The single point agenda for fast-growth enterprises today is superlative customer experience. As forward-looking organizations strategize, customer focus is at the core of any digital transformation initiative. The technology must be agile and intelligent to ensure a positive customer experience from day one. And if you think you have time to iron out your customer delight checkpoints, think again. Retail customers have indicated time and time again that they're willing to walk away from brands after just one bad experience.
As enterprises revisit their tech stack to level up their customer experience, customer relationship management (CRM) is the ubiquitous starting point as it is a vast river from which millions of rivulets of information flow. So, how do we draw the pathways that interconnect these rivulets to form data streams that help sales teams sail straight to desirable customer outcomes?
CRM: A system of record
To help deeply connect with customers and their preferences, we need CRM data to dive deep into a customer story and provide cues to complete it. As we study demanding customer profiles, it is obvious that sales teams can no longer work off a formula based on this available data. Every engagement is now more complex and requires personalization and curation.
Just having multiple data points is no longer sufficient. While modern CRMs are great for managing customer profiles and pipeline forecasting, we need AI-driven engagement systems that provide a sales team with not just the ‘What’ and ‘When,’ but the ‘How,’ ‘Who,’ ‘How not to,' ‘If’ and ‘Instead.’
Let’s look at some of the aspects where CRMs fall short in context to modern-day sales and distribution.
Omnichannel engagement is the way forward, and organizations must delve deeper into the digital behavior of customers. Can a system understand if a consumer is digital by need or digital by choice? Or can it understand which actions a customer prefers to do online versus which actions they prefer doing through live engagement?
The need: A system of insight
A mobile and intelligent layer on top of a CRM system can convert a passive system of record into a contextual system of insight. Real-time data, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities will help convert a CRM into a system of recommendation that helps sales teams close more business faster and improve the overall customer experience. The following features — in addition to robust CRM data — can improve engagement and customer experience by leaps and bounds:
The possibilities! If the terabytes of CRM data can be mined into such nuggets of information for sales and customer service teams, it truly empowers them and paves the way for performance excellence and a superlative customer experience.
Venkat Malladi is cofounder and CTO of Vymo.
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