Putting modern CRM and the human touch at the heart of great customer experience

The past 18 months have been a peri­od of huge learn­ing and, for many, a chance to reset. For busi­ness­es, the pan­dem­ic has been one of the most intense peri­ods of exper­i­men­ta­tion, devel­op­ment and recal­i­bra­tion. It has been a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty to test out assump­tions, con­firm some beliefs – and debunk oth­ers.

In par­tic­u­lar, this has been a huge­ly effec­tive study into what con­sumers want and expect from com­pa­nies. The results have occa­sion­al­ly been sur­pris­ing.

Take, for exam­ple, the shift to online. Dur­ing lock­down, serv­ing cus­tomers remote­ly, work­ing remote­ly, play­ing remote­ly and meet­ing people’s needs was only pos­si­ble dig­i­tal­ly. This debunked one myth – that every­one is already online. Vast swathes of the pop­u­la­tion had to get up to speed with liv­ing online so the assump­tion that cus­tomers want­ed to be served dig­i­tal-first was not alto­geth­er accu­rate.

How­ev­er, a year and a half down the line and almost every­one now has the access and the apti­tude to live a dig­i­tal-first exis­tence. They’ve had a taste of meet­ing their every con­sumer need at the touch of a but­ton and seen an explo­sion in rapid-deliv­ery ser­vices like Getir or Weezy, mean­ing get­ting the week’s gro­ceries is just as quick and con­ve­nient as step­ping out­side their front door. As the pan­dem­ic recedes, the post-pan­dem­ic con­sumer is now 100% dig­i­tal­ly native.

Only this is not the case. Cus­tomer jour­neys are becom­ing ever more com­plex and the num­ber of dig­i­tal chan­nels to engage with con­sumers is grow­ing. How­ev­er, one ele­ment will always be crit­i­cal – the human touch.

“The cus­tomer has changed. They don’t want to lose dig­i­tal con­ve­niences but they still want to be able to go to stores or con­nect one-on-one with an advi­sor where pos­si­ble. Under­stand­ing cus­tomers is going to be very impor­tant as we enter a new phase,” insists Inken Kuhlmann-Rhi­now, EMEA mar­ket­ing direc­tor for Hub­Spot, the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM) plat­form for scal­ing com­pa­nies.

What is the human touch in a dig­i­tal world? Sim­ply put, it’s about giv­ing con­sumers the abil­i­ty to engage eas­i­ly with a real per­son. To con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing human inter­ac­tions in a dig­i­tal world, brands need to turn to dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies that sup­port rather than sup­plant the human.

Kuhlmann-Rhi­now says: “Con­sumers feel appre­ci­at­ed and val­ued when they know they can speak to a real per­son. Get­ting stuck in an automa­tion loop is frus­trat­ing and alien­at­ing.”

HubSpot’s recent research into hybrid cus­tomer expe­ri­ence reveals that twice as many con­sumers want to be able to speak to some­one when mak­ing a pur­chase as the num­ber who want to do so in a cus­tomer ser­vice envi­ron­ment. Dur­ing pur­chase was also more pop­u­lar than brows­ing or pre-pur­chase. “The val­ue in being able to ask ques­tions is high, but any sen­si­tive post-pur­chase cus­tomer ser­vice issues must be han­dled quick­ly and empa­thet­i­cal­ly, even if it is – as dis­cov­ered in our sur­vey – the less fre­quent need,” Kuhlmann-Rhi­now warns.

Being able to deliv­er on the human touch requires a new approach to under­stand­ing the cus­tomer jour­ney and cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment. Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence has pre­vi­ous­ly been dom­i­nat­ed by the fun­nel approach, with dif­fer­ent func­tions only focused on ful­fill­ing their part of the fun­nel.

