How CRM improves customer experience? In the most advanced consumer communication management systems, all content is now designed, created, and distributed within a profoundly transformed business paradigm, in which digital technologies evolve to try to intercept the preferences and expectations of a customer in constant movement.
So what kind of communication is most effective in achieving objectives that are becoming more and more challenging every day? Where should the communication flows initiate? What assets can brands use to reach an increasingly aware and elusive consumer? And finally, how we’ll look at how CRM improves customer experience.
In this post, we’ll identify the value on the data already present within CRM systems as the essential initial step in any subsequent communications process.
And if change is driven by the customer – and it becomes essential to try to interpret the customer’s digital traces to get to know him better – it is through the personalization of communications that can influence a customer’s decision to remain loyal to the brand, namely a fluid, decisive, and engaging customer experience. Improving the overall customer experience with the company is the cornerstone of Doxee’s vision. Doxee develops solutions for the digitalization of the communication processes of any organization, implementing the most suitable tools to create and enhance data-driven, personalized, and contextual interactions.
For Doxee, communication is the competitive factor in which to invest in order to establish and maintain valuable relationships with customers and citizens.
Data and CRM improves customer experience: the cardinal points for corporate communication
A new type of “always connected” customer expects to have relevant content available everywhere, in any format and device, in the various moments of their daily routine, whether it be work or leisure. It’s a customer who expects purchasing and consumption experiences that match the quality of the technologies he or she usually has access to. For this reason, companies are faced with a forced choice: on the one hand, they must adopt more flexible and responsive business models in order to adapt to the new market reality, and on the other, they urgently need to equip themselves with intuitive and performing digital tools that are able to concretely support these same models. In both cases, CRM is the inevitable starting point.
Modernizing the business: How CRM improves customer experience
Customer Relationship Management systems have taken on primary importance in managing the relationship with customers, in offering the information resources necessary to design relevant content and in conveying personalized communications. We can say: CRM improves customer experience.
Before going any further in tracing the links between CRM data, customer experience, and personalization, we would like to recall once again how CRMs are now at the service of the entire company structure and contribute substantially to the activities of measuring and evaluating its performance.
This is specific software that constantly collects and analyzes customer data and stores it in a single place, open to the different business functions. The different departments, in turn, use this data for their particular needs, for example to:
- build a more accurate consumer profile
- set up ad hoc communications
- open and maintain a vital channel with the consumer, offering them the information they actually need
- articulate the relationship on the different touchpoints, in increasingly in-depth exchanges
- improve the customer experience, working with greater awareness on specific and significant aspects of commercial proposals
CRM improves customer experience: The determining factor in purchasing decisions
Customer experience (CX) is an integral part of Customer Relationship Management (CRM): it is defined by the interactions that the customer has with a company throughout the customer journey, from the first contact to its retention. It is, in other words, a direct consequence of the relationship modes that the brand has designed for the individual consumer over time. If a customer has a positive experience, the brand is more likely to gain a loyal customer (to learn more, see our tips for good customer base management and retention).
According to Pwc, 73% of customers cite the customer experience as a determining factor in their purchasing decisions. Salesforce goes even further: 84% of customers believe that the experience provided by a company is as important as its products and services. That’s a very high percentage and represents all those who expect more from the brand, much more. They expect call-back options: a series of alternatives, all of which are easy to use, for contacting the company in the event of a request for information or need for further investigation.
They expect to take advantage of dedicated conversation spaces on the official website or to get almost instant responses to the post sent on the social network of reference. They expect to be reached by relevant content, blog posts, newsletters, or videos, through channels precisely tailored to their lifestyle. They expect customer care to already know who they are when they call. They don’t want to repeat their information. They don’t want to wait. They don’t want to be interrupted by superfluous, redundant,or worse, useless, messages.
More than 25 years after the spread of the Internet and 14 years after the introduction of the iPhone, customer expectations of the quality of brand communication continue to grow such that customer experience will surpass price and product as a key brand differentiator by the end of 2020 (source: Walker).
Consumer expectations: More interactivity, more personalization
This is clear: designing better CX has become indispensable. Let’s now try to go into even more detail: what exactly do consumers demand from brands? What qualities must a customer experience have in order to be considered fully positive and satisfying? There are two characteristics in particular that consumers react to in a positive manner.
1. A smooth and seamless transition from one channel to another and between different platforms
Sixty-nine percent of customers expect a connected and interactive experience. This means that their preferences are recorded through touchpoint interactions throughout the purchase journey, and that any information requested is quickly made accessible in any of the virtual locations of the user’s choice (source: Salesforce).
2. Personalization of communication
Although more than 74% of marketing leaders say they fail to give proper relevance to personalization (source: Gartner), the consumer experience has definitely improved over the last decade precisely because of the personalization possibilities offered by digitalization.
