Customer-intelligence and data-driven decision-making form the backbone of successful relationships with modern consumers (Generation Z and soon Generation Alpha) in the modern age. They look for engaging experiences, are empowered beyond belief, exhibit little or no loyalties and retaining them requires modern enterprises to develop strategies that are not only grounded in real insights but that also enable long-term relationship-building using relevant tools. This evolving (and often exhausting) need by these consumers require a methodical system that acts as the backbone for all customer-focused collaboration within an enterprise and helps with the acquisition of new users, enables retention of existing ones and expands the growth, value and profitability of the relationships with them. And the go-to solution for all this is a Customer Relationship Management (popularly known as CRM).
But what is a CRM anyways?
At its core, a CRM strengthens organizational customer relationships by putting customers at the heart of everything and acts as a bridge between vision, strategy, process, and technology to boost efforts required to win with the customers. In practice, it is a one stop shop that breaks the silos of sales, service, and marketing and projects a 360-degree view of customers through the core disciplines of account, lead, campaign management, call, contact center workflows, project/knowledge management, and much more. Doing so, it enables the creation of holistic and targeted strategies and journeys that makes the pursuit of consumers collectively by the organization as one, rather than as a disjointed or isolated effort by each division. Owing to the success of its 100 plus operational vendors, from the Big four (Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle) to smaller ones like HubSpot, Agile, and Zoho, CRM was named by Gartner as the biggest (and possibly one of the more strategic) enterprise software tools in 2017 and is expected to reach $80 billion in worth by 2025.
How did it come into being?
CRM finds its philosophical and historical origins in the 60’s when standalone mainframe systems started housing customer information electronically. Then in the 70’s, to gain competitive advantage, the innovative and systems savvy organizations started storing information in dedicated digital contact management systems that paved the way for earlier versions of database marketing systems (popularized in the 80’s) and allowed statistical models to analyze patterns in customer data. By the early 90s, emerging sales force automation functions began to appear (with advanced contact management capabilities) as the foundational elements of the first CRM solution called Siebel, founded by former Oracle executive Tom Siebel. Oracle and SAP, the contemporary ERP vendors of the time, followed suit by adding marketing and sales components to their solution stacks (later adding service as well), which were subsequently spun-off into dedicated CRM offerings. Cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) then took CRM to a new height in the late 90s, as the off-premise or cloud delivery model allowed multitudes of advantages including scaling without having to expand existing infrastructure. Salesforce (also founded by an Oracle executive Mark Benioff) become a major proponent of this approach and popularized the concept in the CRM space. The turn of the century then saw mobile versions of CRM emerging (starting with Siebel Mobile) and enabling salespersons to take their work to the field, a major win for the sales community that could update customer related activity information from anywhere instead of only when dialed in from their office or home machines. This was followed by the inclusion of Social CRM in the mid-2000s that paved the realization about the richness of insights on people’s lives on social media and the ways such information could be leveraged to make targeted customer related decisions. The last few years have seen more and more artificial intelligence and natural language processing being added into the mix (with conversational, voice-based elements of telephony) adding further value to CRM, which has now truly become an essential customer related guiding force for organizations in all industries and geographies.
How it assists with customer acquisition?
For 44% of organizations on a global basis, the only customer strategy is customer acquisition (Econsultancy study) and that too through an age old process where leads are qualified and processed through a sales funnel (structured or otherwise) until conversion is achieved and a sale is made. This rinse-and-repeat process places the onus on the marketing function to ger creative in their messages based upon identifying and segmenting various group of users instead of a system to run the process better. A CRM circumvents that. As the cost of acquisition (and marketing, in general) continues to go through the roof, the value of data and customer insights cannot be understated, which is where a CRM can be enormously helpful. By aggregating all leads (from all channels) into one space, it reduces missed opportunities and enables better planning towards converting those leads. The sales cycle review and pipeline management features also allow the identification of processes that are taking customers towards a conversion and could be lured into being acquired and doubled down upon. The advanced lead management capabilities further allows a CRM to identify high-value prospects and fast-tracks their conversion by positioning the optimal performing products against the one that need to be updated. Such internal insights and the ones gathered from social media help in trend analysis and building targeted personas to detect developing patterns and trends around acquiring customers and building value for them.
How it assists with customer retention?
The importance of customer retention has been on a steady incline since organizations learned about stickiness through loyalty programs in the 80s as well as the blazing fact that customer retention can be up to 25 times cheaper than acquisition (HBR). Forward thinking organizations now attempt to augment the value of their customer relationships through extraordinarily personalized service where complaints and service requests can be better captured and ranked based on factors like the worth of client and the potential of their growth with the business. Contact center workers (also known as call centers) are provided a 360-degree view of customers (through a CRM) that includes insights and data on their past complaints and their existing product or service portfolios to better assess and service them. CRM enables inter-departmental collaboration with teams from front and back-office to work closely on solving cases in minimal time and advanced features on Customer Sentiment Analysis can identify words, pitch tone and temperament patterns from customer speech (on the phone) that aid in engaging with them through the right skillset needed to satisfy the complaint. Also, customers now have the ability to engage through social channels and the advanced integrations creates support cases directly on a CRM to ensure that customer loyalties and satisfaction remain high.
