How Are Chatbots Boosting The CRM Adoption Rates

One of the biggest challenges organizations face with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms is the low usability and adoption rates. In our experience, this is caused primarily due to two significant reasons:

• Manual data entry: According to HubSpot, manual data entry is the no. 1 CRM adoption challenge. Sales and customer support representatives are often bogged down by the extensive manual entry of customer data. This not only affects their productivity but also demotivates them to use CRM more often.  

• Poor UX: CRMs with poorly designed UX also result in decreased user adoption, productivity, and loss of sales opportunities which negatively impacts revenue. 

A sales representative’s time is invaluable to the company and cutting down on the time spent on manual tasks like data entry allows representatives to close more deals and perform better. 

One effective way to tackle these challenges easily is by integrating a chatbot with your CRM system. CRM chatbots can automate and simplify data-entry, provide faster access to data, enhance the user experience, boost adoption and empower sales reps to focus more on selling.

How Chatbots Help Boost CRM Adoption

1. Automate data entry

The CRM bot mines audio calls whenever a sales rep talks with a prospect or account executive speaks with a customer. It captures keynotes, details, insights from the prospect/customer and enters the data automatically into the CRM system, which sales reps have been manually entering. Bots can go to the lengths of logging all the customer information like budget, cost, challenges, and objections about a product while representatives are on a sales call with the customer.

2. Simplify data entry

Updating customer records will be made simpler with bots as sales representatives can achieve this without logging into the CRM system every time an update has to be done.  Users can chat with the CRM chatbot in natural language and provide voice or text commands to update the records with the relevant details. Ex: “Change lifecycle stage of Customer X from lead to opportunity”, “Add customer Y’s phone number – 1234567890”.

3. Access data faster

In addition to simplifying and automating data entry, CRM chatbots also enable users to access customer information via chat. Users can ask natural language questions like “What is the deal size of customer A”, “When is the follow up due for customer B” etc. right within their actively used messaging app. This conversational workflow eliminates the need to continuously navigate through the complex UX of a CRM system for gaining customer/lead insights.

According to the input received, chatbots can send data in simple text or multimedia formats like graphs or pie charts, etc. 

4. Personalized Alerts

Driven by artificial intelligence, CRM bots will be able to send alerts to sales representatives and account executives about pending action items, KPIs and even sales insights that come in handy during interactions with customers.

Integrate Chatbots With Your CRM systems For Better Adoption and productivity

Chatbots solve the two biggest problems that hinder your CRM adoption rate – manual data entry and poorly designed UX. Chatbots act as a single point of contact for your sales reps for data entry and data access. Users no longer have to go through the clunky UX of a CRM every time they need something from the system – a quick chat does it all.  

The simplification and automation of data entry frees up sales reps who will have more time to handle critical and value-adding tasks that greatly improve productivity and revenue.

Acuvate helps organizations build CRM chatbots with our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore. We support integrations for a plethora of CRM systems including Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Zendesk, Oracle, etc. If you’d like to learn more about this topic and how our clients are benefitting from CRM bots, please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation.