Bridging the Investment Divide Between CRM and Customer Experience

Last week I had the honor of speaking at Forrester’s CX NYC event – it was an impressive gathering with executives from many Fortune 500 companies, and the energy and excitement for how to leverage CX to innovate was palpable. It was a humbling experience to present amongst some of the leading minds in the industry, and if the measure of the success of a slide is the numbers of iPhones snapping pictures of it, I thought it might be worth sharing their contents here.

At Genesys, we believe that companies should interact in innovative ways with their customers and create connected moments.  In the same way they have a connected moment when they interact with a person in their personal lives. Those connected moments can be designed by organizations and repeated in how they interact with their customers.

To do this, they need to know three things:

  • They need to know who their customers are.
  • They need to predict what their customers are going to do.
  • They need to be able to engage their customers in new and different ways than they have before.

Let’s look at the two items that caused the most interest.

1. The Investment Divide between CRM and Customer Experience.

The first hot topic we discussed was the investment divide between the money spent on new customer acquisition versus the money spent on keeping and delighting existing customers. Industry data shows that for every $1 spent on service for existing customers, $5 is spent on CRM systems to acquire new ones.

          Sources: CRM Market source and CEP Market source

There’s an investment divide that needs to be fixed in order for companies to be able to create connected moments. And that investment divide exists in how the imbalance is today between CRM investment where for every $5 a company invest in CRM systems they are paying that off with only a dollar of investment in a customer engagement platform. The danger is that via CRM they may be exploiting people’s interests and preferences for short-term gain.  Instead, they should create long-term loyal customers by delivering excellent service right at the moment it is needed, and learn to accept that the organization may not make an immediate sale.

2. The Customer Experience Value Creation Framework

It takes more than a financial investment to be successful in customer experience. My second hot topic was a framework for creating value in customer experience (CX). This structure sets out a new dynamic for how you interact with your customers during their journey with you.

The six elements of the customer experience value creation network fit neatly together to shift the focus to each individual customer, in the moment, in the way that works best for them. Each of those interactions then become a connected moment between your organization and an individual customer. Starting with the imperative that the most highly valued brands are those that offer the best customer experience, you can begin to create a value chain around the customer journey, using technology (like Genesys!) to provide consistent, personalized and memorable service that goes one step further with relevant and valuable ideas that go beyond the transactional interaction.

How and where do you invest? We believe companies need to make a change between the imbalance of investing to know your customers (CRM) and the opportunity to serve them with customer experience; between the potential customers out there, and the ones you hold in your hands today. I recommend you use what you to know to serve them better, maybe not with the expectation of payback today but for the long game payback for tomorrow, the day after and the years to come.

Please let me know if these subjects resonate for you too – I can be found on Twitter @pistolprce.

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