How to ace the customer communication game with generative AI

The significance of customer communication

Communication is the key to any good relationship—including your customer relationships. The best products and services may never see the light of day if your messaging doesn't reach or resonate with your target audience.

Across the customer lifecycle, effective communication is required to achieve the following:

• Maximize the reach of your products or services.

• Identify and engage with interested leads.

• Help them understand how your products or services can address their unique requirements.

• Communicate product updates.

• Help customers resolve issues and achieve success with your solutions.

In short, a well-designed communication strategy is critical in acquiring new customers and retaining your existing customers as well.

Why quality content matters  

Two important aspects of your customer communication are its content and presentation, both of which can make or break your brand. You need to include relevant information, present it in context, and ensure timely interactions. When your reps have too much on their hands or scarce resources, it can be challenging to manage customer interactions efficiently. In both these cases, you need to do more with less, and without compromising on the quality of your interactions. This is where generative AI can come to your aid.

Generative AI in customer communication

Generative AI can generate various types of content, such as text, images, videos, and more, all based on user input. This can help you significantly reduce the amount of time and effort reps spend on drafting content, as well as the number of unintended manual errors that might occur. Ultimately, you can more easily establish and maintain essential interactions with your leads and customers thanks to enhanced productivity. Let's dive into some prominent benefits generative AI offers for customer communications.

Draft content faster 

You may encounter instances when you're pressed for time but have to draft a large quantity of content. Drafting content hurriedly can make you susceptible to making contextual, tonal, or grammatical errors.

With the help of generative AI, you can generate content within seconds based on your input prompt. You can either use the generated content as-is or make modifications based on your requirements.

Hence, you can ensure timely communication with your customers.

Enhance content quality 

Drafting content under strict time constraints is challenging, but even when you have plenty of time, sometimes your content doesn't pan out as you'd hoped. Manually revising content can be unthinkably tedious, especially for long and complex pieces.

Apart from generating content from scratch, generative AI can also help you improve existing content. You can elevate various aspects of your content, such as tone, style, length, vocabulary, and more through the use of generative AI. This helps you refine your content and mitigate errors before communicating with your customers.

Improve your presentation 

Any content with accurate information, an appropriate tone, and straightforward vocabulary will appeal to your customers. But all this fine-tuning is futile if the overall presentation of your content isn't reader-friendly. In some cases, your sentences or paragraphs may be too long, be full of redundant words, contain more information than is necessary, and so on.

Based on your target audience, you can polish your content presentation by summarizing it, converting it into data points, and more—all with minimal manual effort. This way, you can ensure better readability and prevent the loss of customers' attention even when your content contains the right information.

Fetch additional customer information  

Besides directly helping with your content, generative AI can also help behind the scenes. To communicate with your customers effectively, you need to know more about them and understand them. You could gather valuable information about them from the web yourself, or you could use generative AI.

Based on the information you request in your prompt, generative AI can fetch customer information from the web, which can go a long way in helping you understand your customers better. With a better understanding of your customers, you can create content that's more relevant to them.

How does generative AI compare to conventional AI?

With all the talk lately about generative AI, where do the conventional AI capabilities stand? Why use generative AI when conventional AI can provide insights and reduce time and effort as well? Both generative AI and conventional AI have their own value for users.

Generative AI is more dynamic and produces immediate outcomes based on user input. The utilities that generative AI provides don't necessarily need to be pre-defined. For example, if you prompt generative AI to create an email to be sent to a particular customer regarding a particular issue, you'll get an email generated in real time based on your query. Generative AI primarily deals with content experience.

In comparison, conventional AI capabilities tend to be more specific. The purpose to which it caters and the insights that it provides through the application of AI are more defined. For example, AI-driven sentiment analysis operations serve to analyze and inform users about customer sentiments so they can set their priorities accordingly. Conventional AI features also deal with other functions apart from content, such as analytics, predictions, recommendations, and more.

AI in Zoho CRM 

Zoho CRM provides built-in generative AI capabilities, such as email and call summaries, the strategy influencer feature that offers descriptive and prescriptive insights into your overall business performance, subject line suggestions for emails, and more. You can also leverage the Smart Prompt feature that integrates Zoho CRM with OpenAI so you can tap into the combined benefits of both platforms.

As the landscape of AI evolves, we strive to provide you with more top-notch AI capabilities, both generative and conventional, to augment your CRM operations and maximize your business yield.

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