6 Best AI CRM Software Tools to Supercharge Your Customer Relations

According to a report by SugarCRM, 98% of sales and marketing experts said they use AI to enhance their business processes.

They also said that they will increase their use of AI in the next two years to augment their processes.

Why? Because sales and marketing experts believe that AI has the power to develop more personalized communications with customers.

With AI, customers can get more helpful answers which can increase customer retention.

And that’s not all, AI in CRM can sort out customer information and keep it organized. Artificial intelligence can work on everything from contact details, chat history, purchase history, etc. It basically covers all the factors that will help you grab sales opportunities and give your customers a better experience.

With the help of AI, the CRM market is expected to grow to $57 billion by 2025. If you haven’t used AI in your CRM system by now, this is your time to get started.

Best AI CRM Tools

1. HubSpot: Best Free AI CRM
2. Salesforce: Best for analytics and sales forecasting​.
3. Pipedrive: Best for AI-powered sales insights​ ​.
4. Zoho CRM: Best broad AI capabilities
5. Freshsales: Best for AI Chatbots
6. Creatio: Best for no-code AI CRM options.

Understanding AI CRM Tools

Let’s see how you can use AI in CRM.

What is an AI CRM?

When you integrate AI with a traditional CRM system, you get an AI CRM. With AI, you can analyze customer data, automate tasks, generate insights, and personalize customer transactions. This enhances the capabilities of the CRM platform.

With the power of AI in a CRM system, you can manage customer relationships more efficiently and drive sales and revenue growth.

Benefits of integrating AI with CRM

There are many benefits of integrating AI with CRM.

• AI can analyze large amounts of data to reveal customer insights such as their preferences, needs, and behavior.
• With AI power, sales teams can prioritize leads and focus more on high-quality ones.
• AI delivers personalized customer experience, increasing engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.
• Businesses can analyze historical data to discover trends. This helps in forecasting customer needs and making better decisions.
• When manual tasks are automated using AI, it optimizes workflow and increases operational efficiency.
• As you improve customer experience, drive sales, and increase customer loyalty, you gain a competitive advantage.

Review of the Top CRM Software

I’ll discuss the top CRM software solutions here along with what makes them the best.

1. HubSpot (Best Free AI CRM)

HubSpot is a very popular CRM solution that offers generative AI in all its plans – even the free one. With HubSpot’s AI abilities, you can streamline your sales, marketing, and customer support efforts.

It helps you draft content, enhance data analysis, and streamline workflows. In short, HubSpot can create a reliable brand voice for you.

Key AI features

• Creates a single-page website with simple prompts using the AI website generator
• Drafts content in no time with the AI content writer
• Produces engaging captions for your social media pages
• Optimizes website pages to rank higher on search engines
• Generates consistent brand content to create a unique brand voice

Pros

• Clean and easy-to-use interface
• Comprehensive solution for sales, marketing, and other business needs
• Flexible plans for different business sizes
• Free plan for small businesses and startups
• Integrates with hundreds of third-party apps

Cons

• Advanced features are expensive
• There’s a learning curve

Pricing

HubSpot has several products so pricing will depend on the product you want and the size of your team. Luckily, some free tools can help you generate emails, converse with customers, launch a website, and much more for free.

Free AI tools by HubSpot are available for sales, marketing, customer service, content generation, operations, and commerce.

2. Salesforce (Best for analytics and sales forecasting)

Salesforce Einstein is an AI-based technology that helps companies improve their productivity by spotting trends and discovering insights.

It automates and streamlines processes so your staff can repurpose their time. It also automates repetitive tasks and improves the operational efficiency of your business.

Salesforce Einstein offers enhanced reporting capabilities that give valuable insight to help in decision-making. When you understand your customer needs and preferences, you can identify opportunities more easily.

Key AI features

• Uses NLP to carry conversations in a human-like way
• Assigns a score to leads that reflects the chances of success with a particular prospect
• Einstein bots can chat with your customers and solve their problems while keeping them engaged
• With Einstein reply recommendations you can find the best replies to customer inquiries
• Salesforce lets you summarize calls with advanced transcription abilities. This helps businesses understand customer sentiment, pain points, and key discussion points.

