CRM, or Customer Relationship Management tools, are software solutions that support companies in tracking, understanding, and supporting their clients. As a hub of customer knowledge, your CRM can help you to discover each step of the customer journey. With complete visibility into your customer, you can plan to make their interactions with you more immersive and memorable.
Long before the pandemic, CRMs were a valuable part of the customer and brand interaction. They supported agents in contact centres, marketing teams, sales professionals, and business leaders. Following COVID, and the digital transformation of the world, CRMs are taking on a bigger role in the customer journey.
How CRM Solutions are Changing
When CRMs first emerged, they were simple solutions, designed to help teams manage and monitor customer conversations via email, fax, and phone call. Today, CRM is a highly intelligent and digital tool, often capable of integrating with everything from social media channels to website chat systems, SMS campaigns, and contact centres.
After the pandemic fundamentally changed the way people and companies interact, CRMs have become:
- Omni-channel: CRM solutions can now integrate with and enhance the performance of all kinds of tools. These systems naturally work within contact centre environments and sales enablement tools. The CRM can also integrate with and collect information from a wider range of platforms, including social media, SMS, live chat, and many others
- Intelligence and smart assistants: AI is appearing in more components of the CX landscape every day. We have intelligent assistants in our chatbots, our contact centre IVRs, and more. Intelligent tools can also help with finding information in a CRM and surfacing it for an agent instantly or storing new information automatically
- Workforce empowerment: Many CRMs now work alongside productivity and workforce management tools to help hybrid employees stay connected. These solutions can even work within collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams, reducing the number of applications employees need to jump between when dealing with a customer issue
- Improved privacy and security: As customers become more concerned about the way their online data is managed in a highly digital world, CRMs are growing more secure. Many tools are now equipped with solutions that allow companies to decide where and how data should be stored, even in automated recordings
- Greater automations: CRMs now need far less input from employees to be effective. This is crucial at a time when employees are under increasing pressure to respond to higher volumes of calls and queries. Greater automations take some of the extra pressure off the workforce
Simple, Effective and Meaningful
As customers continue to demand more from the companies they work with, the CRM solution is growing to become a must-have part of any contact CX strategy. Today’s CRM solutions are more intelligent, yet easier to use than ever before.
