(This column originally appeared in Forbes)
Right now, as I write this, countless software companies are building new features into their products that will leverage ChatGPT, the conversational AI bot that’s recently been made available for license. And we’re just at the very beginning. In the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) space, here are what a few of the big (and not-so-big) names are doing.
The provider of CRM and recruiting solutions for the mortgage and real estate industries has been integrating ChatGPT with its CRM offerings to help its customers easily and efficiently interact with their clients and streamline their sales processes, resulting in — they say — a significant improvement in customer satisfaction, lead generation, and operational efficiency. Features include natural language chat interactions, auto-responses to handle questions and objections as well as coaching assistance for team members.
The popular marketing and CRM platform is using ChatGPT to power its ChatSpot.ai and Content Assistant tools. CMS Wire’s Jennifer Torres writesContent Assistant is “aimed at facilitating marketing and sales teams with the ability to quickly produce and distribute various content types, including blog posts, content for landing pages, website pages, sales and marketing emails, as well as knowledge-based articles.” As for ChatSpot.ai, the company says that it’s different than a ChatGPT clone because it can draw response data from the HubSpot CRM and inter-organizational data sources. It then incorporates a variety of data from other programs and tech including image generator DALL*E 2, Stable Diffusion (a deep learning, text-to-image model), Google Workspace and keyword research in order to provide results more specific to a company’s needs.
Lucas Mearian at Computerworld reports that Microsoft’s new generative AI chatbot — which is based on ChatGPT technology — will draft email responses to customers, create textual summaries of Teams meetings, and generate marketing and sales email campaigns. “Based on OpenAI’s GPT-3, Microsoft’s new Dynamics 365 Copilot is an extension to its existing CRM and ERP software, working alongside those applications to assist in answering questions, creating content, and summarizing conversations and notes,” he writes. “The Copilot bot, which runs on Microsoft Azure’s OpenAI Service, can be used with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales applications to help write email responses to customers and create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook.” That meeting summary will pull in information — like product and pricing — from the CRM system and provide insights from the recorded Teams call.
The real estate sales and marketing platform recently introduced two new AI platforms using ChatGPT called Chocolatechips.ai and Aelo.ai. Chocolatechips.ai embeds new technology in AI imaging, video, text and avatars and can be used by a single user or by teams with permission-based sharing, and collaboration of content which can then be turned into emails, blogs and social media marketing. Aelo.Ai, a fully automated AI driven virtual staging platform empowering agents, builders to allow buyers and prelisted sellers reimagine a variety of home interior or exterior space transformations which they say happens “all in a matter of seconds using uploaded or live photos.”
The CRM system for financial advisors now has a bridge with ChatGPT — thanks to its partner Orion Advisor Solutions — that can analyze conversations between advisors and their clients and suggest solutions — all with the ability to edit before sending.
The business communications platform has rolled out its own AI tool called Jason AI which uses ChatGPT’s technology to generate, personalize and optimize emails. According to a report from Chris Wood of Martech, Jason AI “uses Natural Language Processing algorithms and the ChatGPT language model to identify specific keywords and phrases to recognize the intention of email replies received by the marketer. The tool can then generate suggested responses. Users can select the option to review responses before they’re sent out. If marketers and sales associates are comfortable with the AI’s performance, they can opt for the tool to automatically send out messages without review.”
Salesforce has upgraded its Einstein AI tool to leverage ChatGPT for a wide-ranging number of functional uses throughout its platform. As Eray Eliaçik writes on Dataconomy.com the ChatGPT-powered Einstein will help generate sales activities, including emailing, meeting scheduling, and other ready work automatically. It will also use data-driven personalization to develop unique content for email, mobile, online, and advertising that will attract and retain customers. Because Salesforce owns the collaboration platform Slack, users there will be able to use the Slack-GPT app for artificial intelligence-powered discussion summaries, and to perform deeper research to learn about any topic, as benefit from a writing aid to compose messages swiftly.
A popular customer review and management platform, Widewail has now integrated ChatGPT and other AI features into its platform to support clients that prefer to manage review responses in-house and also to bring new topic and sentiment analysis reporting to all clients. According to a company statement “AI prompts are crafted from years of people-powered responses to provide the most accurate and strategic response possible. Leveraging the data from client systems of record, such as a Point-of-Sale System or CRM, Widewail can generate responses tailored specifically for each of your customers. Business owners can optionally provide custom instructions to Widewail to help ensure responses match specific tone or branding preferences.”
Zoho — a very popular CRM platform for small and mid-sized businesses is using ChatGPT to power Zia, it’s AI-based sales assistant across many of its business applications including CRM, Analytics, Desk, and SalesIQ. Features include extracting important information from customer records, predicting deal outcomes, creating custom emails and templates, and checking for grammatical errors. It will also automatically summarize tickets, analyze customer tone, generate replies from a knowledge base (and track down solutions), create multiple versions of emails, highlight action items, and generate email summaries and transcribe conversations, among other tasks.
When my CRM clients ask me if they should be investing in AI I tell them yes…but not where they think. The software companies mentioned above — and many others — are already leveraging ChatGPT and other AI tools now and will continue to do so in future iterations of their software. Users — my clients — need to invest in training so that they can use these features to better run their businesses.
