CX Tech: The Unexpected Power of a CRM
05/26/22 • 40 min
In today's episode, hosts Devin and David discuss customer experience tech, specifically diving into customer relationship management.
Since David is our resident CRM expert, he fills the role of guest as Devin runs the interview! Devin first wants to explore David's history with CRM, which includes experience building a CRM platform. From his early CRM experiences, including such things as rudimentary efforts using Excel and Access, and onward, David has seen all the flavors of what's out there. He first became heavily involved in work on CRMs when he participated in building a CRM for a college sports program. This process, he explains, prompted him to think about the full customer life cycle; for a prospective college athlete, this life cycle actually extends from pre-college athletics through the rest of life as a student and alum. The question was, how could David and his team build a system for this market to help different aspects of the business keep up with the customers (athletes)? There were tricky nuances to navigate, especially if the CRM platform was to function smoothly—like an extension of human touch.
At their best, CRM platforms work with humans to augment their efforts; thus, they must be designed around the layers of relevant use cases and different aspects of a business. Since some companies' touchpoints with customers never leave the digital realm, these companies' CRM platforms are the employees' only means of customer interaction. In these instances, it is especially crucial for the platform to represent customers well and thoroughly. David explains how business leaders can help employees who feel burdened by the task of keeping up with customer information input, highlighting the need for proper information to meet customer needs and expectations in the moment. As the conversation wraps up, he and Devin talk about empowering employees to deliver a great customer experience by using CRM for prioritizing, business optimization, and personalization. CRM is not only good for customers, David goes on to share, but is also a tool by which leaders can empower their employers!
Links:
Learn more about the Experience Leader podcast.
Learn more about hosts Devin Smith and David Antoline.
Learn more about episode sponsor Active Digital.
If you have any questions on this episode, send them to [email protected]
Connect with Devin
Subscribe and Review
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
In today's episode, hosts Devin and David discuss customer experience tech, specifically diving into customer relationship management.
Since David is our resident CRM expert, he fills the role of guest as Devin runs the interview! Devin first wants to explore David's history with CRM, which includes experience building a CRM platform. From his early CRM experiences, including such things as rudimentary efforts using Excel and Access, and onward, David has seen all the flavors of what's out there. He first became heavily involved in work on CRMs when he participated in building a CRM for a college sports program. This process, he explains, prompted him to think about the full customer life cycle; for a prospective college athlete, this life cycle actually extends from pre-college athletics through the rest of life as a student and alum. The question was, how could David and his team build a system for this market to help different aspects of the business keep up with the customers (athletes)? There were tricky nuances to navigate, especially if the CRM platform was to function smoothly—like an extension of human touch.
At their best, CRM platforms work with humans to augment their efforts; thus, they must be designed around the layers of relevant use cases and different aspects of a business. Since some companies' touchpoints with customers never leave the digital realm, these companies' CRM platforms are the employees' only means of customer interaction. In these instances, it is especially crucial for the platform to represent customers well and thoroughly. David explains how business leaders can help employees who feel burdened by the task of keeping up with customer information input, highlighting the need for proper information to meet customer needs and expectations in the moment. As the conversation wraps up, he and Devin talk about empowering employees to deliver a great customer experience by using CRM for prioritizing, business optimization, and personalization. CRM is not only good for customers, David goes on to share, but is also a tool by which leaders can empower their employers!
Links:
Learn more about the Experience Leader podcast.
Learn more about hosts Devin Smith and David Antoline.
Learn more about episode sponsor Active Digital.
If you have any questions on this episode, send them to [email protected]
Connect with Devin
Subscribe and Review
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
Previous Episode
Five Forces of CX, Part 3: Product & Service Excellence
Welcome to the Experience Leader podcast, and to this episode brought to you by Active Digital! Do you want to de-commoditize your products and services? Do you want to become a destination brand, increase your revenue, and have more control over your pricing? If so, you're in the right place! Each week, we'll talk about how to create great customer experiences and how to orient your company to enable them. In today's episode, hosts Devin and David have a conversation about product and service excellence.
