The rise of the CRM in the contact centre space.

In today’s world, consumers increasingly demand a more personalised and seamless customer experience. As a result, the CRM’s role in the contact centre space is evolving rapidly. Here’s why the CRM is changing the contact centre as we know it.

The CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or CSM (Customer Service Management) system is playing an increasingly significant role in the contact centre space as businesses seek to consolidate their technology, increase automation and efficiency, reduce costs, and deliver a better customer experience.

As your business’ communications solutions come up for renewal, now’s the time to decide whether to invest in two tightly integrated, best-of-breed products — a contact centre and a CRM/CSM system — or an all-in-one platform. You can’t look at the contact centre platform in isolation to the CRM/CSM system, as functionality will be blended between the two. Without a trusted technology partner, many businesses are making critical mistakes when it comes to building their next solution.

The top three contact centre challenges 

1. Building a next-generation contact centre

One of the key challenges is building a contact centre that’s built for the future. 

Historically, businesses were more concerned about the cost of delivery than the customer experience. Now that the world has changed, one unsatisfied customer has the power to share their unsavoury experience with millions of people on X (formerly Twitter). Suddenly, the stakes are much higher and therefore NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a key metric. AHT (Average Handling Time) has fallen down the priorities list.

To deliver a decent customer experience, knowing your customer well is vital. The CRM is the ideal place to store and refer to that information. 

If your key business challenge is building a future-proof contact centre, prioritising your CRM is crucial.

2. Understanding the customer journey

Another key challenge is understanding where the customer is in their journey so that you can act accordingly. 

Put simply, customer experience is about doing the right thing at the right time. More specifically, it’s about identifying a moment of truth in the buying or service cycle. The moment of truth is when the customer is about to take an action which will ultimately determine their NPS. 

The CRM is built to know where the customer is in their journey, and can identify when a customer is at stage three of the buying cycle and ready to make a purchasing decision. Armed with this information, you can handle the customer interaction accordingly.

When it comes to delivering an excellent customer experience, context is king — and a good CRM can equip you with the information you need, fast.

3. Lack of data and customer insights

Finally, most contact centre managers don’t have enough visibility over what’s actually happening in their contact centre, typically because they don’t have access to day-to-day data.

However, if you store every piece of information in a CRM, you can mine that information and reveal powerful insights. What if 90% of customers are calling in because your website doesn’t work? If you know this, you can take steps to quickly resolve the issue.

If you don’t have the data, you can’t make decisions. The CRM is designed to combat this.

A good CRM system can also help new agents get up to speed on the customer quicker and ensure a consistent service, since every agent has access to the same database and can therefore act based on the context.

The future of the contact centre is context-aware

The contact centre of the future is context-aware, adaptive, and conversational. 

In order to be context-aware, you need to know how your customers have interacted with your business in the past. Therefore, a key element to any future-proof contact centre is having somewhere to store all customer interaction information; the natural place for this is the CRM.

Even if you’re thinking from a contact centre perspective, rather than a CRM-first perspective about how your future contact centre should look, then the context store and CRM remains key.

What we’re now seeing is if you do want to go down the context-awareness route, you’ll naturally fall into the CRM space.