Guided Next Steps

Explanation

Guided Next Steps is a CRM home widget designed to help sales representatives take the right actions to strengthen relationships with accounts and contacts. It provides AI-driven recommendations that suggest meaningful next actions. By surfacing the most relevant next steps, the feature makes it easier for sales reps to stay proactive, build stronger customer relationships, and keep opportunities moving forward.

The recommendations are AI-generated from business emails stored in the CRM as well as previous interactions, such as calls, meetings, and logged activities. Communication patterns, frequency, and tone are analyzed to identify gaps or opportunities (e.g., follow-ups, unanswered questions, overdue check-ins). Contextual next steps are then suggested and displayed in the Guided Next Steps widget.

Examples of recommendations include:

• “Schedule a follow-up meeting with Contact A after last week’s demo.”
• “Send a thank-you email to Account B for their recent purchase.”
• “Reconnect with Key Account C — no activity logged in 30 days.”

Non-AI recommendations are also provided to highlight inconsistencies or action items.

Sales reps can review, accept, dismiss, or act on recommendations directly within the widget. From a recommendation, you can also create a meeting, log a call, or schedule a follow-up. Actions taken feed back into the AI model, continuously improving future recommendations. This ensures that suggested actions are highly relevant and tailored to the context of each account and contact.

The data needed for recommendations is processed using background jobs. For example, summaries are created for business mail bodies saved to the CRM, while customer evaluations and interactions are also summarized. Recommendations are then generated based on these summaries and insights. AI-based recommendations consider interactions for the top 20 customers per representative, with ranking based on total revenue from customer evaluations. The background jobs can be scheduled to run e.g., daily or weekly depending on the data volumes.  

Best Practices

• Add the widget to your start page and review it daily to stay ahead on customer interactions. Timely action increases the chance of positive customer engagement.
• Ensure all customer activities are recorded in CRM for the AI to generate accurate recommendations. Recommendations are only as accurate as the data available. If emails or activities are not logged, insights may be incomplete.
• Use recommendations as guidance—not strict instructions. Always apply your judgment and prioritize based on deal stage, account importance, and personal knowledge of the customer.

Prerequisites

• An IFS.ai subscription is required to get AI-based recommendations in the widget.
• The settings Generate Recommendations from Business Mail Summary and Generate Recommendations from Customer Interactions must be enabled on the CRM/SRM Default Values page.
• To receive AI recommendations, sales reps must be subscribed individually on the Business Representatives page.
• Alternatively, sales reps can subscribe directly within the Guided Next Steps widget. The Guided Next Steps widget must be added to the IFS Cloud Web Home page.
• The following background jobs should be scheduled and activated: Populate Customer Evaluation, Generate Business Mail Recommendations, Generate Customer Interaction Based Recommendations.

System Effects

The background jobs will generate the Guided Next Steps recommendations.