To begin, Devin stresses the importance of always asking if the main intent of your product is to help customers meet their goal. As someone who has run a product company himself, David shares his thoughts on this. While it may sound obvious, this task is a hard one to do. Small scale businesses have limited resources, so it’s crucial to make tradeoffs which will actually resonate with the customer. That being said, customer goals are rarely linear. You run into big problems when you begin thinking of customer needs as a one-size-fits-all. Customer feedback, both positive and negative, is essential to this process. In both Devin’s and David’s experience, not all feedback is created equally, so it’s important to single out feedback from customers with the job to be done that you are targeting. Similarly, you must have realistic expectations which map to gradual innovation.
Innovation is about being able to deliver more in a way that helps the customer solve that problem in a way they couldn’t before. While it is a cultural force, there is a need to give people the latitude to make those decisions. Most companies don’t allow a sufficient amount of time to ask why something didn’t advance progress like it should’ve. If you ask yourself these questions, you’ll often find that you weren’t very far off from success at all. Another way to nail product and service in the software world is to keep employing agile. David shares that if the adherence to the process becomes more important than the outcome of the work done, you need to reevaluate. Most importantly, you need to care about the impact of your product.
If you find that your product is not helping the customer reach their intent, you need to feel comfortable enough to stop what you’re doing and find out why. However, it’s never easy to slow the train down, especially in a large organization. Most of the time, it all comes down to how well you understand your customer. David explains that excellence comes from a place of understanding and demands latitude to solve problems. Finally, Devin offers parting advice for achieving excellence.
Links:
Learn more about the Experience Leader podcast.
Learn more about hosts Devin Smith and David Antoline.
Learn more about episode sponsor Active Digital.
Connect with Devin
Subscribe and Review
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
Next Episode
Sales is from Mars. Marketing is from Venus. Or are they?
Welcome to the Experience Leader podcast, and to this episode brought to you by Active Digital! Do you want to de-commoditize your products and services? Do you want to become a destination brand, increase your revenue, and have more control over your pricing? If so, you're in the right place! Each week, we'll talk about how to create great customer experience and how to orient your company to enable them. In today's episode, hosts Devin and David unpack the idea that sales is from Mars and marketing is from Venus.
At almost any given company, the tendency for the sales team is to feel like marketing is not doing their best, and vice versa. This can lead to pressure for teams to end up behaving in a way that isn’t in line with the best interest of the customer, and therefore the company. Individually, each of these groups struggle with short term vs. long term, which often ends up with each side feeling they are in opposition with one another. One of the biggest issues within enterprises is having marketers who don’t see how their actions impact sales. However, both sales and marketing should understand that they share the same end goal: helping the customer buy.
While it’s necessary to have a method behind the madness of marketing, this isn’t just limited to the number of calls made or how the conversations went. Rather, it needs to be measured by asking ourselves if we are helping customers be more educated on the service and understand how we can be of value to them before they ever make a final decision. Having a goal number to shoot for to incentivize ourselves to grow can be good, but it’s important not to wind up too focused on the numbers. There is the question of looking at these teams and how they operate, and then there is also the question of leadership. Representatives from any field of a company must have a clear vision of who their customer is and what their expectations may be at every touchpoint. Leadership and company culture is really where this all begins.
As a marketer, you hold a unique ability to expand someone’s mind by helping them consider other possibilities rather than the ones they already know. The beauty of understanding what somebody is trying to achieve is that you can actually introduce solutions for them to solve their problems at hand. Once the door is open, it is prime time for marketing. Moving forward, Devin and David predict that the line between sales and marketing will continue to blur as people tend to do more research and shopping without human contact. Similarly, we will find that sales will have to be involved in the process of educating without contact.
Links:
Learn more about the Experience Leaderpodcast.
Learn more about hosts Devin Smith and David Antoline.
Learn more about episode sponsor Active Digital.
Connect with Devin
Subscribe and Review
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. We'd also appreciate if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help us reach more people and create a bigger impact.
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