As the digital landscape evolves, customers expect companies to provide personalized experiences and fast service across multiple channels. However, most companies struggle to connect different datasets, resulting in disconnected experiences for consumers and a lack of a single source of truth about customers for marketers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) offer a solution to this problem by unifying customer data and making it available in real-time to deliver personalized experiences. In this post, we'll discuss how CRMs work, their primary tasks, and their various use cases.
How Does an CRM Work?
An CRM is a software platform that helps companies collect, unify, activate, and gain insights from customer data across various sources. The first thing CRMs need to do is connect all of a company's customer data in a single place. This involves stitching together a single customer ID from many different instances and tying together databases that traditionally don't share customer data, like marketing clouds, service software, and e-commerce engines. This process is called customer resolution.
The next thing CRMs have to do is reconcile the identities of known customers (like email and mobile numbers) with what we know about customers before they share their data with companies (anonymous cookies and mobile device IDs). This way, CRMs can associate an interaction that started with an email campaign and continued onto the website with the same customer. This is called cross-device identity.
Once the CRM has created unified profiles of customers, the system makes that data available in real-time, so companies can deliver personalized experiences. This means connecting customer data to many different types of systems, such as email-send engines, demand-side platforms, and content management systems.
In a nutshell, CRMs are concerned with four primary tasks: data collection, data unification, data activation, and data insights.
What Are CRMs Used For?
CRMs are used for various purposes, not limited to marketing. Here are a few examples:
Suppression: Sometimes, the best use of data in marketing isn't to better target consumers, but to not target them at all. A unified profile that connects marketing and purchase data enables marketers to optimize their addressable spend by suppressing consumers who have already made a purchase, redirecting those dollars towards net-new customers or recommending other products.
Personalization: CRMs enable marketers to deliver personalized experiences to customers based on their behavior and preferences. For example, a customer who browses a particular product on a website could receive a personalized offer via email or push notification based on their unified profile data.
Conclusion
In conclusion, CRMs help companies connect various datasets to create a unified view of customers. By doing so, CRMs enable marketers to deliver personalized experiences that customers have come to expect. Additionally, CRMs offer insights that help companies make data-driven decisions that can lead to improved customer experiences and increased sales. As companies continue to focus on customer experience, CRMs will play an increasingly important role in ensuring that customer data is accurate, timely, and actionable.
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