How CRMs are Driving Personalized, Digital Experiences

Welcome to another Prime TSR podcast. I have Eric Peebles, who is an Associate Principal and Technology Architect. Welcome to the show, Eric.

Thank you. It's nice to be here.

And today, we're talking about building better customer experiences and outcomes using CRMs. And I want to open up with a very general question. I've worked with Microsoft Access databases, and that was sort of the CRM back in the day. So if you wanted to store information, I used Microsoft Access databases. But we're seeing companies like Salesforce and other CRM companies that continue to grow exponentially. And the growth of CRM has been really astounding. Why do you think CRMs are growing the way that they are?

I think there's a lot of reasons for the growth in CRM. And it's crazy when you just look at Salesforce and some of the other companies. In general, you've got a wide set of people that are using CRMs today. So it's often easy for corporations to expand that use. But more importantly, there's definitely been a shift in the industry where we're starting to put the customer at the center of everything that happens, from all the decisions, from designs to interactions to how we want to cross-sell and how we want to up-sell and what additional information and how can we better know and understand our customers. So CRMs are core to helping to make that possible by pulling in some of that additional data that companies need to keep that customer at the center of all the decisions.

And that's an interesting thing that you brought up about putting the customer at the center. And one, it was always assumed that the customer was at the center, but I guess we all figured out, not really. That's not how we build software. So it makes common sense now. Of course the customer is at the center. And when you put the customer at the center, like we just said, you drive some of these experiences that are personalized for the people that are in your CRM. So what is the role of the CRM in terms of driving better customer experiences for them?

It comes in a lot of different ways. I think early on it started off just trying to catch some of the issues that customers are having on the support side, when they make calls, knowing who a customer is. I know personally, I love it when I'm calling a support line and they pick up the phone and they say, "Hi, Mr. Peebles. What can we help you with?" And they know everything. And I've got this problem, and they're right on it. And they get it fixed and resolved. Or I call and they've got a record of some of the issues. So I think it started there. Then people started realizing that, "Hey, we can use this for a lot of other things." So pulling in additional information around that customer. And I think the thought is the more we know about them, the more we know about what they're doing, the better off we are. Recently, worked on a big digital marketing site for a large insurance company. And they really wanted to make sure that they understood the customer to the point of, do they have additional homes or houses, or how old are their kids, or what colleges or universities do they attend? What kind of cars do they think about they want to get their kids? Or other types of activities. Where do they go on vacations? What kind of handbags do they buy? What's their shopping experience? What do they prefer? All this information, all to help them deliver better products to the customer. And they would use that to say, "Okay, if this customer is interested in high-end handbags and drives $80,000 cars, then they're used to a certain type of experience. So we need to slot them into this product category. On the other hand, maybe they are a bit more frugal and they drive $20,000 cars and they want more pragmatic experience without all the fluff. So let's slot them over to this category." And, while both experiences are great, if you swapped and put those customers into each other's experience, you would have an unhappy customer. And not that one is bad. It's just, people have preferences. And the more we can align our products and our services with those preferences that people have, the better customers are going to start to engage with our product. The more they're going to recommend our product. And, as you know, that net promoter score (NPS) is becoming bigger and bigger where companies are looking at how well people love their product and are going to tell all their other friends about it. Apple's probably one of the companies that consistently has a high score where their customers are just overly-engaged. And personally, I'm not an Apple fan or an Apple person, but-

Really?

Yeah. I know, right? I'm kind of on an island and it's shrinking day by day. All my kids are Apple fans. Everything is Apple: phones, tablets, watches, computers. And they're, "Dad, we can't FaceTime with you." And I'm thinking, "Yeah, I don't know if I want you to FaceTime with me." It's all about understanding that customer and bringing them into that ecosystem and giving them better service, increasing that loyalty, keeping them stuck on the brand.

