The ActivateCX Podcast
Join Frank Rogers on The ActivateCX™ Podcast, your resource for demystifying, clarifying, and providing guidance around AI, CXM, and the modern Cloud Contact Center.
In this Podcast series, Frank interviews Thought Leaders, Unpacks critical AI & CX technology, and addresses the leading Experience topics of the day.
#cx #customerexperience #ai #ex #cxm #contactcenter #salesstrategy
The ActivateCX Podcast
Why a Bad Approach to Deploying CRM will Crush Your Business
TO BE SURE…Being a modern CX leader means working across the organization to effect change and gain alignment on customer experience, messaging, and building business. This involves acquiring technology that supports a CX and EX Mission. Fun times, right!
FIND OUT… how Sherry and Frank Rogers from Arroyo360 unpack common mistakes made with CRM acquisition and Implementation, a key component of the CX Ecosystem.
WHAT IF…you are not ready to hit “go” on a new CRM or refactoring an existing one... take advantage of the power of the ActivateCX™ Framework at Arroyo360 as a way to gain clarity, identify direction, and unify your business silo’s when it comes to CX and your business’s need to convert, amplify engagement, and gain better data insights.
TAKE AWAY…Expect to learn the best way to look at your CRM, implement the technology, iterate, and integrate…and much more.
Extra Stuff:
Learn more about deploying and integrating your CRM →
https://activateCX.arroyo360.com/crm
Learn more about the ActivateCX Framework → https://activateCX.arroyo360.com/ActivateCXtoday
To support me on Youtube (thank you): * / activateCX@arroyo360
#contact center, #cloud contact center, #contact center omnichannel, #microsoft dynamics, #salesforce, #salesforce sales cloud, #salesforce service cloud, crm for contact center, #salesforce contract center, #contact center consulting, #contact center consulting group, #crm consulting, #crm consulting group, #how to deploy a crm, #why crm’s fail
So, Hey, Sherry, welcome back to the activate CX podcast. It's, good to have you back, my friend. Thank you very much. Excited. We have some really great topics to talk about today. So it's even more important for people to be very strategic in what they're doing and to work across the organization. Breaking down those silos because it impacts. All the data which impacts visibility, which impacts predictability, which impacts. what we're doing around driving change inside the business. How do you, you get the organization to think strategic around the CRM? So a lot of that goes to kind of a smart implementation plan. So planning and implementation and then looking around in the market to see what the opportunities are. So when we talk about the market and opportunities, we talk about how you can harness new technologies, for example, how you can use them within your CRM to give you a competitive edge. And then now this could be through, aI and machine learning. It could be using AI to increase your data quality. You could build solutions for advanced operations that help your kind of overall operational efficiency, and this could be something as simple as workflows that automate some work for you or things that would use some of that data entry work. It's these kind of strategic moves, strategic integrations that would give you a much stronger chance of success. And it'll lead you away from problems of , Data compliance or privacy issues or Wouldn't a customer data platform also play into that as well. Absolutely. So the customer data platform would very much go hand in hand with your CRM because it would allow you to really track your entire customer journey. Now you're going to see the customer in all its power, seeing all of the different contact points or touch points you've had with that customer. Allowing you to act a whole lot faster. Your CRM is kind of your tool, which will give you some information. Your CDP will allow you for more actionable insights when it comes to how you're approaching and targeting that particular customer. I can see that. Ultimately, when we get pulled into, address a particular need on a CRM, it could be a net new implementation, but it could also be something that's pre existing and, needs fixing to improve data quality or automation. It comes down to us being able to address that specific need, but at the same time consult with the client around maybe areas that are not being addressed. And that's really difficult because we could become part of the problem, part of the problem is tactical modifications that don't fit an overall strategic and but that organization may not be in a consumption mindset. So we can quickly become part of the problem, it's a struggle for us because there's an element to advising the client of something that they should be looking at, not straying from the need at hand, or appearing to be inflating this into something bigger than it needs to be. How do you think about this when we're talking to clients? So I again, , like you said, we don't know everything, right? We, we know the CRM world, we know the implementation world, but that specific organization and that organization specific concerns we won't be aware of until we meet the right stakeholders and stakeholders are forthcoming and open about their issues. And given that they. for themselves or thinking of the right issues or pointing at the right areas that would kind of provide us the right insight in order to formulate our plans. Often what happens is you speak to the different stakeholders, they bring up different problems that are completely irrelevant from one another. So where our mindset kind of comes into is trying to understand the link between these stakeholders, trying to understand the link between these particular departments, and then thinking of the solution. with the CRM in mind, meaning different departments may have various problems, but there can definitely be a particular solution that would help you address both of their problems fairly effectively while still staying in the realm that you've been brought out to do. It's also very important to set expectations. Oftentimes when we go and meet stakeholders, they want the solution today or tomorrow, and that's kind of often the joke, right? What will this product be done today? Can I have it before I leave for the weekend? So it's important to kind of set the right expectations that any fix takes time, especially when you're talking about much larger fixes, larger implementations. You need to have that patience with you as well. If you keep rushing our engagement or trying to get to the end result faster, , it might get you there faster, but the result won't be optimal. That's very true. One of the things that is interesting when we do a discovery and we're really trying to get to a statement of understanding is some of the questions that we ask sometimes seem out of scope. It might be , well, what