Art, writing, coding: It seems nothing is untouched by AI these days, and contact management is no exception! Despite scare tactics, AI isn’t coming for your job (or your team). If you’re a marketer, business owner, or anyone who uses contact management tools, AI can help you:

• Automate mundane and time-consuming tasks
• Gather intelligent insights about existing lead and customer behavior
• Provide predictive analytics
• Reduce error
• Improve efficiency across the organization

When it’s employed correctly, the whole business benefits through increased efficiency and time in day-to-day operations. 

Think of how long it takes to research your leads’ behavior, for example. If your organization is more advanced, you may have access to a dashboard that shows key data about lead behavior, including when a lead visits your website, what pages they view, and what links they click.

But what do you actually do with this information? AI can not only gather this data for you, but it can take these insights a step further, tracking behavior across multiple channels and actually offering suggestions (or kicking off automated processes) that respond to these insights.

With just this example, you can get a glimpse of how transformative AI can be for your team. Here are some of the key areas where AI is changing contact management.

1. Automation

Even the fastest and most experienced team wouldn’t be able to capture and update customer information at the same speed and level of accuracy as an AI-powered contact management system.

AI is revolutionizing the way businesses manage customer relationships. Automation allows you to quickly and accurately capture, categorize, and store customer data. It helps to keep information accurate and in one central place through your customers’ journey or life cycle. It can trigger important workflows — from sending follow-up emails after a sales call to entering contacts into a drip email campaign after they make a specific purchase.

Aside from being faster and more accurate, the AI automation of tedious tasks can dramatically improve morale across teams. You’d much rather have your top talent focused on creative problem-solving than conducting data entry, right?

The automation of contact management tasks through AI also enables businesses to become more efficient in their operations overall. Companies can save time by letting software handle mundane tasks such as data entry or lead scoring, allowing employees to focus on more important tasks like developing relationships with customers. Through automated features like automated email campaigns and personalized communication strategies, AI-powered solutions make it easier for businesses to build strong customer relationships.

For example: imagine you’re shopping online. You’ve visited an online store several times, and you’ve added a favorite item or two to your cart. You’ve created an account on the site so you can save your cart — but you haven’t made a purchase yet.

AI takes notice and automatically triggers a personalized ad campaign that shows you the items in your cart across multiple channels: Google, Facebook, and Instagram. You’re reminded of these awesome items you haven’t purchased yet, and you revisit the site to make a purchase.

As a contact manager, you never would’ve had the time or resources to collect data about this customer and put it to use manually. But with AI, you can do this multiple times over for all of your customers, freeing up your time.

2. Intelligent Insights

AI can unequivocally gather and assess data faster than any human. When you have a mountain of data to pull from, AI can take this seemingly disparate data and make sense of it — generating insights that would’ve taken you months to obtain on your own.

This includes insights into customer behavior and preferences, which allows you to tailor your communication and marketing efforts accordingly. For example, an AI system may be able to detect patterns in a customer’s purchase history or engagement with emails, so you can turn around and optimize your sales strategies (or set up automations to cater to customers in a more meaningful way).

AI systems are also able to track customer interactions across multiple channels, analyze that data, and suggest the most relevant content or message to send at the right time. This helps customers forge a more emotional connection with your brand since they’re seeing what’s actually interesting to them rather than a broader message for a large group. 

3. Predictive Analytics

Take the section above one step further, and you get predictive analytics. What is predictive analytics? It’s essentially a scientific form of fortune-telling (similar to weather forecasting), where you use data about the past to make educated assumptions about the future.

When you’re using predictive analytics to manage customer relationships, you have the potential to:

• Identify high-value customers who are likely to make additional purchases
• Identify and automatically follow up with leads who are more likely to make a purchase
• Determine whether customers will respond favorably or unfavorably to particular sales strategies or offers
• Identify customers who may need more guidance or attention
• Create content based on shifting customer interests or needs
• Adapt your product or solution to changing trends

Additionally, predictive analytics can help you identify potentially unsatisfied customers before they become unhappy, giving you an opportunity to reach out and ensure that their needs are met. By understanding customer trends and behaviors better, you can make informed decisions about how best to engage with each individual customer in order to build meaningful relationships with them over time.

4. Error Reduction

We mentioned it above, but it bears repeating: humans are far more likely to make mistakes than AI-driven tools. Contact management solutions powered by AI reduce the risk of errors that often come with manual data entry and conflicting information across channels or departments. This often leads to better and more consistent customer service across your organization, which means happier customers, too.

5. Improved Efficiency

With AI-powered contact management tools, efficiency improves dramatically across your whole organization. This extends to email marketing campaigns, lead generation and sales processes, and customer relationship management. AI empowers businesses like yours to save time and resources, as many tedious tasks are eliminated or streamlined for more efficiency. This means employees can focus on core duties, growing the business, and interacting with customers rather than being bogged down with busy work.

Your business contacts are the fuel for your business. Regardless of your role, AI promises a host of valuable opportunities to serve your customers better, which benefits your business well into the future.