Pros

• AI-powered analytics that provide valuable insights into customer data
• Lead scoring helps businesses decide which leads are more important than the others
• AI-powered bots handle routine customer inquiries
• Voice assistant lets you interact with Salesforce in a natural language
• Free trial available

Cons

• No free plan
• Migrating data from other CRMs to Salesforce can be complicated

Pricing

There are different pricing plans depending on the services you need and the size of your team. While there is no free plan, Salesforce offers a 30-day free trial.

3. Pipedrive (Best for AI-powered Sales Insights)

Pipedrive automatically monitors and arranges emails and calls while seamlessly aligning schedules across various devices.

I like Pipedrive because it has the capability to visually represent sales workflows. It displays the three main areas of any sales pipeline: the number of deals, the average value of each, and the close ratio. You can use these findings as a benchmark and make important decisions.

Key features

• AI sales assistant that identifies patterns and recommends high-potential deals
• Email creation tool creates personalized emails using simple prompts and boosts productivity
• Condense emails into brief summaries that help businesses quickly understand the essence of the conversation
• Integration recommendations based on the nature of your business
• AI-powered marketplace search to find relevant third-party tools to solve business problems

Pros

• Easy to use interface on different devices
• Integrates with other software tools easily
• Especially useful for sales insights as it automates sales-related tasks
• Easily customizable sales pipelines
• 14-days free trial

Cons

• No free plan
• Basic plans are not AI-powered

Pricing

The basic plan of Pipedrive is called Essential. It costs $12 per seat per month. However, you won’t get AI features in this plan. AI features are introduced in Professional and higher plans. Professional costs $49 per seat per month.

4. Zoho CRM (Best broad AI capabilities)

Zoho CRM is best for small to mid-sized businesses. It has an AI-powered tool called Zia that can help you with sales. It can fetch relevant information, predict the results of sales activities, automate manual tasks, and more.

Zoho CRM can seamlessly integrate with other Zoho tools. It can also integrate with third-party apps such as Google Analytics and Google Adwords. It offers a free plan that can help small businesses create contact lists, generate leads, and much more.

Key features

• Automates routine sales and marketing processes
• Zoho Blueprints lets you manage your process pipeline in a better way as your team is informed about the next step
• Predictive sales with Zia, the AI assistant that manages your CRM data
• CommandCenter lets you create personalized customer journeys to get insights into customer preferences
• Omnichannel presence lets you communicate with your customers in real-time over different platforms
• It lets you measure the performance of each sales activity and create achievable targets

Pros

• Clean and intuitive interface
• Comes with a free plan for up to 3 users
• Offers some degree of automation on all plans
• There’s a 30-day money back guarantee on the monthly plans and 45-day money back guarantee on the annual plans
• Integrates easily with Zoho tools as well as third-party applications

Cons

• Free and basic plans don’t have AI features
• The free plan doesn’t have integration abilities
• Limited customization abilities

Pricing

Zoho offers a free plan that has limited CRM capabilities. The most basic paid plan is Standard which costs $15/month but it doesn’t support AI services. To get the maximum benefits, you need to subscribe to the Premium ($79/month) or Custom plan.

5. Freshsales (Best for AI Chatbots)

Freshsales offers unified sales and marketing capabilities. It’s a cloud-based CRM solution by Freshworks. It lets businesses manage their sales processes by organizing the leads and focusing on customer relationships.

Freshsales comes with Freddy, an AI-powered intelligent assistant, which can automate repetitive tasks by using workflows. It offers several channels for customer engagement such as email, chat, and phone.

