How does Salesforce Use Artificial Intelligence?

Salesforce is a customer relationship management platform that uses the cloud to perform. It was founded in 1999 by Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, Marc Benioff, and Frank Dominguez. This platform works as a software as a service(SaaS) which makes it extremely convenient to use due to the fact that no installation is required in order to use this platform. 

 

Salesforce is a software that offers a platform to communicate with clients, customers, or whomsoever and you could also resolve queries for your customers or clients by answering the question asked by your clients, all of this is happening on the cloud. Therefore, Salesforce helps you to make better interactions with your clients to ensure their needs. Let’s learn in detail about a CRM platform.

 

 

What are CRM platforms?

 

Customer relationship management (CRM) is responsible for forming healthy communication between your clients with the business platform. One of the key objectives of such a system is to point out the needs and queries related to the business, this allows the potential customers to become actual customers. This type of system is meant to help build a good relationship with either the business partners, colleagues, or customers. 

 

Everyone achieves something or the other from this platform, for a business, it is a way to increase the audience through resolving their issues and more, and if we think with the perspective of a customer, this is a great system to interact with the business and such communication gives a sense of security to a customer.

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CRM platform Illustration

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CRM tool saves everything on the cloud, from the data like information regarding the customer, potential customer, opportunities, queries/issues, and anything of importance. The shared use of such a platform makes it highly convenient to use, for example, you and your trusted colleagues could see how the customer interaction is going on. 

 

A CRM tool could be a great way to increase your sales and bloom the business, from a startup to a big organization it could be used by anyone and the right kind of use might get fruitful results.

 

According to the Gartner (Research and Advisory Company), CRM is going to be the largest revenue software by 2021, this shows how much potential this sector holds. Maximum businesses that have been using CRM have seen a significant amount of profit from this tool/software.

 

(Must read: Customer Behavioral Analytics)

 

 

Features of Salesforce CRM

 

Salesforce CRM platform is arguably the best CRM tool that is being used today, the reason behind the success of salesforce is the features it provides and the ease of usability, let’s discuss salesforce CRM features in detail-:

 

1. Salesforce is a cloud platform: being a cloud platform makes everything so less complex and efficient, every work you do is saved on the cloud which means, you need not take any unnecessary stress over local storage, everything is handled by the internet. 

 

2. Uses SaaS: The benefit of software as a service(SaaS) is that it allows you to use a tool or software on the internet itself, which means you don’t need to download the tool, hence, storage is not even needed for installation.

 

3. Easy Access: As this is cloud-based software, it becomes easy to access over the internet from any part of the world. This ease of access is one of the reasons why this is the number one CRM platform.

 

4. Third-party Integration: This software allows third-party integration, for example, Gmail could be integrated which makes it extremely helpful.

 

5. Affordable: Affordability is one of the main reasons it is widely accepted and loved by so many businesses regardless of the status, i.e, it is as affordable as a startup would want it to.

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Features of Salesforce

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(Recommended read: Cloud computing tutorial)

 

 

Salesforce Technologies

 

Majorly there are three technologies that salesforce uses, these three are VisualForce, Apex, and compiler. 

1. Apex is a programming language specially designed for the use of salesforce as a developer, the whole software is based on this particular programming language.

2. VisualForce is a framework that is again designed and created by salesforce itself, this framework is used by the salesforce developers that use the apex programming language to create custom UI.

3. To compile the programs based on the apex programming language, salesforce has its own compiler, this shows the amount of work that has been done in order to create this perfect software, this also provides additional security to the software.

 

Thanks to the tons of features and beautifully crafted technologies, salesforce is trusted by many tech giants like pizza hut, sony, HCL technologies, Nikon, L’oreal, and thousands of small startups. Also, the pricing starts from as low as 25 dollars per month which makes it quite affordable.

 

As of the reports of 2017, it was claimed that over 1,50,000 companies are using this software as a CRM platform which shows the sheer amount of trust and brand value of this incredible software.

 

While surfing to the Salesforce website, the following data was concluded-:

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Testimonial results delivered by salesforce

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The above data is the testimonial that this platform tends to provide significant results, from sales revenue to lead conversion, from customer satisfaction to faster deployment, salesforce covers it all.

 

(Similar lead: How Facebook uses Big Data to enhance customer experience?)

 

Salesforce uses Artificial Intelligence

 

With the growing horizon of artificial intelligence, it is not possible that a CRM platform would go untouched with this technology, salesforce term its AI system as salesforce einstein and is one of the first CRM platforms to integrate an Artificial intelligence system.

 

Machine learning and natural language processing are the two most used AI techniques used by the salesforce AI for their predictive analysis, one thing that helps their model learn fast and accurately is that their source of data is huge, they don’t rely on other resources to get data, well they have their own data. 

 

The artificial intelligence salesforce use helps in marketing, sales, service, and more. With the help of their enormous dataset and machine learning, they could easily predict which customer is more likely to buy a product, hence providing a lead on the potential customers.

 

Some frequently asked questions are used to make a dataset that could be used by a chatbot, after learning this chatbot would be able to give answers to the maximum questions with ease which makes customer interaction extremely fast and better.

 

Artificial intelligence methods in salesforce are also used to increase the rate of conversion of the potential buyer to the happy customer by predicting the engagement score with current techniques.

 

When it comes to showing the relevant advertisements to the customers, salesforce does a great job in doing so. Artificial intelligence improves the ad experience for the user by predicting the ads that are most likely to get recognized by the user.

 

Salesforce Tools with ML and NLP

 

Salesforce names the 5 main natural language processing and machine learning tools they use -:

 

1. Einstein Discovery-: 

 

This analytics tool is responsible for giving the most relevant advice to the users regarding customer engagement with the help of the customer data. These recommendations systems from Einstein discovery are highly beneficial for the user to get an insight into customer behavior

 

 

2. Einstein Next Best Action-: 

 

With the help of Einstein next best action, you would know whether the customer is showing interest in the business anymore or not and what could be the possible steps to keep them in the business, for example: If the next best action says to email them the new deal, that means the new deal might interest them as a customer.

 

 

3. Einstein Prediction Builder-: 

 

This tool is based on the likelihood, how much likely a potential customer is to convert into a regular customer or whether a customer would like to continue or not, whether the customer is going to pay in time, or not based on the previously collected data. This tool also provides custom-based likelihood queries.

 

 

4. Einstein Bots:- 

 

Einstein bots are the advanced chatbots that are used to resolve the frequently asked issues from the customers, which saves a lot of time for a user. The question is automatically updated based on the data it collects. This natural language processing technique is helping thousands of users of salesforce.

 

 

5. Einstein Language:- 

 

This tool is purely based on natural language processing, this tool is designed for the sentiment analysis of the customer by analyzing their texts via email, chatbot, or other sources. 

 

For example, if the customer writes “ You are doing a fantastic job”, the Einstein language will notice that this is an appreciation text and will notify you about the customer reviews. This is a great and time-saving way to analyze the customer response rather than manually reading them all, it could be hundreds or thousands for a day. 

 

(Must catch: AI applications)

 

 

Conclusion

 

Although Salesforce is the world’s number one CRM platform, with a lot of unique features and integrated artificial intelligence system, it gets huge competition from Microsoft Dynamics as it offers ten times more storage than salesforce and more dynamic language support ( Supports over 35 programming languages). 

 

Even with seemingly better features, it could not grab the world’s number 1 spot because of the easy UI/UX and fluent working of Salesforce’s software.