How To Use CRM To Improve Customer Experience And Employee Experience

Today’s customer is highly informed, tech-savvy, and socially engaged.

He conducts digital research, participates in brand chatter on social media, and seeks out reviews and feedback from his digital tribe.

When he engages with a brand, he looks for more than great products or low prices – he demands great experiences cisco unified.

In fact, products, services, and prices don’t matter to today’s customers as much as great Customer Experiences (CX). He is even willing to sever a relationship with a brand if it delivers poor customer experiences.

CX matters.

This is why CX is a high priority for 76% of customer management executives and leaders.

If CX is the pulse of your contact center as well, you’re already creating a crucial competitive difference for your organization. You’re also well on your way to driving greater customer satisfaction, trust, and loyalty – outcomes that can ultimately increase your revenues and improve your profitability. So, keep focusing on delivering great CX. But at the same time, keep in mind the role of EX (Employee Experiences) in enhancing CX. Your employees and agents are your contact center’s first brand advocates, as well as the people who actually deliver CX. So, their experiences can affect how they talk about your brand and impact their ability and enthusiasm to deliver great CX. Simply put, CX and EX are intrinsically linked, and that’s why you should make an effort to enhance both in your contact center. Fortunately, you already have a powerful tool at your disposal to support you with both aims. This tool is your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.

Leverage your CRM to Enhance CX

Your CRM system is a rich goldmine of information about your customers – who they are, what they do, how to contact them, and much more. By tapping into its granular nature and 360° customer views, you can easily access a huge range and volume of data to derive meaningful insights, tailor your communication strategies, and provide relevant services through the right channel at the right time. In short, your CRM provides the “eyes and ears” you need on the ground to understand and address your customers’ goals, preferences, and pain points. However, CRM is more than just a customer information database. It can provide a relevant context for each transaction and reveal key trends and patterns. It can also tell you about what, where, and when of CX, so you can take steps to address gaps and nurture and deepen your customer relationships.

Your CX program can provide the right strategic direction to your CRM so you can convert the latter’s observations and statistics into meaningful insights and predictions. And by integrating the customer data in your CRM with strategic and analytical CX processes, you can unpack the more in-depth CX stories that lie behind day-to-day interactions. Equally important, you can highlight pain points and issues related to CX, uncover the underlying reasons or root causes, and then use this information to inform the way you respond to CX gaps. Thus, the “symbiotic” relationship between your CRM and CX programs can help boost your CX objectives and improve your chances of converting today’s customers into tomorrow’s brand advocates.

Yet another symbiotic – and no less powerful – relationship exists between CRM and EX. We cover this aspect next.

How CRM Can Help Improve EX

Every customer experience starts from within an organization. According to Richard Branson, “loyal employees in any company create loyal customers.” So if your agents are not having a good experience, your organization will struggle to deliver a good experience to customers. That’s why great EX is such a crucial business imperative for your contact center. And your CRM platform can help with this as well.

One way to deliver great EX is by integrating your CRM with your contact center platform. With this integration, agents can immediately access customer information and gain valuable insights about their journeys, preferences, and interaction history. They can also get the right context with every interaction on the same interface/screen they use to communicate with customers. Since they don’t have to switch screens or waste time looking for relevant data, they can quickly address the customer’s concerns. Thus, CRM integration provides agents with the means to engage in meaningful customer interactions and thus improve CX. Moreover, they can do this in a way that’s not difficult or cumbersome for them. This results in better EX, which eventually leads to better CX.

On the other hand, a customer support system that is not integrated with CRM forces agents to switch between multiple screens and applications. This makes it difficult for them to negotiate the system, increase their Average Call Handling Time (AHT), and hinder their ability to provide meaningful support, ultimately leading to less satisfied customers. And since CX and EX have such a close relationship, unhappy customers who complain or, worse, leave, also damage agents’ experience. To break this vicious cycle, it’s important to make sure that agents enjoy great EX. And CRM makes this possible. With a CRM system, you empower your agents with all the information and support they need to deliver exceptional CX. Simultaneously, it helps them feel like they are part of the experience solution instead of the problem.