Key features

• You can track the activities of your website visitors to understand what your customers want
• AI assistant will always keep an eye on ongoing processes and highlight the ones that deserve your attention
• Reporting features that let you get actionable insights on sales performance
• Ability to engage with your prospects and customers through built-in phone and chat features
• It lets you use your mobile phone to run sales using voice notes and call logs

Pros

• Easy to use interface
• Integrates seamlessly with other products by Freshworks such as Freshdesk and Freshmarketer.
• An AI chatbot to automate your tasks and give data-driven insights
• Comes with a 21-day free trial
• Lets you contact leads through chat, email, and phone

Cons

• Some advanced features are available only with high-end plans
• Reporting capabilities are somewhat limited

Pricing

There are three plans and Growth is the most basic plan that starts at $9/month. Its 21-day free trial is available with all three plans. Features such as AI-based forecasting insights are only available with the most premium plan – Enterprise which costs $59/month.

6. Creatio (Best for no-code AI CRM options)

Creatio is a CRM that can handle your entire sales cycle without the need to learn coding. It has three components: Sales, Marketing, and Service. While sales are the strongest point of this CRM, it comes with robust features for the other two processes as well.

With lead management, Creatio lets you focus only on important leads. It offers low-level workflow management that can automate reminders for you. It comes with Creatio Copilot which is powered by AI.

Key features

• No code CRM that automates workflows and builds applications without coding
• Lets you manage the entire customer journey
• Comprehensive sales management that boosts sales processes
• Omnichannel marketing platform that quickly converts leads to customers
• Ready-to-use workflows for several industries

Pros

• Easy to use interface
• Automated reminders to remind you to follow up with leads
• A customizable dashboard that lets you automate workflows
• Offers tools and guidance to develop applications without coding
• Centralized workspace to configure generative AI
• Free 14-day trial

Cons

• Plans quickly become expensive if you add three elements of CMS
• While it offers many customizations, you cannot customize everything without using coding
• No free plan

Pricing

Creatio offers three plans and the most basic plan starts at $25/user/month. If you add individual Sales, Marketing, and Service platforms, it will be $15 each. This quickly adds up the costs, making it an expensive solution. However, it does offer a 14-day trial so make sure you try it out before purchasing the subscription.

How I Evaluated and Tested the Tools

I evaluated 10 AI-powered CRM tools and created a list of the top six tools. I carefully reviewed the AI features and capabilities of each platform and their use cases.

For example, if a tool only has generative AI abilities, it was ranked below a tool that could also automate tasks and workflows.

A tool that could also rank leads and make sales predictions was ranked even higher. I also checked their prices and which tool offers the maximum capabilities for the cheapest price. All the tools I’ve listed here have excellent AI capabilities and free trials.

Choosing the Right CRM Tool

I have discussed the top six CMS platforms above and each of them is best in its own way. How do you choose which one is right for you?

I’ll discuss some factors here that will help you select the right option.

Scalability

A CRM should be able to accommodate the growing volume of data and expanding business needs without losing efficiency.

Cost

Budget restrictions can make you select an inferior tool. Most CRMs come with free plans. Try them before selecting the right solution.

AI features

AI helps in the automation of several tasks and is a powerful tool to have in your CRM

Integration support

You’ll need to integrate your CRM with other tools such as accounting software, productivity apps, and email marketing software.

Importance of No Code Features

With no-code features, you can customize and build applications, workflows, and processes even if you’re not tech-savvy. It reduces dependence on IT and lets small businesses focus on customer management.

Implementing AI CRM in Your Business

I have discussed six of the best AI CRM tools above. Why AI CRM? Because with AI, you can automate tasks, personalize interactions, and boost your efficiency.

How to Implement AI CRM Tools

Here are some steps you can take to integrate and maximize the use of AI in CRM. I’ll use Hubspot as an example here.

1. Learn about the AI capabilities of your CRM. For example, Hubspot is planning to launch an AI chatbot. Learn how it can be helpful to your processes.

2. Now identify the areas where you can use this ability of AI. For example, Hubspot’s AI chatbot will be able to help you with general inquiries.

3. Train your team on how to use these features. Your team can feed business data to the chatbot so it can perform better.

4. Monitor the results to see which type of AI conversations are performing better. This will help you refine your strategies.