“Com­pa­nies need to under­stand the full cus­tomer life­cy­cle,” Kuhlmann-Rhi­now advis­es. “At Hub­Spot, we rec­om­mend the fly­wheel mod­el, which helps explain and visu­alise the momen­tum you gain when you align your entire organ­i­sa­tion around deliv­er­ing a remark­able cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. It ensures dif­fer­ent busi­ness units are con­tin­u­al­ly work­ing togeth­er, with every func­tion hav­ing an ongo­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty to sup­port the oth­ers in ful­fill­ing the business’s over­all goals.”

To put the cus­tomer at the heart of the busi­ness means mov­ing away from today’s patch­work approach, where the sur­vival mind­set of 2020 led to com­pa­nies adding process­es and oper­a­tions that were not suit­able for scale. As a result, a patch­work of tech­nolo­gies was stitched togeth­er and now it is hold­ing com­pa­nies back.

Extri­cat­ing your­self from this patch­work means rethink­ing how your cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment infra­struc­ture is con­struct­ed. Today’s busi­ness­es need a pow­er­ful and easy-to-use CRM plat­form that enables them to cre­ate a sin­gle point of cus­tomer truth that all teams can feed into and, cru­cial­ly, pull from, help­ing them remove fric­tion in cus­tomer inter­ac­tions.
Why this is so impor­tant is because CRM plat­forms have evolved beyond pure­ly man­ag­ing cus­tomer infor­ma­tion. The dig­i­tal jour­ney trav­els across many dif­fer­ent inter­ac­tions and touch­points. You need to cap­ture all of that infor­ma­tion in order to deliv­er delight­ful cus­tomer expe­ri­ences. This is the rise of mod­ern CRM and it’s chang­ing how we think about it.

“Today, CRM pow­ers your whole end-to-end cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and includes tools like a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS) or core engage­ment tools. The pan­dem­ic has accel­er­at­ed the adop­tion of CRM and lead­ers under­stand it is now vital for suc­cess. Hub­Spot UK’s Sales Enable­ment report recent­ly showed that the adop­tion of CRM soft­ware was up 40% com­pared to pre-COVID lev­els,” Kuhlmann-Rhi­now reveals.

The Hub­Spot plat­form is con­struct­ed in such a way that com­pa­nies in the process of trans­for­ma­tion aren’t faced with the uncom­fort­able – and expen­sive – prospect of jet­ti­son­ing their lega­cy tech.

“With near­ly 1,000 inte­gra­tions into pop­u­lar SaaS apps, as well as rich and open APIs for inter­fac­ing with cus­tom-built apps, HubSpot’s pow­er­ful and easy to use CRM plat­form lets com­pa­nies con­nect data and work­flows across the stack into a ratio­nalised CRM plat­form. You don’t have to rip out every­thing else,” Kuhlmann-Rhi­now advis­es.

Equal­ly, small­er com­pa­nies with big ambi­tions needn’t feel that deliv­er­ing world-class cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, whether in-per­son, dig­i­tal­ly or – as is more com­mon­ly the case – a mix­ture of the two, is some­how out of their league. “The Hub­Spot CRM plat­form is designed to grow with an organisation’s appetite and need for tech­nol­o­gy at every stage in their growth jour­ney. It is built with scal­a­bil­i­ty in mind,” Kuhlmann-Rhi­now sug­gests.

She adds that automa­tion doesn’t dimin­ish the human angle but rather sup­ports it, help­ing scal­ing busi­ness­es man­age the dif­fi­cult mix between grow­ing head­count and expand­ing the cus­tomer base — with­out com­pro­mis­ing on qual­i­ty of expe­ri­ence.

“Cus­tomers won’t wait for your sys­tems to catch up or your team to fig­ure out the fric­tion points that are caus­ing frus­tra­tion. Deliv­er­ing a best-in-class expe­ri­ence that allows com­pa­nies and cus­tomers to switch seam­less­ly between dig­i­tal and human inter­ac­tions will be key. In 2021 and beyond, com­pa­nies from start­up to scale-up, and beyond, that adopt­ed an end-to-end CRM plat­form will be in a much bet­ter posi­tion to deliv­er on that best-in-class cus­tomer expe­ri­ence as they grow,” Kuhlmann-Rhi­now says.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.hubspot.com

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