What’s the Difference between CRM and CX Technology?

Making the distinction between these technologies is important for many reasons, but the main point to understand is that your CRM is just one component of a larger CX technology ecosystem. Your CRM manages and analyzes customer information to help build and maintain customer relationships and other important data. CX technology, on the other hand, must provide a strong foundation for the total experience of your brand, managing every aspect of the customer journey including each touchpoint between your company and your customers. That includes marketing-driven messages and content, sales communications, service interactions, and every engagement within and across each channel.

A superior customer experience requires a 360-degree view of your customers, and a strong CRM solution is only one part of a successful CX strategy. Your CX technology must be able to take your organization farther, and faster, to achieve a strong total experience for your customers and your employees.

What CX Technologies Does Your Company Need for a Total Experience?

The experts at Gartner note that organizations providing a total experience will outperform their competitors by 25% in both CX and employee experience satisfaction metrics. That’s because a strong total experience strategy is focused on the goal of creating stronger, more holistic journeys for anyone who engages with your brand.

Total experience means getting serious about orchestrating the entire customer journey into a seamless, consistent brand experience.

Choosing the right CX technology for your organization requires an understanding of the unique needs of your business, your customers, and your employees. In fact, the right CX technology solution is dependent on uncovering those needs, preferences, and challenges. Make sure you’re asking specific questions such as:

• How do you want customers to view your brand?
• Where can you make improvements to the employee experience?
• How should your CX differentiate from your competitors?
• What does your company’s ideal total experience look like?

Answering these questions will serve as the North Star for analyzing your current CX delivery, and help you uncover how and where you need to make improvements to deliver a much more powerful total experience, in every possible interaction and touchpoint.

Once you’ve gained a strong understanding of where you are now, and where you want to be in the future, you’re ready to source the right technologies. There are certain baseline requirements for CX technologies that can deliver a total experience, including creating and maintaining superior experiences for your staff as well as your customers.

Contact Center Technology

Most consumers today want customer service to be available 24/7. Beyond availability, reducing friction to deliver a more holistic contact center experience has become a priority for many businesses. For those reasons (among others) many contact centers are undergoing a move from a traditional contact center to a cloud contact center and adopting innovations to transform and modernize their operations.

Choosing the right cloud contact center technology can help strengthen both your agent and customer experiences, reducing effort overall and improving key metrics that boost efficiencies and lower overall costs. Remember, effective cloud adoption requires a comprehensive strategy that helps eliminate information silos and accelerate the ROI of your investment.

CRM Technology

As we enter the Experience Economy, with its constantly evolving customer and employee expectations, intelligent CRM solutions are growing in popularity. These CRM systems help develop a much deeper understanding of everyone interacting with your brand, building comprehensive profiles of both your current customers and your target audiences.

Leveraging the right CRM solution can help empower agents and customers with better data access, more detailed reporting, and improved lead management driven by a single source of truth. A strong CRM helps maximize the information you already have and drives higher performance across every aspect of your operation.

Smart Technology

Smart, AI-powered automation can elevate every core component of the CX including customer enablement, agent enablement, and data analytics. Conversational AI like chatbots and virtual assistants can boost efficiency while mimicking human interactions, saving more important interactions for your contact center agents to manage.

These tools can also create areas of friction if your agents and customers are not kept a top priority every step of the way. It’s important to understand best practices for using AI in the CX as you create a total experience strategy moving forward.

From contact center cloud solutions, to the CRM, to AI and smart automation, your CX technologies must function smoothly in an interconnected, integrated fashion. In other words, a superior CX design requires orchestration that goes beyond mere technological convenience, toward experiences that infuse every touchpoint with warmth and humanity.

What’s the Result of Improving Your CX Technologies?

According to Gartner, 86% of professionals engaged in or leading CX initiatives expect to compete on experiences. At the same time, research from Salesforce shows that 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and preferences, and more than two-thirds (76%) expect consistent interactions across all departments.

All of this data points toward a huge opportunity to move ahead of the competition by creating more integrated, holistic, and consistent customer experiences.

Better CX technology supports these enhanced experiences while streamlining more efficient and cost-effective operations, and creating simplified, improved agent experiences. The right technology, combined with strategic orchestration can help achieve a strong ROI, resulting from meeting the combined needs of your customers and agents, and ultimately, generating more strength and stamina for your business.

Avtex Transforms CX Technologies and Strategies

Implementing the right CX technology requires a partner who can help develop a strategic roadmap to enhance your customer experiences. Avtex has the CX consulting and strategy expertise to design the right strategy and determine the right solution for your brand’s Total Experience. Our breadth and depth of CX technology offerings includes our own IP solutions as well as relationships with world-renowned technology partners.