[ITW] Decoding customer relations: trends, technologies and opportunities for companies

As the customer journey continues to expand and become more complex, it's more important than ever to offer a seamless, unified interaction.

Given this challenge, what opportunities are created when you integrate your front-end functions with sales, marketing and customer experience?

Thomas Ciezar, Marketing Specialist at Zoho, offers you his insight into customer relations, between the evolution of the digital customer journey and technological trends. He gives you his advice on how to seize the opportunities offered to companies wishing to strengthen their customer loyalty strategy, in order to innovate and stand out from the crowd.

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In recent years, the number of customer relations channels has multiplied. How do you build strong customer relationships in such an environment?

Thomas Ciezar

There's no doubt that companies today are increasingly aware of the meteoric rise in the importance of the "omnichannel customer journey". In fact, we're in the midst of the golden age of the customer experience, a new battleground for companies created by a digital revolution and a crisis that have led consumers to adapt their consumption habits. With repeat purchases, increasingly communicative word-of-mouth and greater market competition, today's customer journey is made up of many stages.

Indeed, customers like to move from one channel to another to explore, research, compare, try, buy... This journey is now a ritual that they live out to the full, for reasons as diverse as ethics (responsible branding) or comfort (ease of purchase). Although it begins with an online search, this first stage is often not included in the customer journey, and therefore lacks customer service too. Yet it is by integrating it into the entire customer journey that the best experiences are created.

Defining a unified customer experience in 2021 and after the Covid crisis involves much more collaboration between organizational disciplines. They are cooperating so that brands establish a deeper connection with their customers, capitalizing on the latter's growing need to make more engaged consumer decisions.

It's now time for companies to seek to control as much of the customer journey as possible, improving every step to gain more sales and marketing opportunities. A successful customer experience, or at least an improved one, is impossible without knowledge of that customer's needs.

Typically, companies begin this process by analyzing the customer journey from start to finish, assessing where technology and human interaction can be most effective. But efficiency, through an increasingly customized customer journey, finds its limits at the doorstep of privacy.

Indeed, personalization at the expense of privacy can do more harm than good. To avoid this, retailers can put in place specific personalization measures on their site , while ensuring that privacy remains at the heart of their concerns.

What are the major trends in new technologies for customer relationship management?

Thomas Ciezar

There will be a shift in the way CRM is approached, to put customers back at the center of our concerns, in order to find the best way to interest them and meet their needs. This means, however, that the various customer-facing teams must have access to the information they need to deliver these personalized experiences. Knowing your customers inside out means collecting and using potentially sensitive information across different channels and contact points.

At a time when privacy is a growing concern among consumers, optimizing the personalization of services without encroaching on privacy will be both decisive and differentiating. However, data management may prove difficult, given the sheer volume of information that can be collected. It will therefore be a matter of retrieving, sorting, storing and managing data optimally, while complying with the RGPD.

In the future, medium-sized and large companies will want more personalized tools centered around CRM. Purchasing decisions for these organizations will thus favor the flexibility and extensibility of a supplier's technology offering and architecture. Those who offer a wider range of flexible applications that are compatible with other offerings will therefore be more successful.

In this vein, a few key innovations will make all the difference between suppliers over the next few years:

• Sector-specific technology integration - As CRM systems become more specialized, their ability to merge with complementary technologies will be crucial. For example, retail companies using augmented, or virtual, reality will need to integrate these innovations into CRM so that data can be relayed to other stages of the buying cycle.

• Artificial Intelligence and information processing - One of the main aims of machine learning is to reduce manual and repetitive work, such as entering customer data. This will be possible with deeper voice processing, where sales reps can guide a virtual assistant to collect customer information and perform actions, such as searching for documents, using image recognition.
  
  
• Focus on Mobile CRM - CRM tools must enable sales teams to track and update their entire sales cycle from their phones. Taking this a step further, many basic CRM functions, including personalization, will now be designed directly for smartphones - rather than first for PCs and then adapted for mobile. In addition, separate apps for different activities will be developed for greater usability; notably for dashboards, the transaction pipeline, or lead tracking.

As the cloud becomes more widespread, organizations are increasingly considering the deployment of CRM tools via comprehensive SaaS and mobile applications.

In the future, these will benefit from major enhancements that will boost their adoption, such as putting the customer at the center, privacy-friendly personalization, flexibility and compatibility, and the ability to adopt the latest innovations. All for a smooth, productive experience for sales teams and a lasting relationship with end-customers.

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What advice would you give to companies wishing to implement a loyalty strategy?

Thomas Ciezar

Obviously, by putting the customer at the center and offering him the best possible experience, which will encourage him to make repeat purchases. Customer experience needs to be at the heart of every company's culture , and if employees are to deliver exceptional experiences, they need access to a range of appropriate tools that work harmoniously across different disciplines and cross-reference data from different departments.

Customers interact with brands across multiple channels, including online chat, phone, social networks and messaging apps. A centralized system that can contextualize all the data and interactions generated from the different channels is therefore essential.

Yet many companies still have outdated systems, siloed data and services that don't communicate with each other, creating barriers to delivering a consistent experience. A well-integrated customer experience platform offers a single, 360-degree view of the consumer, encompassing many of the frequent touchpoints within an omnichannel experience.

Coherent platforms with a suite of applications that communicate with each other make a lot of sense, as do simple, actionable, business-focused analytical tools. There's no doubt that we need a new generation of digital tools capable of organizing, visualizing and making sense of large slices of data.

Customer experience platforms are now being used by smaller, younger companies that don't have legacy systems, enabling them to compete agilely with larger structures and offer better customer service.

All companies, large and small, are redoubling their efforts. Organizations want customer synthesis to be seamless, rather than fragmented and massive. Do the right thing and you get better, more active interaction with your customers. It's a complete game-changer. It's essential when you're competing for customers' time and effort, attention spans and wallets.

What's incredible now is that we can measure the effectiveness of every activity from its inception. For example, if your community manager runs a campaign, he or she can clearly see the added value the campaign has brought to customer relationship management, and thus gauge customer reaction and involvement. This links all key data and functions on a single platform, increasing visibility and fostering collaboration, while leaving responsibility to the right team or individual.

Finally, companies must not forget the centrality of the human element in all this. For us, it's also about improving and fostering the best human interactions in the customer experience space. Technology must complement human interaction, not replace it.