How it assists with customer growth?
If done right, satisfied and loyal (existing) customers can spend upto 300% more than new ones (RjMetrics) and as a result, 76% of Fortune 500 now view metrics like customer lifetime value as an essential aspect of their profitability. A CRM can be a foundational tool in providing such insights and enabling the development of cross-sell and upsell strategies and journeys through the use of its artificial intelligence infused next best offer features. The Big Four of CRM (Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft) all provide context-based suggestions through its AI engines (Einstein, Cortana etc.) and the automated insights that are generated via online customer profiles and real-time events. CRM can also be leveraged for similar tactics by the service teams that can stay ahead of common patterns and reach out to customers before issues become issues and the marketers can push targeted omnichannel campaigns to the existing customers based on the stage of the customer relationship and aid in the lifetime value of the customer.
Achieve CRM success; the TransformX way
By directly augmenting organizational relationships with their most important stakeholders in the modern day, the customer, a CRM fast tracks the way in which organizational value is created. The TransformX Customer Success Model assists clients in achieving this by assessing their readiness to take on a CRM implementation and leveraging a methodical, proprietary and industry-leading approach to help select the best fit solution that will add comprehensive value for their customer-related goals. The processes include sessions and interviews with key organizational stakeholders to comprehend the real needs and showcase short and long-term roadmaps for achieving customer success across the board. A bespoke CRM RFP effort is also conducted to compare the solutions against 15 dimensions of success from the model. In cases where a CRM is already in use, a comprehensive value and impact review is performed to underpin any potential failings in the current solution and similar tacts are leveraged to recommend one that fits the need better. TransformX clients have leveraged this model over the years to add value to their customer relationships, reduced costs of acquisition, increased customer satisfaction scores (CSAT, NPS etc.) increased customer retention, grown customer lifetime value and achieved further benefits and growth in this realm. We welcome you to review the Success Page on our website to gain more insight into the success stories of our clients and we look forward to engaging with you and your teams to assist in the success of your next CRM or customer-related effort.
Customer-intelligence and data-driven decision-making form the backbone of successful relationships with modern consumers (Generation Z and soon Generation Alpha) in the modern age. They look for engaging experiences, are empowered beyond belief, exhibit little or no loyalties and retaining them requires modern enterprises to develop strategies that are not only grounded in real insights but that also enable long-term relationship-building using relevant tools. This evolving (and often exhausting) need by these consumers require a methodical system that acts as the backbone for all customer-focused collaboration within an enterprise and helps with the acquisition of new users, enables retention of existing ones and expands the growth, value and profitability of the relationships with them. And the go-to solution for all this is a Customer Relationship Management (popularly known as CRM).
But what is a CRM anyways?
At its core, a CRM strengthens organizational customer relationships by putting customers at the heart of everything and acts as a bridge between vision, strategy, process, and technology to boost efforts required to win with the customers. In practice, it is a one stop shop that breaks the silos of sales, service, and marketing and projects a 360-degree view of customers through the core disciplines of account, lead, campaign management, call, contact center workflows, project, knowledge management, and much more. Doing so, it enables the creation of holistic and targeted strategies and journeys that makes the pursuit of consumers collectively by the organization as one, rather than as a disjointed or isolated effort by each division. Owing to the success of its 100 plus operational vendors, from the Big four (Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle) to smaller ones like HubSpot, Agile, and Zoho, CRM was named by Gartner as the biggest (and possibly one of the more strategic) enterprise software tools in 2017 and is expected to reach $80 billion in worth by 2025.
How did it come into being?
CRM finds its philosophical and historical origins in the 60’s when standalone mainframe systems started housing customer information electronically. Then in the 70’s, to gain competitive advantage, the innovative and systems savvy organizations started storing information in dedicated digital contact management systems that paved the way for earlier versions of database marketing systems (popularized in the 80’s) and allowed statistical models to analyze patterns in customer data. By the early 90s, emerging sales force automation functions began to appear (with advanced contact management capabilities) as the foundational elements of the first CRM solution called Siebel, founded by former Oracle executive Tom Siebel. Oracle and SAP, the contemporary ERP vendors of the time, followed suit by adding marketing and sales components to their solution stacks (later adding service as well), which were subsequently spun-off into dedicated CRM offerings. Cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) then took CRM to a new height in the late 90s, as the off-premise or cloud delivery model allowed multitudes of advantages including scaling without having to expand existing infrastructure. Salesforce (also founded by an Oracle executive Mark Benioff) become a major proponent of this approach and popularized the concept in the CRM space. The turn of the century then saw mobile versions of CRM emerging (starting with Siebel Mobile) and enabling salespersons to take their work to the field, a major win for the sales community that could update customer related activity information from anywhere instead of only when dialed in from their office or home machines. This was followed by the inclusion of Social CRM in the mid-2000s that paved the realization about the richness of insights on people’s lives on social media and the ways such information could be leveraged to make targeted customer related decisions. The last few years have seen more and more artificial intelligence and natural language processing being added into the mix (with conversational, voice-based elements of telephony) adding further value to CRM, which has now truly become an essential customer related guiding force for organizations in all industries and geographies.