are your business goals for this year? And it's , well, we're trying to solve this specific problem right here., why are you asking me that question? But it kind of exhibits the disconnect that people have with their CRMs and their overall, business goals and objectives. There is a specific problem. That's a pain point that we can solve. But the more that you can give us visibility into what you're trying to achieve the greater the potential is that we could not only unlock that particular need, but also have it point to one of those specific objectives that they have and get them closer to, achieving the mission that they want. So breaking down of the silos is really important. It's probably a good message for us just giving out there for anybody listening . If you're managing a CRM, you're managing a business and you see that this tool is that when you engage with somebody to assist you on it, it's good to direct us in the fact that I just, need this focused on right now, because then we could be highly surgical. We could be very much in the triage, but in the same breath, it's important to give us an understanding of what your organization is about, what you're trying to achieve and to be more verbose in that. And maybe be transparent, because that's going to give us the greatest opportunity to heal the problem that is, but also open up opportunity at the same time. Right. Very, very well said. Every single time I look at a CRM and I go into, , what could have been, if we would follow, the right approach. The fact that the CRM is not just this salesperson and support person tool. It is actually part of the customer experience continuum. It's part of the customer journey and it plugs into all these touch points. If you do it right, if a person wants to chat with you on the website that should be coming through into your CRM interface where you have that plugged in with your omni channel capabilities and you're tracking all that data. That, is part of the new way, I believe that you look at this. So there's a step back off of almost CRM that's sitting out there in the world today. And if people are not , Employing this approach, this is a crying shame, you are missing the mark by a mile by not building this in, , do you agree with that? 100%, the market has shifted significantly when it comes to CRM implementations and the expectation of the CRM, right? At first, the CRM was very much targeted as a sales tool. somewhere to track leads and opportunities. Now it's become so much more and now it's integrated with so many other solutions like marketing automation, CDPs, meaning you, you can get a lot more out of your CRM, but in order to get a lot more, you need to be a little bit more strategic about it as well. So now a lot of CRM implementations need to kind of start off in the customer experience world, meaning really think about what your customer experience objectives are. Understand your customers. Really deeply, and that could be through customer research, customer segmentation. When you understand your customer, when you understand your experience a little bit better, that means the data that's going to be in your CRM is actually going to be leverageable to give you actionable insights. You can create a solution where you can integrate, automate, provide, Really personalized interactions, right? What does the consumer want today? They want personalized messaging across different platforms. If you set up your CRM correctly, that means you can have consistent messaging personalized for that individual across platforms. That's right. Reintroduce yourself or do any of that manual work again and again. The CRM will do it all for you. And that creates customer centricity. That's right. If you have a CRM and you don't have a customer extranet, why? Why are those two things not built and connected together? What is the experience that you're building for your customer? You and I have talked about this and you use a term you say, it's a customer experience powerhouse How do we drive engagement, which creates opportunity. Inside of this. And so that's the new frontier, but I also think it's also the new miss, in the CRM is talked about kind of in a functional component. Here's a feature. Here's a function, but that feature in that function that doesn't come with a plan and a strategic way of rolling that out has a probability of poor implementation and poor results. It truly is right as a customer. If I'm implementing a CRM, the first one of the questions I need to ask myself is, what am I looking to track? And the correct answer to that is I'm looking to track customer satisfaction. I'm looking to track my business performance. If you understand those things very clearly, then going into your CRM, you'll know that some customer engagement metrics could be around interaction frequency engagement quality, trying to see kind of the depth and quality of the interactions that you have. If you're looking at a sales focus, you can look at. your sales cycle length. You could look at your lead conversion rates, your customer satisfaction scores return and investment when it comes to marketing quality metrics. There's so much data that the CRM can provide for you. If you have an understanding as an organization, what your goals for say that particular quarter are, those are the revenue related metrics or the operational metrics that you focus on a little bit more. And then you plan and implement exactly for those. And that's what gives you that measurable output with the specific KPIs that you need. You're creating the crystal ball that everybody wants. And when you talk about a crystal ball, right. You can do it in so many ways. Like what is a crystal ball? It's something that helps you predict the future and the world that you live at today, the CRM solutions that you have today. The way that you can integrate AI, the way prediction generally worked before was you created a formula. A formula was based on a specific number of variables. You connected it to a fairly large data set. That led to prediction within the formula, you would give weights to each one of your variables, and that's what did your predictions. When it comes to ai, the weightage is now automated, so instead of having a defined formula with 10 particular variables using ai, you can have 50 different variables and the vantage AI will figure out for you. Mm-Hmm. meaning it's very, very manual process. You now have very advanced automation that allows you to not only predict better results, but have a higher confidence interval. Of course, it takes a lot of implementation, training and planning, but that eventual result means you can actually create a crystal ball now, which hasn't been possible in the past. There's also real time in the moment advice and support to the salesperson or to the customer support person that is also very much generated by AI and also is