships: With the growing volume of transactions and
data, the complexity between business processes and customer relationships has also
increased. This increasing complexity makes the analysis of customer patterns accurately.

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 Artificial Intelligence can easily help in eliminating these complexities by automating
various processes and by giving valuable insights to the business.
 Need for real time data: CRM software were designed to use the data efficiently to
manage customers relationships which further helps in decision making. With the
growing size of the business, need for real time data comes into picture. It is required to
process the data as soon as it is available to facilitate the decision-making process much
faster.
 Requirement of predictive analytics and algorithms for lead generation: For
effective lead generation, predictive analytics and algorithms are required. Earlier,
salespersons were dependent upon rule-based lead generation. But with the use of AL in
CRM, lead generation can be turned into algorithms based which can be more accurate
than rule-based lead generation.
 Need for Sentimental Analysis: AI helps in analyzing the conversations with the
customers and allows the assessment of customer’s emotional status by using sentimental
analysis. Knowing about the emotional status of the customer helps the organization to
serve them with the better service. With AI, CRM comprehends the emotions of the
customers.
 Data Integrity: According to a research published, every year:
o 91% data in CRM software is incomplete
o 18% is duplicated
o 70% is rendered stale
CRM systems are filled with dirty and unwanted data which could disrupt the sales
processes and hinders the process of satisfying the customers by providing better
experience. AI can help in cleaning the dirty CRM systems by detecting and deleting
duplicate and obsolete data. Moreover, integration of AI into CRM can help in
completing the incomplete files by updating records on real time basis.

FUNCTION OF AI INTEGRATED CRM

With the integration of AI and CRM, the way of managing customer relationships has changed.
Earlier, the salespersons used to spend huge amount of time to analyze CRM software reports but
with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, the analysis became much easier as well as
consumes lesser time. The use of Artificial Intelligence in CRM gave rise to new features or
functions which are being used by various organizations. The following are some of the
functions of AI integrated CRM software:
 Determine the intent of the customer’s phone calls by giving various options to choose
whenever a customer call. This AI integrated CRM gives indication about the reason

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 behind calling. It also keeps check on the frequency with which these calls are received in
order improve customer satisfaction and ultimately helps in customer retention
 Automatically escalate requests from various customers by processing the customers’
requests based on the huge database of the customers.
 Generate auto responses on the basis of issues and questions of the customers. This
saves time and effort for customer care executives.
 Classify and route necessary calls to respective live agents as per the availability of the
customer care agent.
 Track and analyze consumer satisfaction on social media platforms to move ahead of
various issues and queries of various customers and automatically assign tickets to agents
 Use of Chatbots and Virtual assistants: This feature is one of the most helpful features
to deal with customers’ queries. AI integrated CRM software’s virtual assistants also
keep check on the emotions of the customers.

These features are making the use of Artificial Intelligence in CRM software very popular.

THREE BUILDING BLOCKS NECESSARY FOR SUCCESSFUL

APPLICATION OF AI IN CRM
 Data Unification: Every organization has data coming in from different sources, so data
unification is necessary to create a single customer view. Newer technologies have made
it possible to make the data unification process cheaper, faster, and relatively pain-free.
 Real-Time Insights Delivery: For AI to work its magic it must be able to provide
actionable insights in real-time. The speed at which AI can reveal these insights allows
the departments to answer the internal requests faster than ever before.
 Business Context: Customer journeys are in itself an unique process and every company
has its own set of touchpoints and a distinctive method for using these engagements to
improve their overall customer experience . Now for AI to deliver value it must provide
insights which are useful for the organization and must have a business context it follows.
AI can be used for predicting customer journeys to provide actionable insights for the
departments.

