Since the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic hit, the practice of building and maintaining relationships with customers has had to evolve rapidly. As a result, one of the principal means for achieving this - customer relationship management (CRM) software – has been required to bring in new features to facilitate new approaches to CX.
In this edition of the CX Today round table, we welcome:
- Gabe Larsen, VP of Marketing, Kustomer
- Inken Kuhlmann-Rhinow, Marketing Director, EMEA, HubSpot
- James Frampton, SVP and General Manager EMEA, SugarCRM
- Simon Thorpe, Ambassador Director, Pegasystems
Our panellists will discuss how the pandemic has affected customer engagement strategies, the major value centres within CRM today and the future of CRM in the wider customer experience field.
How has the pandemic affected customer engagement strategies/development from a CRM perspective?
Larsen: “Kustomer research found that 71% of consumers reported shopping online more frequently during the past year, and of those, 85% plan to continue shopping online more often post-pandemic. It is important to consider how new online shoppers will be interacting with businesses in a digital-first world. It’s not enough to simply be available on all channels anymore. Businesses must also deliver an effortless and seamless experience across the buyer journey, at scale. In order to achieve this successfully, agents must be free to move across channels through a single conversation and have a real-time view into historical interactions, so they know the context of the issue immediately. Additionally, when customers aren't touching and feeling products in-store, pre-purchase, consultative support becomes imperative. Companies need a CRM platform that can surface relevant product information effortlessly, without the need for agents to switch systems and toggle between tabs. Lastly, many businesses are choosing to stay fully remote. Companies need to adopt a CRM that is easily connected to by all agents with a basic internet connection and standard browser, and allows for remote collaboration and oversight so businesses can manage their team with confidence.”
Kuhlmann-Rhinow: “Zooming back out to an organisational level, the pandemic has pushed leadership teams to fully embrace digital transformation. For many organisations, making remote work plausible meant pulling together capabilities from a range of technology providers into something of a patchwork of solutions that didn’t necessarily behave well together but was necessary given the organisational shock felt initially.
“Recognising that remote working will be a significant and constant part of our working landscape, it is now time to think about how to make this tech stack work more effectively. In many cases, this will involve consolidation, ideally onto a single CRM platform, where the sharing of customer and prospect data between marketing, sales and customer service teams is seamless and where the platform supports growth, instead of creating friction points.
“According to HubSpot’s Future of Sales Report UK, 40% of businesses have embraced using CRM software to understand and serve prospective customers -up from 25% before the pandemic-, being the only digital tool to see an uptick in usage during the lockdown. The findings suggest that CRM platforms have become even more relevant and necessary to support the quick responses our customers expect in a digital-first climate, and this is likely to continue as we tackle the headwinds throughout the year.”
Frampton: “Due to the pandemic, more businesses than ever were forced to embrace digital, even those that were apprehensive before. With the lockdowns came the need for online banking, virtual doctor’s appointments, and expansion of online retail. Higher consumer demand meant that businesses needed to focus on their CRM technology to keep their relationships going and ultimately survive.
“The pandemic also highlighted how little companies knew about their customers, due to poor CRM systems and the impact this is having on their ability to predict customer churn. In fact, Sugar’s recent research of sales leaders revealed that over half (56%) reported their customer churn increased in the last 12 months, with 57% of respondents having trouble predicting when customers would churn. And, upon reflection, almost half (48%) of sales professionals reported not knowing why customers churned. This is especially worrying when there are so many on-going uncertainties due to the pandemic.”
Thorpe: “In the hangover of the pandemic, customer satisfaction has plummeted to an all-time-low. Now they know more about customers, 74% of businesses are commitment permanently improving operations via digital transformation (DX).
“First, CX needs to be taken seriously at the C-level. IT is twice as likely to lead CX than another function, but before DX can transform CX, it must be led by a dedicated CX specialist.
“Low-code platforms bring business and IT teams together by empowering citizen developers from across the organisation to design and build customer-facing applications.
“Instead of slow, frustrating requirements-based approaches, teams can align their work and directly capture the business requirements - IT can focus on data and integration, business users and designers focus on personas and channels, everyone aligns around the central microjourney.
“With low-code, business and IT can build sophisticated, strategic applications in a system that regenerates new code as the underlying technology evolves.
“A volatile and interconnected world needs a new generation of agile digital platforms architected for change. These are designed for open ecosystems, multi-cloud, distributed environments and they weave together legacy data systems with cloud-based AI services and in-house applications to deliver streamlined, seamless experiences for customers, employees and partners.”
Where do the major value centres sit within the CRM offering today?
Larsen: “AI and automation are becoming essential for CX organizations. Oftentimes the most tedious tasks on an agent’s plate are manual and repetitive, and may not require human intervention. Luckily AI can automate much of this work. Chatbots are growing in popularity with both businesses and consumers, and can be used to answer basic queries, collect initial information, or direct customers to a help centre if human intervention is not needed. These interventions save time for both the customer and agent, and increase the time agents can spend on delivering personalized, empathetic support, building lifelong customer relationships.
“Beyond freeing up agent time, AI can also be used to arm support agents with all the information they need to quickly and accurately service their customers. AI support technology can suggest messages to send to customers based off of historical conversations and customer attributes. Sentiment analysis is another benefit of AI technology. By looking at the words and tone in a customers’ messages, the technology can identify how satisfied, or dissatisfied, a customer is, and escalate the issue accordingly. AI within a CRM platform, thus supercharges the agent, giving them the ability to handle more conversations in a more personalized manner, and transforming the contact centre into a profit centre.”
Kuhlmann-Rhinow: “Those getting CRM right are companies that understand that to grow better, they need to run better first. To scale in today’s world, businesses need to transform their operations internally to create remarkable experiences externally.
“In a moment when consumers are more demanding than ever before, customers won’t wait for your systems to catch up or for your team to discover the points of friction that are causing frustration. They don’t care about your complexity or that you don’t have the systems in place to understand who they are and what they want.
