To satisfy today’s hyper-connected consumer, you need a holistic approach.
In today’s instant digital world of Uber, GrubHub, and Amazon (accentuated by their latest foray into one-click shopping via the Dash button), the rules of customer engagement have changed. It’s no longer just about the product or service a company delivers but delivering it in a trustworthy and personalized way. In fact, an astounding 78 percent of global digital companies try to differentiate themselves through customer experience. That experience can take shape across a number of touch points—in-store, mobile, social, the Web, via the contact center, and more—which means there are constant moments of truth with your customers, opportunities to delight and build loyalty, or frustrate and create churn.
Which is why it’s more important and more difficult than ever to deliver a satisfying, efficient, and accurate experience. Organizations must simultaneously support today’s channels while preparing for tomorrow’s (like wearable tech, which is coming fast). At the same time, mergers, acquisitions, massive expansions in product offerings, and new regulations are rapidly exposing the flaws that currently exist in siloed processes and aging legacy systems. Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) software, including the cloud-based varieties, can no longer reliably keep pace with the needs of the enterprise in this complex, changing world. As a result, CRM systems must evolve to satisfy a new generation of customers.
For too long, organizations looking to implement a CRM system have had to choose between two evils: conform their business to inflexible, packaged CRM applications or embark on costly development projects to build their own customized CRM from the ground up. The “CRM Hangover” of the late 1990s was the result of these expensive and monolithic CRM applications that did little more than aggregate customer data, dumping information on to user screens with no useful guidance, intelligence, or value to the end customer.
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