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 BENEFITS OF ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE IN CUSTOMER
RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
Customer Relationship Management is one of the most fundamental components of any business
organization that wants to build a competitive edge in this ever-competitive market. Brands
nowadays primarily focus on customer needs and to maintain a positive customer relationship.
Gone are those days when customers would be satisfied with just a product or service. Customers
nowadays want personalized experience and want to feel special, so most companies have shifted
their primary focus on being customer centric. Customer Relationship Management at present
has been hugely benefited by the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Considering the huge amount of
data companies deal with due to rise in technologies such as IoT and big data, the needs of these
companies have changed. Companies now need a CRM system which is capable of extracting
and analyzing data in real time so that they can take fast and fact-driven decisions that would
ultimately help build positive customer relationships. Moreover, AI also helps companies in
predicting their customers’ behavior and needs and assists their own employees to help improve
customer engagement and retention capacity.
Below mentioned are some of the key benefits of integrating Artificial Intelligence and Customer
Relationship Management:
· Effective Data Management: CRM systems have data coming in from lots of different
sources. So, it is essential to organize the data effectively so that CRM systems can
process and analyze data. With the help of Artificial Intelligence data is managed
effectively and companies can respond accurately and quickly to customer requirements.
· Enhancing Customer Engagement: AI technologies such as speech recognition and ML
algorithms have made it possible to perform in-call analysis for determining the current
mood of customers. They do so by analyzing the speaking pattern, choice of words and
tone of conversation to determine customers’ moods. This helps the employees connect
better to their customers and can slow down their own speech, show more empathy,
lower or increase their voice according to the demand of the situation.
AI algorithms also help in managing and creating multiple advertising campaigns based on
customers' needs. This helps businesses to stay connected with existing customers and attract
newer customers.
· Segmenting Customers: Use of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Relationship
Management help companies become more granular in their segmentation approach.
With the help of deep learning neural networks and ML algorithms organization with the
help of the vast data available to them can help classify customers into different groups
according to their likes, dislikes, demographics etc. Classifying customers into these
different groups helps organizations provide personalized services.
Artificial Intelligence also helps Companies keep track of customers’ purchasing behavior and
can target customers who can easily be converted into leads instead of focusing on a broader
range of customers.

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 · More Application Development: With the integration of Artificial Intelligence in
customer Relationship Management large amount of data is managed effectively and
efficiently which helps companies get important insights which is passed on to the
development team. The development team with the help of these insights builds easy to
use and intuitive applications that help improve conversion rates and create positive
customer experience.
· Customer Confidence: With the help of Artificial Intelligence companies can provide
security and safety technologies such as face recognition, voice recognition etc. This
helps customers build more trust. AI also helps in keeping the data of customers’ safe.

INDUSTRIAL APPLICATION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN

VARIOUS SECTORS

Almost 91 % of the companies with over 11 employees use a Customer Relationship

Management (CRM) system. Demand for the hour is of CRM systems getting more accurate and
more intelligent and with increased volume of unstructured data and growing complexities
around the customer relationship management processes, AI technology is becoming a necessity.
However as indicated by a report by Freshworks, only 12% CRM users use AI powered tools.
Coca-Cola is such an example of a company which harnesses the power of AI to get valuable
customer insights. They created Cherry Sprite as a new flavor after collecting and analyzing data
from the smart self-service soft drink fountains the had installed earlier. Coca-Cola used the
power of AI to create this whole new flavor as per customer needs, which helps in both getting
new customers and retaining the earlier ones.
Here we discuss the integration of AI tools into sales and marketing domains related to an
organization:
· Marketing: In recent years AI has seen its rise in the field of marketing with companies
primarily focusing on creating more personalized experiences for its customers. These AI
tools earlier present with large enterprises can now be used by small enterprises too as it
has become more affordable over the years. These artificial Intelligence tools keep on
constantly running at the background of popular products such as Netflix, Google,
Amazon etc. are helping the company gain key customer insights. Companies are now
able to get real time customer insights to create more personalized website experiences
and create content and advertisements as per the customer insights harnessed. Companies
can even use these AI tools to judge the success of various campaigns and projects and
learn ways to refine them.

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 · Sales: With the use of algorithms of Artificial Intelligence, CRM identifies most
potential leads which can be converted into sales. The huge database of CRM allows to
analyze customer’s data automatically to convert leads into sales. The sales forecast done
by AI integrated CRM is highly accurate. AI integrated CRM sends notifications to the
system when there is a delay in converting the leads into sales. It keeps a check on time
taken to convert the leads into sales. It also facilitates the analysis of buying patterns and
behavior of customers. Based on that analysis, it sends reminder notifications to the
customers to buy the product or avail the services. With the help of AI integrated CRM
software, the process of sales cycle from creating awareness to closing the deal is
automated.

SALESFORCE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Salesforce, the company is famously known for revolutionizing the CRM industry through its
innovative use of cloud computing. CRM has become affordable for businesses. One does not
need to maintain or upgrade the CRM system. Uses and features can be added anytime,
accessible from multiple devices.
Why CRM?
Let us imagine a shop where a customer enters to buy shoes. The shopkeeper must clearly
understand the customer choices to match their preference and requirement with the shoes,
therefore offering the best service. The shopkeeper also needs to collect all the data to understand
the end-user needs and give a recommendation. This scenario applies to all sorts of companies,
including information age and industrial age companies.
There is a need for a massive amount of data, data scientists, engineers, preparation of that data,
and huge technology infrastructure to give recommendations. Artificial intelligence (AI) is, as
mentioned above in the report, a technology that can store huge volumes of data in the cloud. AI
encompasses machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and analytics. It has
a self-learning feature from our interactions and helps to identify the customer's expectations. AI
can possess all customers' data and perceive everything about their choice. This will help the
business to become smarter. It is based on three things in the picture mentioned below.