How it assists with customer acquisition?
For 44% of organizations on a global basis, the only customer strategy is customer acquisition (Econsultancy study) and that too through an age old process where leads are qualified and processed through a sales funnel (structured or otherwise) until conversion is achieved and a sale is made. This rinse-and-repeat process places the onus on the marketing function to ger creative in their messages based upon identifying and segmenting various group of users instead of a system to run the process better. A CRM circumvents that. As the cost of acquisition (and marketing, in general) continues to go through the roof, the value of data and customer insights cannot be understated, which is where a CRM can be enormously helpful. By aggregating all leads (from all channels) into one space, it reduces missed opportunities and enables better planning towards converting those leads. The sales cycle review and pipeline management features also allow the identification of processes that are taking customers towards a conversion and could be lured into being acquired and doubled down upon. The advanced lead management capabilities further allows a CRM to identify high-value prospects and fast-tracks their conversion by positioning the optimal performing products against the one that need to be updated. Such internal insights and the ones gathered from social media help in trend analysis and building targeted personas to detect developing patterns and trends around acquiring customers and building value for them.
How it assists with customer retention?
The importance of customer retention has been on a steady incline since organizations learned about stickiness through loyalty programs in the 80s as well as the blazing fact that customer retention can be up to 25 times cheaper than acquisition (HBR). Forward thinking organizations now attempt to augment the value of their customer relationships through extraordinarily personalized service where complaints and service requests can be better captured and ranked based on factors like the worth of client and the potential of their growth with the business. Contact center workers (also known as call centers) are provided a 360-degree view of customers (through a CRM) that includes insights and data on their past complaints and their existing product or service portfolios to better assess and service them. CRM enables inter-departmental collaboration with teams from front and back-office to work closely on solving cases in minimal time and advanced features on Customer Sentiment Analysis can identify words, pitch tone and temperament patterns from customer speech (on the phone) that aid in engaging with them through the right skillset needed to satisfy the complaint. Also, customers now have the ability to engage through social channels and the advanced integrations creates support cases directly on a CRM to ensure that customer loyalties and satisfaction remain high.
How it assists with customer growth?
If done right, satisfied and loyal (existing) customers can spend upto 300% more than new ones (RjMetrics) and as a result, 76% of Fortune 500 now view metrics like customer lifetime value as an essential aspect of their profitability. A CRM can be a foundational tool in providing such insights and enabling the development of cross-sell and upsell strategies and journeys through the use of its artificial intelligence infused next best offer features. The Big Four of CRM (Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft) all provide context-based suggestions through its AI engines (Einstein, Cortana etc.) and the automated insights that are generated via online customer profiles and real-time events. CRM can also be leveraged for similar tactics by the service teams that can stay ahead of common patterns and reach out to customers before issues become issues and the marketers can push targeted omnichannel campaigns to the existing customers based on the stage of the customer relationship and aid in the lifetime value of the customer.
Achieve CRM success; the TransformX way
By directly augmenting organizational relationships with their most important stakeholders in the modern day, the customer, a CRM fast tracks the way in which organizational value is created. The TransformX Customer Success Model assists clients in achieving this by assessing their readiness to take on a CRM implementation and leveraging a methodical, proprietary and industry-leading approach to help select the best fit solution that will add comprehensive value for their customer-related goals. The processes include sessions and interviews with key organizational stakeholders to comprehend the real needs and showcase short and long-term roadmaps for achieving customer success across the board. A bespoke CRM RFP effort is also conducted to compare the solutions against 15 dimensions of success from the model. In cases where a CRM is already in use, a comprehensive value and impact review is performed to underpin any potential failings in the current solution and similar tacts are leveraged to recommend one that fits the need better. TransformX clients have leveraged this model over the years to add value to their customer relationships, reduced costs of acquisition, increased customer satisfaction scores (CSAT, NPS etc.) increased customer retention, grown customer lifetime value and achieved further benefits and growth in this realm. We welcome you to review the Success Page on our website to gain more insight into the success stories of our clients and we look forward to engaging with you and your teams to assist in the success of your next CRM or customer-related effort.