Case Studies

Here are some case studies of businesses using AI-powered CRM solutions to boost their processes.

Marriott International uses Salesforce

Marriott International uses Salesforce Einstein. This AI-powered CRM platform enhances guest personalization and improves customer experience. It uses AI-driven insights to analyze guest preferences and behavior.

As a result of this integration, Marriott can deliver personalized recommendations, offers, and services to guests. This increases guest satisfaction and loyalty. With AI capabilities, Marriott can anticipate guest needs and offer proactive service. For example, Marriott can anticipate room preferences, amenity requests, and special occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries.

T-Mobile uses Salesforce

T-Mobile is another company that uses Salesforce Einstein to optimize sales processes and improve customer engagement. T-Mobile uses AI-powered CRM to analyze customer data, identify sales opportunities, and personalize marketing campaigns.

With Salesforce Einstein, T-Mobile can predict customer behavior, prioritize leads, and automate marketing tasks. This results in improved customer experiences and increased sales revenue. T-Mobile has streamlined its retail sales by capturing leads and managing appointments. Customers of T-Mobile now get faster responses and better service, thanks to the AI-powered CRM solution.

Momentive uses Hubspot

Momentive, the parent company of Survey Monkey, uses AI-powered CRM to align its marketing processes and improve lead generation.

It uses HubSpot’s AI features such as predictive lead scoring and content optimization. With these features, it generates high-quality leads and creates more effective marketing campaigns.

The AI algorithms of Hubspot analyze data from different sources such as website interactions and email engagement. This data is used to identify high-quality leads and prioritize them to get the most promising prospects.

Challenges and Solutions in AI CRM Adoption

According to TechReport, 91% of companies with over 10 employees use CRM. Despite this whopping number, it’s still somewhat challenging to deploy CRM. Let’s see what the main challenges are, along with their solutions and best practices.

Not being user-centric

When it comes to purchase strategies, sales managers are the main decision makers. This is why CRMs should be tailored keeping sales managers in mind. Most companies neglect this factor and the resultant CRM implementation often stays underutilized.

Solution

To realize the full potential of any CRM software, it should be implemented keeping employees in mind. Also, before you subscribe to a CRM solution, you need to define your objectives. If your main objective is sales, the CRM tool should be implemented keeping the sales manager in mind.

Integration Complexity

It can be challenging to integrate your new CRM with the existing databases and software. This is especially true if different systems use different protocols or formats. This can lead to interoperability issues.

Solution

You can resolve the integration complexity by evaluating your integration needs before getting a CRM. You can also get suitable integration tools to ensure seamless data exchange. If integration is a big challenge for you, you can opt for CRMs that come with a suite of other tools so integration can be done easily.

Cost and Budget Constraints

Depending on the product you choose, there can be implementation charges, maintenance fees, and uncertainty about the ROI. This can deter businesses from adopting CRM systems as it might be considered an unnecessary investment.

Solution

There are some affordable CRM solutions in the market. In fact, there are free solutions as well. For example, Hubspot offers some CRM tools for free. Granted, they are limited in their capabilities but you can try them out and see if they give you good results. If they do, you can move to paid solutions.

Future of AI CRM

Going by the current trends of AI in CRM, it’s easy to predict that AI will continue to revolutionize CRM with refined customer insights and automation of tasks. As there are further advancements in AI, there will be better forecasting with predictive analysis and sentiment analysis.

Machine learning and deep learning will improve customer segmentation and AI-powered chatbots will be able to handle complex customer inquiries.

AI CRM may also integrate with IoT devices to collect and analyze data in the future. This will allow businesses to deliver even more personalized experiences to their customers.

Conclusion

As a business, you absolutely need CRM to manage customer relations efficiently. And when you integrate AI capabilities with it, you get an automated system that handles your tasks without much manual intervention.

As artificial intelligence evolves, businesses must embrace it to stay competitive in the dynamic marketplace.

With AI in CRM, companies can anticipate customer needs and create lasting relationships. But make sure you consider your specific requirements before purchasing a CRM solution.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)