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Let us take the case of Salesforce further-
Suppose a bank has its application built on the Salesforce CRM platform, upgraded with
Einstein. The AI would be able to decipher who the customers are, the history of their banking
activity, and solving their issues based on their queries in the past and present. The advantage is
that the customers can get their questions answered faster, which will lead to greater customer
satisfaction. Satisfied customers help to increase revenue for the bank. Significantly, the
customer service managers no longer must go through long lists of incoming service calls to
prioritize their time.
What is Salesforce Einstein?
Salesforce Einstein is like keeping a data scientist to bring AI into the customer relationship. Its
self-learning feature helps it learn from customer data sourced from email, CRM data, social, &
IoT (Internet of Things), helping in offering recommendations and predictions in the context of
what you are trying to achieve. AI has benefits aspects of the business apart from customer
service. Sales representatives no longer must enter sales data manually. Marketers do not need to
use manual testing to select the best social media images for their next campaign.
Different Einstein platforms -
• Einstein Voice gives the ability to talk to Salesforce and have an AI-powered assistant on any
device
• Einstein Bots enables building a custom service chatbot trained on CRM data, natural language
processing (NLP), and customer feedback using a simple point and click interface.
• Einstein Prediction Builder: allows admins to make predictions on standard or custom objects
in Salesforce with clicks, using a simple wizard.

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• Einstein Discovery: helps business analysts find important insights hidden in the CRM data,
also explaining those key insights using simple language, and then furthering these insights into
Salesforce
• Einstein Next Best Action: enables delivery of contextual recommendations at the time of
engagement by using a combination of Salesforce data, third-party data, business rules, and
predictive models.
• Einstein Vision and Language allows a developer to build smarter apps using a set of APIs that
give them the ability to use their unstructured image and text data.
Salesforce Einstein: The Elements for True Customer Intelligence
Salesforce Einstein improves the digital experience for the employees working in several roles
with distinct levels of responsibility-
Sales Cloud Einstein enhances the experience for sales representatives by scoring leads, pointing
to prospects who are most likely to become customers, and identifies deals in the pipeline that
has higher possibility yield sales.
Marketing Cloud Einstein provides insightful recommendations which helps to increase average
order values, convert more anonymous web visitors into prospects and finally into customers,
and recommend the next best product, content, or offer for customers.
Einstein Social Insights helps marketers by helping in managing social interactions by
automatically analyzing their sentiment, tone, and degree of spam. These tools help in increasing
employee effectiveness and satisfaction.
Why is it unique?
Two features that make Einstein different from other platforms-
 An automated way of data cleansing makes it unique. For instance, if there is a particular
feature that is highly correlated with another, and it can automatically detect and remove
it. Alternatively, if there is a particular column that does not have much variance, it can
be removed.
 Second, it can surface insights about the models, called explainability. This informs the
user of things such as, "These were the most interesting factors in your models," giving
insightful results to the user.
How do Einstein and Watson work together?
Einstein is focused on structured customer data to predict likely outcomes, facilitate smarter
decision-making, enhance recommendations, automatically score, and prioritize sales leads, and
send notifications and alerts about the same. Succinctly, Einstein provides insights from CRM
data, Watson on the other hand, excels at developing meaning and sense of unstructured data that
is not necessarily within a business' database–drawing insights from emails, texts, images,
customer surveys, and social media. In practice, Einstein and Watson's collaboration allows an
insurance company to pull local forecast data from IBM Weather into Salesforce and
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automatically send safety and policy information to customers who are at risk of being affected
by a severe weather crisis.