Back in 2017, 71% of customers said they were frustrated by an impersonal customer experience, while currently 72% of customers say they only engage in a relationship with the brand if they can count on personalized messages (source: SmarterHQ). Finally, 63% of customers are considering stopping buying from brands that use poor personalization strategies (source: Smart Insights).
Doxee transforms data into personalized communications and valuable relationships
If it is true that CRM is a platform for managing all customer data, it is equally true that this definition, in light of what has been written so far, seems decidedly reductive. The scope of the actions that can be carried out thanks to the use of a CRM makes it a real approach with broader scope that allows you to understand and anticipate the needs of customers.
In a previous post, we defined Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as “the operational translation of relational marketing,” the access point of an integrated and structured communication process: from the analysis of data related to purchasing and consumption behaviors included in databases, to their profiling, and up to the creation of real clusters. From the planning of strategic actions to be activated based on the individual customer, to the offering of additional products or services (also in premium versions) to verifying the success of the strategy based on the results and objectives achieved.
For more than 20 years, Doxee has been doing just that: transforming data into personalized communications and from there into valuable relationships. Working with organizations of all types and sizes, it builds a true architecture of coordinated and integrated communication, an entire system that starts with document management and ends with the customer experience, laying the structural foundations for developing content suitable for different channels, and for enriching the purchase funnel with the thousands of detours that make it an exciting journey.
Doxee creates the tools necessary for its clients to deliver a truly complete and seamless customer experience, leveraging all types of media and output, including, for example, email, web pages, and even tax documents.
Personalize traditional communications: Doxee document experience
Data is the main lever in a digital communication strategy and, through Doxee dx, it is enhanced at every stage of the production process: it is enriched, sorted, and optimized to maximize the effectiveness of communications; it is used to instruct the processing workflow, facilitating both digital processes and the postal logistics of paper communications.
Doxee dx is a formidable accelerator of the customer base’s digital transformation strategy. With a truly multichannel approach, it leverages transactional and CRM data into documents and communications. It makes use of analytics based on information generated by the Doxee technological platform, but also of data from the entire production chain, feeding control dashboards based on a multichannel approach.
On the other hand, a digital customer experience is primarily a document experience: newsletters, renewal proposals, upgrade offers, tax documents, bills. Such communications are often destined to go unnoticed or, at worst, to be perceived as useless or annoying. Yet they represent the moments when a company speaks directly to its customers and when it should present itself as reliable and maintain a high level of consumer interest. Doxee dx processes any mandatory document, digital or traditional: invoices and statements, standard and static communications, even paper documents.
It can efficiently and collaboratively manage multi-channel document creation, storage, and distribution processes and translate them into more engaging communications because they are processed in a form that is memorable and meaningful to the individual user.
Doxee interactive experience: Customer engagement tools at your service
For Doxee, every moment of communication between a company and its customers is an important and unique moment of relationship within a continuous process that has the customer at its center and value creation for the company as its goal. The component to invest in is on-demand and interactive, able to constitute a powerful tool for customer engagement at the service of companies.
Thanks to the Doxee interactive experience (Doxee ix) product line, it is possible to create personalized content according to the type of user whose attention you want to attract, modifying the message from recipient to recipient based on the action you want to stimulate (lead qualification, follow-up purchase, renewal, upgrade, etc.). Doxee transforms data into unique, interactive videos and dynamic, responsive web micro-sites, created and dedicated to each customer to offer an interactive and personalized customer experience.
Interactive experience products, Doxee Pvideo® and Doxee Pweb®, transform customer communications into conversations that help you get to know your customers better, so you can offer them the content, products, and services they really want and build strong, lasting relationships.
From CRM to personalized communications: How to unleash the potential of data to create memorable customer experiences
From CRM to personalized communications, harnessing the full potential of data means, first and foremost, learning how to use it to extract knowledge and produce value from a customer-centric and business-oriented perspective.
Doxee products are based on a proprietary technology platform, the Doxee Platform, which can be perfectly integrated with back-end systems – CRMs – that contain customer data. In this way, documents, emails, videos, and micro-websites can be highly personalized according to the interests, behaviors, and characteristics of individual recipients.
Thanks to Doxee ix and Doxee dx technology, companies can transform standard, static documents – whether marketing, sales, tax, or administrative – into digital communications, rich in useful customer information, characterized by interactivity and a high level of personalization. In conclusion, Doxee’s success lies primarily in its ability to support the digital customer experience through:
- the extraction of data contained in corporate CRM systems, which it then transforms and optimizes to ensure fully automated end-to-end management of communication processes, in omnichannel mode
- the creation of personalized holistic communications starting from the wealth of information stored in CRM applications: innovative content and services offered at the right time and through the preferred channel, disseminated ad hoc at the moments of contact along the customer journey