Customer experience is the new hype-word for enterprises these days. Because of its importance, businesses have started implementing CRM and CXM initiatives like there’s no tomorrow. This fact, in itself, speaks about how the industry is susceptible to the hype machine. However, if these initiatives are adequately applied, they could bring a LOT of benefits to the business. However, the catch is that most of these initiatives fall far short of their promised deliverables when the company implements them practically.
The core of this issue stems from how businesses approach the implementation of these initiatives. Even if you’re a business at the phase of looking for programmers for your startup, customer management should still be a concern. It’s an intrinsic part of how enterprises do business. In this article, we’ll explore how companies can successfully implement CXM or CRM initiatives by asking themselves a few critical questions.
1) What Should the Business be Doing?
CXM and CRM initiatives are a step into the future. Before companies can genuinely embrace the future, however, they need to break with the past. Too many businesses try to implement customer management systems that rely on older data to function. By tying the enterprise to this older data, the system can’t evolve and adapt to meet the current needs. While it may scare some businesses, breaking with tradition is a good idea for developing a new CRM or CXM system. The company shouldn’t focus on what they used to do, but rather on what the business ought to do to benefit its customers.
2) What Does the Business Need?
A CXM or CRM system should be developed to benefit both customers and the company. Many businesses aren’t sure what a CRM application does or if they really need to implement a CXM system. Often, businesses give in to the hype and think that implementing these measures will be a magic bullet for their customer relations and interaction. For an enterprise to benefit from implementing a CXM/CRM system, they need to know what purpose it serves in their business. If management doesn’t know or can’t explain why they need it, they likely don’t know enough about these systems to make a logical decision.
3) Are We Building a Constantly Improving System?
A CXM/CRM system should be adaptable, but it should also be easy to determine whether it’s working. When putting together these systems, it is crucial to have metrics that the system can measure itself by. If the business is looking to improve its customer satisfaction ratings, there’s no way to tell if it performs this duty if there are no statistics to compare one month to another. Metrics also allow the business to set achievable goals, which will make those working with the system feel more focused, once they have a direction to aim towards.
The Customer as an Asset
Companies have come to realize how necessary customer retention is. With so many businesses relying on repeat customers to push their bottom line, they need to start seeing the customer as an asset. As with all assets the company maintains, having a management system makes it easy to delve into the details of those assets. In the case of the customer, it can have multiple benefits, from gauging customer satisfaction to learning about their individual preferences. However, this only holds if the system is built to handle it.
