How to align systems around the CRM

How to align systems to support growth

We are solidly in a digital-first world. Over the last year, consumers worldwide adopted new behaviors, defaulting to digital-first or digital-only interactions with their favorite businesses — and there is no going back.

There is a heightened need for delightful end to end customer experiences in 2021 and beyond. And B2C experiences that are simple, holistic and delightful are shaping expectations in the B2B world.

What does this mean for us as business leaders? Well, it means it’s time to talk about the third discipline of delightful customer experience — aligned systems.

As a reminder, the first two disciplines of customer experience are aligned teams and aligned strategy. (This order of operations is important, so I would highly recommend you read the previous posts first!)

Aligned teams are your foundation, and aligned strategy is your roadmap. Think of aligned systems as the operational infrastructure that keeps your teams aligned and humming.

Run better to grow better with modern CRM

Systems have always been important for obvious reasons. They are the glue of your business — they store customer information, customer engagements, and a ton of other information that shapes the customer experience. They enable your teams to get work done. The core system needed for customer experience is of course, the CRM — customer relationship management software.

But systems have always been shaped by customer expectations, and CRM is no exception.

I actually started my career in CRM multiple decades ago. At that time if I needed to connect with a customer, I pulled up a contact card that had their phone number and address on it, and called them. That is the full extent of what customer relationship management was, and the system functioned as a simple database.

Modern CRM is completely different and has been redefined. Today, we don’t always start with calling customers — they come across our website, or our social media, or our ads — and engage with our businesses in many ways. Maybe they use a free trial of the product. There are multiple “front doors” into a digital-first customer experience.

The digital journey needs to carry through to the many interactions that your customer has with you. Our businesses need to capture all of that information. That redefines how we think about CRM — it is the content that is in your website that starts the journey, connected with the contact data regarding your customer and the information on how they engage with you.

This approach to CRM — that it is inclusive of tools like CMS, inclusive of core engagement apps, and is an engagement powerhouse rather than a data warehouse — is becoming the norm in 2021 and beyond. These systems look different than they used to, and companies will need a modern CRM strategy to evolve.

Systems that power scale

Choosing a CRM system for a digital-first world is an important task. Choose right, and your systems will be the foundation of growth and accelerate scale. Choose wrong, and they’ll hold you back and become a roadblock.

In 2021 and beyond, your systems need to have the following characteristics -

1. Easy to align — With multiple front doors to the customer journey, your systems need to bring all customer-facing teams together. A customer service call should dynamically change the content of marketing messages. A cluster of visits to a website should change the sales approach and prioritization of efforts. This is what alignment looks like in the age of the customer.

2. Easy to adopt — A system is only as good as the data inside it. A CRM can be the most powerful tool in your arsenal, but not if nobody uses it. Systems need to be incredibly easy to learn and easy to love so your teams will use it, generating the data that enables good decisions.

3. Easy to adapt — When you need to make a change to your systems, it should be easy. We’ve all spent weeks or months waiting in an IT queue to make basic improvements. It’s painful for us, and painful for customers. Systems need to be adaptable and support changing business needs.

The actual CRM you choose is less important (although, of course I’m biased) than how it functions. The key is this: You probably have ambitions to grow and scale your company. CRM is no longer important to that goal — it’s indispensable. Buyer journeys will only continue getting more complicated. Customer expectations will only get higher. Your systems need to be ready to meet the moment.

Pivoting through change

Imagine being a healthcare organization, in February 2020, in Northern Italy. The region was heavily impacted by COVID-19 and was on the frontlines in the early days where very little was known about the disease. That is the situation Fatebenefratelli, a healthcare company that operates in the hospital, psychiatric, rehabilitation and residential space, found itself in.

Prior to the pandemic, Fatebenefratelli had unified its fragmented digital presence. Each of their 11 healthcare centers had its own independent website and operations. The team mapped out all their engagement channels and touchpoints in the customer journey, then built a new centralized website connecting their CMS to CRM data so they could understand the holistic customer journey.

Then the pandemic struck, and alignment became critical. In just a few hours the emergency disrupted the province’s ordinary activities and created a need for rapid change. To tackle the crisis, a donation-based fundraiser was planned to support healthcare facilities in the urgent and sudden need for medical and protective equipment. And, medical staff across the region needed volunteers.

Fatebenefratelli needed to implement some significant changes so that they could raise donations and attract suitable candidates to help medical staff. They quickly added forms for both fundraising and personnel research to the site, and used their CRM data to send personalized marketing campaigns to attract donors and volunteers.

Over 4,000 donors contributed over €2.7 million to support healthcare centers, and over 1,500 volunteers offered to assist medical staff. Most importantly, Fatebenefratelli was able to maintain business continuity and provide care to their patients in a time of crisis.

This is simply incredible. And it speaks to the importance of building a business on a solid foundation.

As we learned in 2020, anything can change on a dime. And yet our businesses still need to survive (and even try to thrive). Even in “normal” times, companies are ever-changing, and your systems need to change with you. They are the foundation of building a resilient business that can evolve over time.