For brands today, one of the most important goals is capturing data gleaned from one-on-one customer interactions and leveraging this immense amount of raw and disconnected data to deliver timely, relevant, and personalized customer experiences. Consequently, CRM software is now considered a martech stack essential.
A CRM continuously captures, centralizes, organizes, and makes available customer interaction and transaction data, so that it can be used to achieve key objectives such as identifying new sales opportunities, managing marketing campaigns, and recording, tracking, analyzing, and resolving customer service issues.
This latter objective is a relatively more recent application of CRM platforms, which since being introduced in the 1980s have primarily been used to support sales and marketing functions. Salesforce, the world’s largest CRM provider, describes the evolution of CRMs this way:
Though CRM systems have traditionally been used as sales and marketing tools, customer support is a rising segment of CRM and a critical piece in managing a holistic customer relationship. Today’s customer might raise an issue in one channel and then switch to email or telephone to resolve it in private.
A CRM platform lets you manage the inquiry across channels without losing track, and gives sales, service, and marketing a single view of the customer to inform their activities.
The ability to connect these three functions, and the teams that deliver them, on one platform and with one view to the customer, is invaluable for delivering relevant, connected experiences that build customer loyalty and improve retention.