They want to know where products are made, what the working conditions are, how materials are sourced, what environmental impacts are and how the customer experience is. Customers will pay more and stick with a specific company or brand if they find these attributes. These changes have pushed the CRM systems and processes to evolve and capture more information about customer behaviors and attitudes, apart from simple demographics and sales.

Those days are gone where a shop felt happy after the customers paid them and walked away. Today’s organizations need to have an ongoing pulse on their customers, even after sale has completed. A simple example of buying a refrigerator in store or ordering a computer online does not end at that transaction. We need to measure what customers thought of our communication with them post-sale, did we kept them informed through their preferred channel (email, phone, text)? Did we deliver the right item in right place at promised time? Did the product worked as intended after they started using it. All this information needs to be gathered in ethical way with permission from our customers so that CRM and supporting systems can take these additional data dimensions in to consideration when providing the insights to various internal teams.

One of the areas me and my team have spent time in last 7 years is measuring customer experience at each customer touch point, let be a purchase interaction or simple question asking about store timing. We measure customers’ experience as they traverse their journey with our people, products, brand and services. This information when used in tandem with financial, operational metrics and marketing data yields rich insights – some informing the tactical actions and some more strategic which helps in steering the ship in right direction mid and long term.

CRM and its supporting systems needs an organizational maturity, adoption and executive sponsorship which is essential to inculcate the culture which asks – “how will a specific action impact our customers’ experience”. Organizations need to go beyond just the business cases (inside out view) and also bring in the customer experience insights (outside in view) when they prioritize their product roadmap, services, communication and strategy.

I’d like to end with the future and importance of speed of insights and actions. It’s not just having CRM and supporting systems which get you the needed insights but how soon they can gather them and then how mature is the organization to act and take advantage of those insights. CRM tools continue to advance and taking on more functions - CRM teams should be open to adopt, change, innovate and continue to provide the needed insights. CRM has been, and will continue to be the key asset in delivering right customer experience, retain/gain customers and drive the company growth.

See Also:

Top CRM Technology Companies

Top CRM Consulting/Services Companies