ChatGPT and CRM are two completely different systems, they don’t do the same thing, they don’t have the same objective, they work in complementarity or integration, we’re going to see their advantages and their limits.
Features
- ChatGPT is a conversational chat based on a language model
- CRM is a customer management system that improves customer relations and boosts sales.
Database
- ChatGPT uses the internet as a database for its information searches, currently its search database is older than 2021.
- CRM uses your customer database to provide information in real time
ChatGPT provides much broader, but less specific information, and its intelligence will generate information that is inferred rather than factual, and therefore prone to error. What’s more, its information is not real-time, unlike CRM.
Objective
- ChatGPT’s aim is to provide you with quick answers, based on a wealth of information gleaned from a variety of sources.
- The CRM aims to :
- Better customer management
- Helping you sell more
- Improving the customer experience
- Provide sales statistics to better guide company strategy.
The first is a general, deductive system, the other is a specific tool for analyzing your data. The first can go wrong, the other shouldn’t.
ChatGPT or CRM, strengths and weaknesses
- ChatGPT allows you to search a large database quickly and has several weaknesses:
- Currently limited to 2021
- Sometimes he makes mistakes, so always check his information.
- He reports the average synthesis of what he sees on the NET, so he’ll pick up on the general ideas of the moment, depending on the questions asked. You could even say that ChatGPT is woke, he’s always fairly politically correct and doesn’t forget to express that there are divergent points of view on all controversial subjects.
- It has no originality or creativity; it’s not artificial intelligence, but a conversational tool based on a language model.
- You need to know how to use it, i.e. how to formulate your question, and ask for several answers to the same question.
- CRM is highly specialized and therefore more limited, it’s not a conversational tool, it provides specific data on your organization’s customers but most of them have big flaws:
- Most CRMs are too complicated, and salespeople often hate them.
- They have most often been designed by information specialists for marketing or sales people, and on for those who use them.
- The majority of sellers feel that they spend more time trying to fill their tool than selling.
- But there are a few simple CRMs
Using ChatGPT with a CRM
Many specialists praise the direct use of chat in sales and marketing tasks:
- Copywriting your site’s home page (landing page): possible, but I don’t see why a language model researching the whole web would know better than you what to say to your customers.
- Call-to-action buttons: here too, there’s no reason why ChatGPT should know YOUR customers’ motivations better than you do.
- Advertising copywriting: you’re supposed to know your customers better than an intelligence search engine.
- Call scripting: this borders on the ridiculous. Call scripts are highly specialized and require professionals working in collaboration with your company’s best salespeople, real-life test periods, and the selection of the best scripts.
- Emails: why should an automated tool be able to respond automatically to your customers when you should have automated response templates tailored to your organization’s customers?
- Targeting customers and prospects: yes, it’s possible, but your CRM is a specialized tool for this, programmed for the specifics of your organization.
- Writing articles for your website: this is quick and easy, and in just a few seconds you can have an article that would have taken you several hours to write. On the other hand, it won’t be original, it won’t be as sharp, and there are rumors that Google is trying to identify automated answers and penalize the SEO of sites that use them.
So, these suggestions either come from AI specialists who know nothing about sales and marketing, or from CRM providers who are trying to use AI integration as a marketing tool.
The most effective use today is complementarity, i.e. offering ChatGPT to people who use CRM to do their own preliminary research. So a sales rep can use chat to find lists of new prospects and then integrate them into the CRM, or a customer service agent can do his initial research with chat to get his answer faster.
Integrating ChatGPT with CRM
Some CRM suppliers offer to integrate it into their tools, which is possible, but it’s still very new and the results remain to be seen.
How to integrate it? I put the question to the main interested party, ChatGPT himself, he should the best to give a good answer, here it is:
- Needs analysis:
- Identify specific objectives
- Identify specific use cases, e.g. :
- real-time customer support
- automate certain customer service tasks.
- Choice of interface in your CRM.
- User interface (UI)-based integration . You can create a user interface that allows users to communicate with ChatGPT directly from the CRM interface. This may require custom development to integrate ChatGPT’s user interface into your CRM.
- API-based integration if your CRM offers custom integration functionality if your CRM has an API (Application Programming Interface), you can use ChatGPT’s API to send requests to ChatGPT’s API and receive responses. This usually involves making HTTP calls to the ChatGPT API using the programming language of your choice.
- ChatGPT configuration.
- If you’re using an API, you’ll need to configure and deploy your ChatGPT interface. This may involve creating a learning model specific to your use case, and training this model with relevant data.
- If you’re using a user interface, you’ll need to configure and customize ChatGPT’s user interface to integrate it into your CRM.
- Technical integration: you’ll need to set up the necessary technical connections to enable communication between ChatGPT and your CRM. This may involve the use of APIs, webhooks or other communication mechanisms.
- Testing and successive improvements: carry out thorough testing to ensure that ChatGPT works properly in your CRM. Identify any problems or improvements to be made.
- Deployment and monitoring: deploy integration in your production environment. Monitor ChatGPT performance and gather user feedback to make adjustments where necessary.
I have to confess that I’m not an AI specialist and I can’t validate the answer.
In conclusion
ChatGPT is a language model that generates text, while a CRM is customer relationship management software that stores, organizes and analyzes customer data. Both can be used in the context of customer relations, but they have different functionalities and objectives.
There are two ways in which you can make the most of complementarity: by using chat as a back-up tool, and its benefits are obvious, or by integrating it into your CRM. It remains to be seen whether the benefits justify the costs and risks.
Jean-Pierre Mercier