And you reminded me of something when you say, obviously, you're an Android user, not an iOS user. It's shocking to me. It's kind of like, I was listening to my daughter's kindergarten class and the teacher said, "Raise your hand with a fist if you like McDonald's and raise your open hand if you like Wendy's." And so all of them except one kid had a fist. There's one Wendy's person out there. And then the teacher goes, "Johnny, you're the only one that chose Wendy's. Why is that?" And then Johnny goes, "Oh, no, I made a mistake. It was McDonald's." He just heard the directions wrong on how to raise his hand. That's the way I look at it. It's like you're on an island.

That peer pressure, it gets to you.

Absolutely. And so, what's interesting about this, especially the CRM stuff. It makes a lot of sense. Walk me through, because building those experiences, like you said, if you do the segmentation of those customers within those CRMs, you can drive those experiences off of how you've segmented within your CRM. But for these companies that haven't done that yet, how do you approach different, like a holistic strategy, or even like a digital CRM strategy to get them going? Is it just: buy Salesforce, put a bunch of people in there and call… How do you really architect something like that?

Yeah. I think it happens at a couple of different levels. Definitely an understanding of where you are with engaging your customer and what qualities are important, and making a decision to then start to shift to gather more customer information and build that view. And then bringing in a CRM to start to build some of that data. But it's definitely a journey and a road that companies go on where they really need to start first understanding the basics of a CRM. So if you're starting from zero and there's nothing there, then typically, going through the typical CRM setup process of understanding just your customer, basic information, your accounts, issues that you want to track related to that customer. Once that sort of foundational components are in place, then starting to expand it to look at slowly, how can you start to collect additional data? How can you make sure that you can uniquely identify a customer over a period of time? So maybe a customer was with you, then they left, then they come back. Now they're married, or they have moved and have a new address or new information, or whatever the case. But the ability to begin to tie customer information together. So having that customer master record, tying that into your CRM experience, and then the fun stuff starts to happen. Now you can start to look at your third party data. You can start to look at other features that allow you to drive more relevant information to that customer. And that is often the stage where customers start to realize that they can use their CRM for more than just customer relationship management. And I think that's also a component of what's driving the growth in the CRM industry, is that it's grown beyond just being a CRM. It is this central work hub for a lot of different types of purposes. Everything from our traditional marketing and sales needs on customer relationship management to other needs from across different industries. Centralized and financial portals, helping to understand how customers are doing wealth management and banking and finance industry, high-tech product industry. It's just rolling across every single industry outside of just those marketing and sales areas and into those product areas and into the service delivery area for even professional services organizations or any type of service organization really.

Yeah. And what's interesting, like you said, it started as really a marketing thing. Here's my customers. It's a sales pipeline. Are we closing the deals? And that's sort of the foundation of it. And I've also used it in that way. But you mentioned something interesting about, as expanding outside of that, even the technology and product stuff. How does that fit in? How would a technology team use the CRM? What place do they have as far as driving customer experiences? How do they use that information to do that?

Yeah. And it happens in a lot of different ways. I've seen projects where, for example, a large housing authority to manage tenants coming in and coming out, to help them track and provide services to those tenants. So from a tenant management system, the ideal solution was a CRM. The organization, the authority, had no clue what a CRM was. They had no sales. They had no marketing. It was all about managing their tenants. But the key was they had to understand their tenant population. They had to understand the type of communities that they were trying to reach and to bring in. And it turned out that a CRM was the ideal tool for them to understand and reach those communities, to look at those groups and decide and determine what types of services do they need? When you start to look at public housing and things like that, you have different groups that are at very different stages of their life, and they need a lot of different services. And managing those services can often be overwhelming. But CRMs can definitely help to align those services with the needs of those different groups of people. So that's an area where it sort of just jumped into a new industry to help drive a lot of the benefits and services that they needed.

Is there anything that, when you're implementing a CRM or you're designing a CRM, are there wrong ways to do it? Have you seen like, if people have good intentions but never do it, or they start it and then just never do anything with that? Walk me through that, if there's any bad ways to do it.

