Automated CRM Signpost ups its game with built-in AI agent

The symbol of Signpost’s new Mia

Step by step, rules-based marketing platforms are adding predictive technology and other intelligence on their way to becoming largely self-managing systems.

This week, Google Ventures-backed and New York City-based Signpost announced its contribution to that march toward cognitive marketing. Its automated CRM is adding an artificial intelligence agent, dubbed Mia.

Signpost’s platform already provides a large degree of self-management. It captures data from phone calls, emails, and credit card transactions with a business, and then automatically takes selected marketing actions designed for customer acquisition, customer loyalty, and reviews.

The platform has been able to automatically communicate with customers and would-be customers via templated emails and SMS, such as suggesting that a happy customer might want to post a review on Yelp.

The idea is to provide a CRM for companies that “don’t have sales teams,” CEO and founder Stuart Wall told me. He characterized many of the leading CRMs, like Salesforce, as “incredibly hard to use.”

Since the platform is already automated, he said, the addition of Mia isn’t making it less manual. But she is improving the quality of intelligence that’s applied to actions, he said, and she has the authority to take additional actions based on that intelligence.

Instead of the platform looking at the communications and transactions of one business’ thousand customers, for instance, Mia is now looking at — and making inferences from — anonymized communications and purchases across the platform’s entire data set of 16 million customers. She can discover, for instance, that a customer who uses the word “like” in an email will probably say good things about the brand, while someone whose communication includes “please” may have had a bad customer experience.

Here’s a sample conversation between the platform owner and Mia:

Mia is authorized to act on that knowledge according to set business goals, such as sending a pre-written discount offer via email to the “please” customer. She is also “in charge of” follow-ups and ongoing communication with customers, although marketers can pause the platform at any time to modify the rules or take control.

And here’s Mia’s dashboard in Signpost, for a specific client company:

Wall said the new AI capability, which is largely working in the background, is driving “better results than in the past,” although he added that it was too early to provide any statistical evidence.

The Signpost platform has “always been automated” by employing rules-based logic, he said. “Now, we’ve taken it up a significant level.”