Customer service priorities: Bye-bye silos, hello growth
Delivering the stellar service that protects a brand, increases customer lifetime value, and supports new business models requires a new approach.
Organizations that bank on their CRM project to improve customer experience may be in for disappointment. While it’s true that CRM supports CX, a traditional CRM by itself won’t necessarily boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.
In order to really boost customer experience, organizations need a unified solution that adapts to constant changes in customer, technology, and business needs. The focus always must be on the customer, including their personas, behaviors, and strategic roadmaps.
But companies can lose sight of this when they embark on CRM transformation projects. There are four key reasons these projects fail today:
- Siloed solution
- Low or no user adoption
- Set and forget approach
- Lack of customer and user input
CRM project: The silo problem
Traditional CRM solutions are inherently siloed since the focus is, as the name implies, managing customer relationships. Their primary purpose is gathering data for the company.
Modern CRM systems are customer experience solutions that focus on the engagement process from a customer’s perspective. As a result, the focus is on both front-office and back-office systems.
When a customer interacts with a business, they expect it to know about previous interactions, their intent, and to be able to quickly provide the information they’re looking for.
Regardless of whether the interaction takes place through sales, customer service, field service, marketing, or e-commerce, the experience must be seamless.
Moreover, it shouldn’t matter which channel the customer uses, whether it’s social media, email, phone, or web.
Customer service collaboration: Teamwork makes the dream work
With the shift to remote contact centers, companies are taking steps to help customer service agents collaborate. The results are amazing.
Tedious tasks? Forget it
CRM projects often suffer from low user adoption. The need to key in too much data or repeat banal tasks manually frustrates users, who don’t see the benefits.
A modern CRM implementation provides the user with a simple, easy-to-use interface alongside intelligent processes. The processes must give the user real-time data, such as a customer 360 view, automatic deal scoring and predictive resolutions to customer tickets, instead of being a tool to simply collect data.
The tools must be flexible to allow the key users of a CRM system – sales, customer service, and marketing teams – to customize their own experience and deliver relevant data. This will allow them to complete processes with minimal clicks and without the need for IT’s involvement.
Sales process automation: Freeing sellers to sell – and excel
Learn how automation, done right, improves the sales process by eliminating manual tasks and guesswork so sellers can focus on closing deals.
CRM excellence: It’s a journey, not a stop over
CRM implementations must take a continuous improvement approach rather than being treated as a one-off project. Companies that take the set it and forget it approach are doomed to fail.
Customer needs and market conditions are constantly changing, which requires continuous adjustments and improvements. The enterprise needs to listen to both customers and users to ensure success.
Unfortunately, many CRM projects lack the ability to capture quick feedback from customers and users. The voice of the customer is missing.
In order to deliver fantastic experiences, the solution needs a way to not only collect feedback, but turn it into action points by customer success teams.
CDP use cases: From marketing and CRM to the enterprise
Learn how customer data platforms have evolved beyond marketing to provide a deeper view of the customer for better CX and bottom-line benefits.
A unified approach for great CX
The CRM landscape of solutions is highly competitive with vendors offering similar features. What should you look for in order to deliver the great experiences customers expect?
Your best bet is a tightly integrated set of solutions that support customers’ end-to-end processes when they engage with sales, customer service, or field service.
A CRM that connects to back-end ERP systems not only boosts CX, but can reduce operating costs and resources requirements.
By partnering with a vendor that offers a rich ecosystem of technologies and regularly releases new innovations, your organization can stay ahead of the curve in today’s digital markets.