Yeah. I always get a little heartburn when technology sort of leads the way. When they've gone out and the technology guys have bought the CRM, and they implement it, and they've got it all stood up, and it's working. And then they go to the business teams and they say, "Hey, we've got this great tool for you to use." Typically, there's a clash that happens between those two groups. Because, as a tech guy, we view the world I think through colored glasses sometimes that isn't always reality. So definitely starting with the business need upfront, having stakeholders drive it. But I think oftentimes the data, the level of data interaction is overlooked. The quality of data, especially for a company just starting off, the quality of data that goes into their CRM dictates a lot of the success they'll have with it. And again, with customer information: simple emails. It's easy to get a wrong email, to have something go in wrong, addresses, multiple addresses, splitting people, people are in the same house, and now they're not in the same house. All those types of tasks are important to be able to manage from a data side. And not having the data chops to be able to go in and work with your data and have clean data in your CRM. It leads to eventually bad service. So, technology guys starting off too fast without the business, not having a good data strategy outside of a CRM to say how you're going to manage data and keep it clean. And then not having the skills to support a CRM. Especially in today's world of cloud-based CRMs, a lot of folks feel that, "I put the credit card in and I hit subscribe, and now I've got a CRM." But there's typically a lot more that goes along, especially with CRM technology, where you do need a little expertise. You need some guidance. You need some help on how to set it up, configure it, align it with your organization goals, and then provide that capability to those actual users, those people who are going to be interacting with the tool.

Yeah. I like that. It's sort of how you start off, which was customer first. And so these technology people who bought the CRM first and the business people go, "Have you thought about the customer maybe before we started all of this? This is why we're doing this." This is really good. And that covers essentially all what I was going to ask. Is there anything else, footnotes or anything that you wanted to discuss?

There's so much about it that we can definitely talk about. I think integration as CRMs start to push out into organizations, integration with all the other systems that they may touch or interact with is important. Definitely organizations need to have a strong integration strategy when looking at a CRM. Of course, the core data that we've talked about, that customer data, that customer information is key. But how you start to link that data to other systems to make it meaningful is important. So having a good integration strategy with your other key systems, or even with those third-party systems that live out there in the cloud. There's a lot of other sources of data that are sitting there. What customers are doing, the activities they're doing. It can almost feel a little bit like big brother when you're behind the scenes building these systems. But Google, for example, has tons of information. Our phones have lots of information. If we have an app that we use for whatever, maybe it's an Allstate app, or whatever types of service, we all have different apps on our phones. A lot of those apps have location services. And I think people have started to become more aware that this data is being collected and it shows your location. And a lot of it is used just to really help those companies provide better services. And not so much to track where you're going. Although that seems to be the end result. But I think the initial goal was to say, "Hey, how much information can we pull in? And how can we use this additional information, this new data, to gain new insights on the groups of people that we're trying to serve?" So integration tends to be a huge, huge component.

Who owns CRM?

I think it's evolved over the years.

Who would you prefer to own the CRM? Or is it contextual?

Yeah. I think I see more marketing organizations driving strategy, driving technology when it comes to the digital marketing side. So they tend to own a CRM. Traditionally, your VP of sales would own that, or even your IT department would own the CRM. Especially where I came up, starting off, doing this in the late 90s, that was more the trend. But over the years, that responsibility has moved really to the marketing teams where now in today's world, the marketing teams are driving the technology. They are bringing in solutions that they want to integrate into their CRM and saying, "Hey, we need this information in order to have a better view of our customers." Or, "We want to tie in this information so that we can immediately, soon as they click a link, know what they're doing and provide additional feedback to them real-time." So they're really drivers of the innovation in today's world. And that just seems to be expanding as the world becomes more marketing driven, especially with social media. There's so many different ways to target specific demographics around social media. And it's like I Google for a certain product and then everywhere I go, I'm on my phone, I'm looking at the news, that product's just popping up over and over and over again. And I can't get rid of it. And sometimes it's not even something I want. Maybe my girlfriend used my computer and she Googled something, purses or dresses, and now I've got this dress showing up everywhere. But all that is driven by marketing decisions and them being able to take this and push this back out to their customers.

Yeah. Sometimes I'll just buy it, whatever the ad's selling, just so it'll stop targeting me. Listen, I'll give you $25. Just lay off me for a few months, please. I know you think I want this. That's really good. And that's really all I have. I think you've shared a lot of really interesting thoughts.

All right. Sounds good.