Modern customers must be convinced their needs and desires are heard, understood, and valued before they show loyalty to a company’s product or service. They expect modern businesses to serve up deeply engaging and meaningful customer experiences (CX) across a variety of channels and digital touch-points.
Businesses aiming for long-term expansion through customer retention and acquisition, are under pressure to elevate customer service across the organization. They cannot do it without the power of customer relationship management (CRM).
CRM systems can help pull together and organize data around past sales interactions, purchase records, and other aspects. These reveal more contextual and evolving behavioral patterns in the customer relationship.
With these trends driving demand, the US CRM market is projected to grow at over 13% annually in the next 5 years, to total USD51,527.0 million in revenue by 2030.
The Role of CRMs in Overcoming Challenges That Hinder CX
Retaining customer interest and loyalty is becoming as important as acquisition but tougher to achieve in the modern competitive scenario – this is where CRM becomes indispensable.
Many businesses struggle to deliver evocative and satisfying interactions with the required consistency and scale. By leveraging CRM, they can achieve better outcomes to address the following needs:
Customer-centricity for better conversion
Empathy, emotional connect, and personalization have emerged as key factors for competitive differentiation. Studies show that companies in the US delivering the best CX have built customer relationship strategies around these factors and employ AI and other advanced technologies as enablers.
Customer-centric interactions can unlock growth and brand equity. From a sales and marketing (S&M) perspective, the staff must not lose any opportunity to engage customers or upsell across all available channels. Upselling also means identifying which offer is relevant or irrelevant, and which channel works best for a customer segment of one.
Moreover, experts recognize the marketing rule of 7 – an average of 7 interactions is required before a prospect acts or decides to buy. In other words, a minimum of 7 digital touchpoints is required for the business to achieve a sale. Repeated, reinforced, and well-timed messaging at touchpoints makes this possible – the prospect becomes familiar with, gains trust, and remains loyal to the brand.
It’s also important that no touch-point is left unattended or disconnected as it could become the point of churn and must be plugged quickly.
To meet these needs, companies need a unified and all-round view of data and interactions regarding the customer – Leading CRM software can aggregate end-to-end insights from varied sources and present it in one secure place.
Say, the marketing team is running a targeted campaign on a specific customer category. It will benefit hugely from access to the customer’s data held by other teams like sales, finance, procurement etc. The marketing campaign can be carefully tailored with a more nuanced and holistic understanding of the customer in question that CRM enables.
Similarly, sales teams can be prepared with highly personalized pitches based on a nuanced understanding of needs, interests, preferences etc. to meet the customer wherever they are.
Engaging customers in the age of omni-channel experiences
Being multi-channel will not be enough to retain customer interest. With the number of channels and digital touchpoints increasing, businesses must also ensure customer interactions that feel frictionless, personalized, and consistent.
For instance, the competitive financial services landscape is dotted with incumbents and new-age players that serve as viable alternatives to dissatisfied customers. The need of the hour is omni-channel banking – regardless of which physical or digital channel/device/touchpoint the customer uses, they must experience the bank as one unbroken entity.
Transparency of customer interactions is key here as customers will see the most relevant product recommendations at the right time with consistent messaging. CRM platforms enable data sharing and communications on a unified platform between all the teams involved in customer engagement and services.
Humanizing the technology
In the rush to adopt the latest technologies and tools, businesses cannot ignore the growing demand for human-centricity. Over-reliance on tech and tools and resulting systemic changes can overwhelm and turn off customers. In contrast, brands that tempered their cutting-edge digital interfaces with more human-centric design could engage better with customers, reports KPMG.
Present-day customers are used to companies deploying emerging technologies and tools to drive transactions and interactions. However, although they appreciate the ease of use enabled by technology, they also want their experience to resonate with their unique interests, personality, even communication style. This requires humanizing technology.
For instance, a great number of businesses use virtual assistants and AI-based chat-bots as their customer interfaces. Customers expect and appreciate swift, highly responsive and contextual responses to their contact-center queries. If disappointed with the quality of interactions, they are highly likely to switch to an alternative provider.
To address these demands, contact-center services are looking at CRM systems to deepen their understanding of customers and deliver more satisfactory services. Agents gain swift access to historical records and issues and tailor their responses to be more relevant that improves credibility and trust.
AI-powered, next-gen CRM – a game changer for future CX and S&M
The best thing about CRM is that it continues to evolve, resulting in ways to streamline and manage customer relationships with greater ease. In 2025 and beyond, next-generation CRM systems are poised to further expand capabilities by integrating with AI tools.
AI in CRM makes sense because it combines the powers of ML, NLP, and predictive analytics. As a result, it is possible to automate heavy work, customize customer interactions, and take decisive actions around customer satisfaction and retention.
For instance, a leading alternative investor intelligence service provider acquired a superior CRM database management solution with AI-driven automation, rigorous quality control, and a client-centric approach. Their seamless, error-free database helps their fundraising team to make firm data-driven decisions and achieve superior investor relations outcomes. Catch the story behind the scenes here.
The benefits of AI-powered CRM include:
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AI-driven customer records
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360-degree view and unified customer dashboards supporting agents with real-time inputs to improve customer service
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Rapid analysis of massive customer data piles to identify sentiment, patterns, forecast behavior and preferences. S&M or customer engagement strategies can be modified on the go
Also read how an asset management firm deepened its understanding of fundraising data through a custom-made interactive dashboard built on CRM info.
Moreover, as multiple studies show, a significant number of businesses are expected to deploy AI agents to independently drive customer interactions, 24x7. These intelligent assistants use NLP and ML. They can quickly fetch apt, real-time insights from CRM to drive highly contextual conversations in a way that resonates with the customer.
Explore how upcoming AI architectures such as Agentic AI can transform challenges into opportunities for small businesses in the US.
These transformations make way for better interactions across functions such as sales and marketing, e-commerce, contact center and customer support services. In fact, the global market for AI in CRM is expected to grow at 28% CAGR over the next decade (2024-33).
Why Decimal Point Analytics
CRM implementations are inherently complex. Many companies struggle to identify or implement the right CRM for their business needs. They may not have the in-house resources to assign a dedicated team or abilities to navigate the complexities of setting up the right one.
With AI and automation becoming the norm for nearly every type/size of business, talent and expertise gaps are adding to the challenge.
At Decimal Point Analytics, we have in-depth knowledge and capabilities in dealing complex CRM integrations of highly popular platforms such as Salesforce. While these offer powerful CRM platforms, our expert support, seamless integration, and AI-powered automation capabilities will ensure you can unlock their full potential.
Additionally, our structured, data-driven solutions bolster operational efficiency, streamline workflows, and automate key processes. We help simplify and organize your CRM data with seamless integration, structured architecture, and high accuracy. You will benefit by stronger decision-making driven by KPIs and powers of scale.
