How to Use Conversational CRM to Drive Sales

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As a direct response to increased customer expectations and greater affordability of advanced digital technologies, conversational CRM has grown in popularity. It combines a whole host of different technologies converging around a single focus: the end customer.

From improved UX to artificial intelligence and social messaging, conversational CRM promises advancements and outcomes in customer satisfaction. But what else can it bring to the table when it comes to driving sales and team performance?

Before we dive into the deep end, let’s take a closer look at what conversational CRM is, how it works, and what it entails.

What Is Conversational CRM?

“Conversational CRM” refers to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that includes the integration of messages from a variety of platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Email, and Slack. All these conversations automatically link to the relevant account owner in your CRM. That way, customer and sales narratives can be managed in real-time together, allowing salespeople to easily develop insights.

Chatbots are another helpful tool. What’s so great about combining chatbots with conversational CRM? It enables the collection of customer insights data, which empowers customer-facing teams to have more productive interactions.

Traditional vs. Conversational CRM

Traditional CRM is rooted in a set of applications designed to improve data management, automate sales and marketing processes, and evaluate customer behavior. This is a time-consuming process, as the data needs to be manually updated. As a result, information is often out of date.

Conversational CRM is constantly being updated by chatbots and other AI software. This helps messages sent to customers stay relevant and geared toward enhanced customer experience that goes beyond low-insight email campaigns.

3 Benefits of Conversational CRM

There are many benefits of using conversational CRM, including:

• Improving the overall customer experience

• Creating more personalized and organic interactions with prospects and customers

• Saving time and money

Let’s take a closer look at each benefit below.

Building a memorable & positive customer experience

By having all your customer and prospect conversations in one place, you can make sure your message is consistent and work to build a stronger overall customer experience.

Conversational CRM also facilitates smooth and personalized support via the communication channel prospects and customers are most comfortable with, including SMS business texting, email, and social media.

Taking personalization to the next level

Sales and support chatbots have been around for a while. But generic chatbots typically offer generic experiences that frustrate customers. Enter conversational CRM chatbots, also known as conversational AI.

Not only do conversational CRM chatbots add an AI spin of modernization to their generic counterparts, but they also enrich the customer experience with detailed personalization while filling customer data gaps.

Just imagine the kind of impact prospect and customer communication can have with CRM chatbot insights collected in real-time. Messages sent to customers stay more relevant while unnecessary messages aren’t sent at all.

Fostering organic, human connections that enable cross-selling

Thanks to social media and texting apps, there are endless ways of connecting with prospects and customers. According to Harvard Business Review, texting apps, “provide a stable bond between customers and brands”, promoting regular communication and more natural conversation.

This conversational bond of consistent (and honestly often informal) communication means sales messages start to feel less aggressive and pitch-like, making way for a value-add dynamic that enables upselling and cross-selling.

Saving time and money

With the help of conversational CRM and chatbots, you can greatly reduce time-consuming data entry. Needless to say, the time savings can be reinvested in scaling more meaningful prospect interactions.

Better still, operational costs start to drop thanks to the reduced need to create and maintain all the admin workflows that conversational CRM makes partly or completely redundant.

Security risks (and the costs that go along with it) are also reduced thanks to information being stored in a cloud-based conversational CRM database.

Making the Switch From Traditional to Conversational CRM

Integrating conversational CRM sounds like it’ll involve endless meetings, stakeholder alignment, and project work, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Let’s take Zendesk as an example. Aircall’s one-click Zendesk integration makes switching from traditional to conversational CRM pretty much foolproof. You’ll also be able to bring across any Zendesk customer history data you’ve accumulated.

Besides Zendesk, Aircall also integrates with 100+ other business systems such as Slack, WhatsApp, and JIRA. This means you can avoid enlisting endless third parties for managing your Conversational CRM.

Impact your sales, CRM & customer satisfaction strategy with industry-leading integrations

Aircall has built the leading app ecosystem with 100+ one-click integrations, connecting to your CRM, customer analytics platform, help desk, and other collaboration tools. Imagine what your sales and support teams could achieve with prospect and customer call data flowing between all business systems.

There’s only one way to find out.

Whether you want to connect your Aircall phone system to develop conversational CRM capability, road test other productivity integrations, or save time and money on management, operations, and strategy, a seven-day free trial of Aircall is the place to start.

Published on February 6, 2023.