Is your company ready to move from a CRM to a Customer Engagement Ecosystem?

The acronym CRM is evolving. It is becoming a Customer Engagement Ecosystem. Why? Because that is what it takes to deliver a great customer experience today. You need data quality, integrations, omnichannel, journey orchestration, and all the required customer experience management with all kinds of interactions on any channel. In addition, you need a customer data platform (CDP / Customer Data Platform) to make everything work together. It is no wonder Gartner calls customer engagement the "new battleground for business success." If you want to compete in the market, you must focus on delivering a great customer experience. And that means turning your CRM into a Customer Engagement Ecosystem.

 In your company, you are now defining Customer Journeys or Customer Experience strategies, or your company is already 100% culturally focused on having a customer-centric organization, or even more, your company is in a full process focused on digital transformation. But it turns out that you have 2 CRMs, a Marketing Automation, several marketing agencies, two customer service channels - one with WhatsApp and another via the Call Center, and you don't have a data quality process, but you have several databases that you use to segment, and you have digital ads, but you don't know the performance of them, etc., etc. And at the same time, you see the end customers (D2C, B2B, B2C, and/or Marketplaces) both via eCommerce or via long sales processes, are demanding different expectations from the company, and do not use the call center anymore, since they prefer to use messaging applications. You get the picture, don’t you? As you can see, as a company, you must move from a CRM to a Customer Engagement Ecosystem. And there are going to be gaps with all the technologies and your strategy.

 As an Advisor with CX2Advisory and as a Strategy Consultant in Solvis, I support companies from all types of industries to be able to close these gaps in technologies. Some of those technologies are Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft, Marketo, Zoho One, Five9, Twilio, 8x8, Informatica, Tibco, and many Martech solutions.

I use an audit framework based on these questions:

1. Do you know who your customer is? You will be amazed how many people do not know who the customer is. They think they do, but they do not use data to know the customer.

2. What products and/or services do you sell? As customers, they do not use data to know the products and services the customer buys.

3. Which channels have the most interactions? This is besides understanding which channels are cost-effective or provide more sales. This is about understanding the channels your customers use.

4. Do you have a defined customer relationship cycle? This is a question beyond the known customer journey from right to left.

5. Do you have customer-focused metrics? How do you measure your customers besides NPS, RFM, CSAT, and CLTV?

6. What is your model of having the right people with the right skills and empowerment to help the client? Do we have the processes aligned to oversee the entire relationship cycle?

7. Where is the support of the organization from the executives? Are we customer-focused? Are we still selling products or selling to customers?

8. What is the current state of the data quality? How clean is your data?

9. Do we have all the technology to move from a CRM to a Customer Engagement Ecosystem? Too many clouds, same functionality on three or more systems, no integration ecosystem, the technology is too complicated to maintain, etc.?

These questions help us to define how to close this gap of technologies, without thinking about implementing a technology per se or implementing marketing processes. That is, the idea is to be able to implement customer acquisition processes, which have marketing and sales integrated with data, processes, and people with a single customer acquisition funnel. This helps to have marketing agencies, marketing operations, and the sales department all working together on a single customer acquisition process. This example applies to customer service, upsell, cross-selling, loyalty, and retention.

Having this holistic view is essential to customer experience success, but you also need to have the technologies that support all channels and integrate with other technologies. A Customer Engagement ecosystem needs a data quality process to be able to have clean and updated data in real-time to be able to make decisions on the fly. What it requires to have a Customer Data Platform. It also requires an orchestration layer to be able to manage all customer interactions across any channel or interaction from acquisition to loyalty to retention. But this is eventually another blog post.

 Before going looking for a CDP we must focus on being able to close this gap in technologies. After identifying this gap, you need your own customer engagement blueprint to define how to start closing the gap and implement the Relationship Cycle. This requires having:

1. A customer data model for the entire ecosystem (Person).

2. A relationship cycle for the entire ecosystem (Journeys).

3. Domains in methodologies and technologies to manage the entire ecosystem (Skills).

4. The necessary resources with the necessary skills (People and Government).

5. The technologies that are necessary to be able to execute your strategy (Technologies).

This blueprint (see the previous image with the 5 components) leads us to be able to define a Customer Engagement Ecosystem that goes beyond implementing a Marketing Automation or a CRM or a Marketing Cloud or putting digital ads or implementing WhatsApp for customer service or having journeys for your eCommerce or implementing X solution in a cloud. CRM is now a Customer Engagement Ecosystem that requires omnichannel, with clean data and a CDP, and with integrated processes to manage all types of interactions throughout the customer relationship cycle.

And as an example of what a Customer Engagement Ecosystem is from the point of view of technology, I present this ecosystem below as a starting point (see image). Notice that they are not any clouds or modules, it is an ecosystem. This diagram does not represent all technologies, it is a representative diagram.

I have an outdated (2019 but still sort of works, Salesforce now has industry clouds, Pardot is now part of Marketing Cloud and Social Studio has an end of life) version of how I see Salesforce as an ecosystem on LinkedIn (English) and in the Solvis website in Spanish. I also have a series of livestreams in Spanish discussing the Microsoft Ecosystem with executives and directors from Microsoft Latin America. I also had the chance to have many livestreams with executives and employees from Zoho discussing Zoho One as an ecosystem and marketing platform. Below are some of the livestream recordings discussing customer engagement ecosystems.

A customer engagement ecosystem requires:

1.  a roadmap with premises, dependencies, and requirements

2. a hybrid methodology of Agile/Scrum and Waterfall

3. a transient architecture that has conceptual and functional elements beyond the technical details for business users and executives to understand

4. change management to manage technology and data, plus domains and skills, and resistance to change

5. a customer data model for the entire ecosystem

6. a base customer relationship cycle

A customer engagement ecosystem is feasible to implement under proof of concepts, use of implementation playbooks based for example on customer acquisition or customer service, use of Innovation Centers or Centers of Excellence, use of campaign templates or governance of marketing and sales operations, and/or with pilot implementations. The idea is to start building the ecosystem, be agile in adapting your operations, and transfer the knowledge of what you have learned to everyone in the company.

The question is, is your company ready to move from CRM to a Customer Engagement Ecosystem?

I had the opportunity with the Solvis Team and as an advisor to help many companies and groups of companies implement customer ecosystems in Latin America, the United States, Spain, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Colombia. Many of these experiences are topics of conversation in my livestreams with co-workers, colleagues, and executives from many vendors.

Here are some of these conversations.

More than Ten videos about how to build a Customer Engagement ecosystem with the Solvis Team

Agility and Movement: Two key components to run customer engagement ecosystems with Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce

SAP CX with Paola Becerra, SVP Customer Experience Latinoamérica at SAP

Zoho One has more than forty applications to help build your customer ecosystem. My conversation with Raju Vegesna, Zoho, Chief Strategist.

SugarCRM is one CRM platform with AI. My conversation with Craig Charlton, CEO; and, Rich Green, Chief Product Officer & CTO

Microsoft Dynamics 365 - a canvas for your customer ecosystem. A conversation with Enrique Perezyera, General director at Microsoft México.