The Future of CRM: Salesforce invests further in AI

Salesforce are adding yet more strings to their bow, by acquiring Troops.ai, a revenue communications platform that integrates CRM systems with Slack and Microsoft Teams. With heavier investments in AI and machine learning, Salesforce are accelerating their digital offerings even further than the new features already launching this year. If you missed these, take a look at our articles, ‘Humanising the Customer Experience’ and ‘The Growth of Analytics and Insights’.

In their statement, Salesforce announced… “Exciting news! Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Troops.ai, a leading provider of a revenue communications solution used to improve sales velocity, forecasting, visibility, and collaboration across teams. Upon the closing of the acquisition, Troops will become part of Slack, a Salesforce company.” 

“The Troops team has spent more than seven years designing tools that deliver real-time insights from systems of record like Salesforce to systems of engagement like Slack, bringing together the information and actions that customer-facing teams need to close new deals and support existing customers.” 

The acquisition is expected to be finalised prior to July 31^st 2022, which marks the end of Salesforce’s second quarter FY 2023. 

CRM and the benefits of AI 

According to AiThority, AI helps transform a CRM system in a number of ways, including: customer acquisition and retention, personalised communication and segmentation, brand value, enhancing sales intelligence, predictive analytics and automated recommendations, amongst others. AI can be used to provide a virtual personal assistant to customers, and gather data on customers to predict future behaviour, as well as improving operational efficiency and saving employees hours of time per week, potentially. The main benefits of using AI integrations with CRM are increased sales, reduced time and costs, improved customer satisfaction and improved employee satisfaction. 

Salesforce are not the only CRM vendors to invest in AI-powered technology, with Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sugar and Zoho, amongst others, all offering this type of technological solution.  

Slack integration 

Slack has been a popular addition to the library of Salesforce-owned products, and the financial results for FY 2022 seem to reflect this. Overall, revenue was up 25% YoY, and the company have predicted revenue of $32 billion (21% increase) for this financial year, with $1.5 billion in sales from Slack.  

Salesforce have committed to the integration of Slack with its other products, and the communication platform will only increase in functionality when Troops.ai is incorporated. The Slack-bot offers increased visibility across the customer life cycle, improves data and forecasting, supports built-in deal collaboration, and provides visibility to non-CRM users. This addition to the Salesforce family will certainly offer Salesforce customers a well-integrated and multi-functional service. It will be interesting to see whether Troops will be incorporated into an existing Slack app, e.g. Sales Cloud for Slack, or whether it will become an over-arching feature for all Slack apps. 

With the growth of the company, its acquisitions and their revenue predictions, there seems to be no end to the exciting innovations happening at Salesforce. 

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