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

As the customer journey continues to expand and become more complex, it is 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 his advice on how to seize the opportunities available 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 a context?

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 are in the midst of the golden age of the customer experience, a new battleground for businesses 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 competition on the market, today's customer journey is made up of many stages.

Customers like to move from one channel to another to explore, research, compare, try and buy. This journey is now a ritual that they live out to the full, for reasons as diverse as ethics (responsible brand) 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 organisational disciplines. They are cooperating so that brands can establish a deeper connection with their customers, taking advantage of their growing need to make more engaged consumer decisions.

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

Companies usually start this process by analysing the customer journey from start to finish, assessing where technology and human interaction can be most effective. But efficiency, through an increasingly customised customer journey, finds its limits at the doorstep of privacy.

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

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

Thomas Ciezar

There's going to be a change in the way CRM is approached, putting customers back at the centre of our concerns, so that we can find the best way of engaging them and meeting their needs. This means, however, that the various customer-facing teams need to have access to the relevant information to deliver these personalised experiences. Knowing your customers inside out means collecting and using potentially sensitive information across different channels and contact points.

At a time when the protection of privacy is a growing concern among consumers, optimising the personalisation 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 question of recovering, sorting, storing and managing data in the best possible way, while complying with the RGPD.

In the future, medium-sized and large businesses will want more personalised tools centred around CRM. Purchasing decisions for these organisations will therefore favour 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:

• Integration of technologies with specific sectors - As CRM systems become more specialised, their ability to blend 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 the 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 need to enable sales teams to track and update their entire sales cycle from their phone. Taking this a step further, many basic CRM functions, including personalisation, will now be designed directly for smartphones - rather than first being designed for PCs and then adapted for mobile. In addition, separate applications for different activities will be developed to make them more user-friendly, notably for dashboards, the transaction pipeline and lead tracking.

As the cloud becomes more widespread, organisations are increasingly looking to deploy CRM tools via comprehensive SaaS and mobile applications.

In the future, these applications will benefit from major improvements that will encourage their adoption, such as putting the customer at the centre, personalisation without violating privacy, flexibility and compatibility, and the ability to adopt the latest innovations. All this to ensure 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 centre and offering them the best possible experience, which will encourage them 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 applications. A centralised system that can contextualise 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 provides a single 360-degree view of the consumer that encompasses many of the common 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 analytics. There's no doubt that we need a new generation of digital tools that can organise, visualise and make sense of large swathes 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 organisations and offer better customer service.

All companies, large and small, are redoubling their efforts. Organisations 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, their attention spans and their wallets.

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

Finally, companies must not forget the centrality of the human element in all of 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.