Answering the ‘who’ and ‘what’ from CRM, and the ‘why’ from CX, creates a more meaningful brand connection
Successful organisations invest in creating personalised engagements with customers, engagements that are both more efficient and more effective. By integrating rich data troves from CRM with CX, businesses create unique customer and brand experiences that drive profitable transactions.
Benefits of integrating CRM and CX data
There is pressure on marketing budgets that demands direct, measurable initiatives. The pandemic changed consumer expectations and purchasing behaviour; customers want to be heard by brands and invited to come back in a meaningful way. Relying on CX data alone is no longer adequate. Integrating CRM with CX in an effective manner delivers on the full promise of customisation. Merging these two powerful data capabilities creates a seamless frontline data stack that makes targeting and personalised communication possible. Traditional customer analytics approaches like ‘next best action’ become easier to execute.
In order to derive the maximum benefits, businesses need to first define what brand experience really means, collect data to measure that brand experience, and use that data throughout the customer journey to deliver on the promise of customer-centric marketing.
The resulting benefits are:
- Unique customer experiences
- Connection with the brand: “The brand hears me”
- Smart recommendations
- Personalised offers
- Frictionless transactions
- Deeper loyalty
By integrating CRM data with CX data, businesses can understand which customer is transacting, how frequently, what they buy, why they buy and how long it takes. Answering the ‘who’ and ‘what’ from CRM, and the ‘why’ from CX creates a more meaningful brand connection, enabling organisations to further strengthen their CRM activations.
Successful integration empowers decision makers to:
- Focus on customer transactions and experiences to develop Next Best Action
- Drive loyalty with data-driven decision inputs around customer values
- Increase accuracy of data-driven campaign execution and ROI assessment in both online and offline marketing
Beyond the end-user experience
It’s more than just your interface: your business needs to adapt how it works internally, as well. According to the 2020 IBM MD&I Intelligent Worfklows for Customer Lifecycle Management study, more than 60% of businesses surveyed are also accelerating internal initiatives.
Four steps to build an effective CRM/CX integration program
1. Build CX momentum prior to CRM integration.
- Execute thorough discovery of current CRM systems.
- Define the technology and analytical roadmaps for CX and CRM integration.
- Deploy integrated analytical solutions, such as Loyalty Analytics and Dynamic Pricing.
- Define and communicate importance of CX to key stakeholders and create simple, ad hoc CX activities.
2. Refine program structure and processes with automation where appropriate.
3. Validate program ROI and communicate successes to embed change.
4. Maintain CX momentum by optimising and automating CX programs and processes while expanding the use of closed loop feedback.
Why Kantar’s CRM+CX solution?
Although CRM and CX are two independent disciplines, they have a common goal of gaining a better understanding of human behaviour. Your analytics teams need a solution with the best from both disciplines. Kantar Analytics’ robust set of tools and methodologies for CRM and CX powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are well positioned to achieve that goal. They overlay a connected perspective of the customer and enable personalised and relevant actions.
"Collecting T-NPS data for us is to drive the link to contextual marketing. I would like my customers to get value from their feedback – which in turn is an incremental growth for us through the next best action CRM campaigns," said one of our mobile telecommunications clients. "That’s the business link between CX and CRM."
How it works: A major telecoms company increased overall customer retention by 30%
Our client wanted a unified view of their customer’s interactions across touchpoints and development of an analytics roadmap to help drive customer engagement. By integrating customer experiences from multiple touchpoints (customer support, digital and app data, etc.) and identifying the key drivers of satisfaction, we were able to understand customer and market behaviour through segmentation. We were able to uncover market and customer level insights and deploy next best actions leveraging CRM data.
This approach solved specific client challenges, such as identifying customer product promo-specific intent, attrition modelling, and customer lifetime value. The combination of CRM and CX data allowed better allocation of marketing dollars by identifying customer engagement levers unique to each customer.
The solution enabled the client to execute targeted campaigns and prioritise customer actions, leading to a 30% increase in overall customer retention.