generated by having a really good knowledge base. So the early days when I was rolling out CRM, we were also just changing a lot of business practices. And one of the things we really found was that when. Our prospects got onto a call with our salespeople. They would kind of do a little bit of cross examination of do you do this? Do you do that? Does your solution do this? And so there was this kind of back and forth query, and it was, it was something that took a lot of time and a lot of times put us on a comparison. That wasn't fair. And so we found that there were five points of agreement, that ultimately, if we could agree on these five things that our customer, our prospect was in the right place. That was really huge. And so we had sales materials and support materials for our sales people that would allow them to have that conversation in the year that we sit in now with AI and with agent assist and with all these capabilities that we can drive into the CRM, we can have real time assistance to the salesperson. That when they start talking immediately puts them into Guidance materials that give them help right away. And it could be anything around the industry that the person is in. And so they have insights into the industry. Maybe they can talk that industry better. Maybe it's a particular problem that they have and we can break that down and we can give them a way to position the product or the solution with inside of that. It should change the conversation and then we should be able to analyze that conversation. and validate that the right conversation is being had. And then to your point, use that information to determine the predictability of how this particular sales engagement is going outside of the other aspects of, is there an impending event? Do they have budget? Do do they have an articulated sales process, , all of these types of things that fall into the B MANTR kind of approach that a salesperson will use, there's much more to it. There's much more richness to the conversation. And in today's customer experience realm, with all the things you just talked about, we have a way now to really look at this. We just talked about this in less than five minutes and it sounds like it should take another five minutes to get that done, but that's not true. Absolutely. Just like anything, it takes planning strategy and knowledge. You need the right combination of those things to really get the solution across. And there's so much that you can do. It's really important to have a good use case in mind in terms of. What you want AI to do, like Frank, you and I have spoken a lot about a knowledge base and utilizing AI to make a smarter knowledge base within an organization, you're going to have tons of conversations that you have with your employees and you're going to use solutions like Microsoft Teams. Now you have transcription solutions available that can take those recordings, transcribe them, hold them centrally, and now you have a database of knowledge. and you can create some sort of an AI chatbot on top of it that can now query and get you answers based on previous conversations that you've had. So, you've created your own personalized knowledge base and as an organization you have a much larger. knowledge base available as well. And it all kind of ties into your CRM, the interactions, everything that feeds into this one very clean, very rich data set. Let's look at this in summary. We've talked about the CRM in a way that it's like scorched earth. This is, a path that is repeatedly done poorly, but that it's a byproduct of the fact that People see it as simple and they insert it into their current operations and their run of show, they iterate incrementally, but it's not strategic. So, is the promise of the CRM kind of empty just because this just seems to be the way that it's done? Or do you think, The potential of it is still something that's true and still something that can be realized that can really affect change, Honestly, from everything that we've discussed today. The answer is very clear. The potential is there. You can get the value. You can get the benefit, but it's only going to come if you have a realistic implementation plan. It kind of involves a lot of work. understanding what the potential of the CRM could be realizing what you could achieve with the CRM. It's about setting good expectations. It's about learning from maybe past implementations that you've done measuring success, working with the right vendors. You have the correct steps that you can take that would lead you. To the right type of implementation. Unfortunately, not every client will go that way. Our hope is if someone approaches us in order for guidance, we can at least show them what the right path would look like, show them, what the pitfalls look like and get them to realize some of the numerous benefits that we've talked about today. Go to market plans are really important because within the context of the way that the word is put out there or the way that the phrase is put out there is that we're going to market. This doesn't mean it's going to take a long period of time. We know that we have to get a product to market and there has to be a starting point though. And then there has to be forethought into what happens. 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and what that reasonably looks like in terms of iteration. Because that first year is all about adoption. So the more that you can make that solution have high levels of utility and usability for the people that are going to work with it. That's exactly where you win because once you have that usability And you've built visibility into the system you've done the proper integrations in the go to market. The right integrations are there. The information is clean. Because it's clean, we can rely upon it. That's just going to change the course of that business. And refactoring , is not easy to do. It's doable, but there is sometimes a kind of a resetting that causes everybody to feel like who moved my cheese. And that's just as more of an organizational than the technical challenge, which is already a high bar. So anyhow great conversation, Sherry. I think that we're big CRM fans , we know that the. Potential is there. But to reach that potential, really, everybody has to rally around doing it the right way. A better way and it all starts with a conversation. And the conversation honestly doesn't have to lead anywhere. It can just be in us getting, you know, talking about problems, understanding. What a potential client might be looking for. No, we love to provide advice. We love to share the expertise where we have it. And everything just starts off kind of with that one conversation. I agree. It always starts off with a good conversation, just like this one. Absolutely. Sherry, thanks for your time today. My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