FUTURE SCOPE

1. Intelligent Automation: By mixing AI with CRM, we can automate the manual,

repetitive tasks intelligently and redesign the workflow. These models will be used to
predict customer behavior, evaluate sales data, predict revenue with maximum accuracy.
AI will support CRM to improve all the business operations by increasing routine tasks
and giving virtual help to employees.
2. Data drilling appliance: AI with CRM will convert the entire customer interaction from
human intervention to AI led. It will increase customer satisfaction. CRM platforms will
act on various roles such as a personal assistant to the CRM stakeholders. It will work
like agents, sales executives, decision makers, etc.
3. Transcribe the Sales Calls & Analyze them: 'Artificial intelligence call analytics
software’ can be used to record meetings and calls, take notes and collect transcripts.
Users are able to add trackers to go back to a specific time in conversations after the call
has ended. Sales departments can identify the best practices and trends in phone calls and
combine it with CRM data to compare with historical context.
4. Guidance to new learners: AI enabled CRM tools will help in conducting training with
little human intervention. It will decrease the necessity for training managers.
5. Engage and Follow-up using Email: Conversica is an Artificial intelligence assistant
which is an automated human-like machine that does following activities like engaging,
taking follow-ups, and cross-selling. Conversica works with a high success rate. It helps
to get the best phone number, time to call, feedback, everything using email.
6. Everyday life with Bots: Chatbots is going to be the next mobiles. They are going to rule
our daily life. In the coming future, with AI integration, they are going to be a lot more
intelligent and integrated. This will combine customers’ both past and dynamic data and
records. It will provide real-time advice for sales pitches and corrections too.
7. NLP: Natural Language Processing or NLP, which is also known as speech recognition
will become more advanced and will provide an emotional analysis of the speech. It
would help in targeting dissatisfied customers in no time. It will find out customer
behavior and help sales and marketing team to make new strategies.

CHALLENGES
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 1. Technical: Generally, customers want their queries to be resolved within a very less time
duration. So, they prefer human agents over automated. So, these agents need access to
business information in order to deliver the information as quickly as possible and this
service is delayed if the IT team does not agree to it. The APIs should also be reliable and
useful when it comes to peak time.
2. Political: Virtual agents act on a lot of parts of the company like its brand. So, the
decision to commit to virtual agents typically involves the head of customer service and
decision makers, including the chief management, since the virtual agent can become a
highly visible part of the brand.
3. Cultural: It depends on the company if it wants to let the automated agents talk to
customers or human agents. When the customers become familiar with the automated
machines, they like using them as long as their problems are getting resolved.
4. Less Customer Support: There are very few people who know how to operate machines
(AI based) which think and work automatically. Very few organizations are interested to
invest in it.
5. Creating Confidence: People are not comfortable when they do not know the process
about how the decision was made. For example, banks use simple techniques which use
normal math's and it is easy to explain to the customers. But AI, being a little complex
algorithm, does not make customers feel trusted and this is one of the biggest challenges
faced.

CONCLUSION

CRM is a goldmine of exquisite and useful information given by A.I. You will survive. The more your
information is structured and the more the data collection processes are optimized, the better. On a
completely different level, you will be able to communicate with your customers and make informed
decisions based on the most up-to-date information. A.I. technology has become the soul of CRM.
Companies with AI technology can run automated email campaigns that collect information directly from
the CRM system. Customer communication record analysis can provide crucial insights into future
behavior and buying habits. The benefits and advantages of A.I. for business organizations are
exponentially favorable. Many benefits have been discussed in the report earlier, opening advocating
reasons for A.I. to be adopted in the organization for enhanced Customer Relationship Management. This
combination offers avenues and the potential to improve customer knowledge, providing an incentive for

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greater loyalty and satisfaction for customers and eventually allowing more profit to be made. The CRM
of Salesforce was explored in the process, providing a background for Salesforce Einstein addressed later.
There is a flipside too which needs to be considered in which it is difficult to imagine that a computer
could be wrong, and they may always be "right" mathematically or systematically, but humans are
composed of so much more than just formulas and statistics. Humans are distinctive and have several
ranges of tastes and interests that cannot be scaled down to an equation. The fact that we are continually
evolving and growing is the very thing that makes us human, and there are always exceptions to the rule.
Elon Musk too has indicated that AI should be monitored because of the different threats it poses.
To conclude, we are approaching the age of intelligent CRM, and the future looks promising with the
integration of AI with CRM. Industry experts expect the global CRM market to expand by 2021 at a
Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 13.7 percent. The expectation of greater built-in machine
intelligence in CRM systems is part of the reason for that progress. More smart and efficient decision-
making, consumer intelligence and customers’ positive engagement are driven by marketing data,
insights, and customer-centric knowledge. A new era of smart, integrated CRM systems and platforms is
expected to enable the next generation of functionalities i.e. The Application Programming Interface.
Through electronic networks like the internet, commerce has turned into more one-on-one
communication. This generates a need for consumers for more individualized interactions and businesses
for more personalized services. One of CRM's key goals is to provide better insights into the interests and
desires of consumers, thereby creating a need for more personalized marketing. A.I. with its
Strengthening data processing capabilities enhances personalized business steps to the next level.

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REFERENCES

 https://www.commercient.com/why-artificial-intelligence-integration-in-
crm-is-the-future-for-your-business/#:~:text=Integrating%20AI
%20into%20CRM%20can,the%20best%20leads%20for%20sales.
 https://www.forbes.com/sites/falonfatemi/2019/08/10/5-ways-artificial-
intelligence-is-transforming-crms/?sh=78deec8d5354


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