B2C CRM is Critical to Customer Facing Businesses

Consumers in today’s market are more empowered than ever before, actively looking for opportunities to engage with businesses and brands. The massive power shift to consumers has happened swiftly and left most companies woefully ill-equipped to harness all of the new information consumers began providing in new ways.

Though almost every sophisticated consumer-facing business employs CRM solutions to manage customers and prospects, most of them are based on decades-old technology — and they were designed primarily to handle B2B sales. Most companies rely on disparate customer records within POS, eCommerce, or Marketing platforms that do not share data with each other. Built to support the old model that consisted of mostly functional shopping stages, these solutions are not able to provide complete pictures of modern consumers as they enter and exit the sales funnel multiple times, on various channels and different touchpoints before converting.

The bottom line is that functional systems and CRMs based on old behaviors are ineffective at managing modern consumers. The intelligence they provide is confined to silos, isolated from what is learned through other channels and interactions; this prevents it from integrating new customer data in real-time to paint an accurate picture of the new shopping journey, which is both complex and nonlinear.

This is what drove me to create ENGAGE.cx, an entirely new kind of CRM that was built from the ground-up to enable businesses to know and build relationships with their customers. Born in the cloud, this platform learns consumer behaviors and shares data across all channels, even social media, with the goal of delivering amazingly accurate customer intelligence where it matters most: one-on-one engagements between employees and customers.

I call it B2C CRM.

Why B2C CRM?

At ENGAGE.cx, we know that 80% of your profits are delivered by 20% of your customers.
Imagine cultivating stronger connections with these customers by handling the relationships much like your friendships; knowing each other and understanding the best ways to communicate within the context of the various situations in which you interact:

• Every conversation you have with your friends is based on shared history, and you inherently know how to consider situational context when communicating.
• When they call, text, tweet, you know who they are — their values, desires, and needs.
• When they send you content, it’s always relevant because they know who you are.
• When they show up at your house, you know how to entertain them, and you likely have their favorite drink available for them.

Applying this awareness to your business, you want your CRM to have the capabilities to not only support this new type of customer relationship but to help build new ones. Traditional CRM is handicapped because its knowledge is limited to only the situations and engagements it was designed to handle.

Your new B2C CRM will understand how your customer changes throughout the purchase journey and our Relationship Cloud® serves to inform and empower employees with relevant customer intelligence, it is built upon an agile platform that crosses channels to capture and curate behavior data.

B2C CRM Innovation: Customer Journey Knowledge

Our Relationship Cloud provides insight, visibility and context into where your customers are in their particular journeys. This enables businesses to learn the best ways to engage customers at any individual time and place on the customers terms – across all channels, media, and locations. Over time, a we construct lifecycle timelines for each customer that in turn provides unprecedented levels of intelligence that can be applied to individual consumers or predictively to buyer personas.

B2C CRM Innovation: Employee Empowerment

Employees are on the front lines of customer engagement and are typically the most critical elements in building relationships and generating loyalty. Traditional CRMs are not capable of empowering them with the information they need at the moment to optimize each customer interaction. The Relationship Cloud is purpose-built specifically around providing the RIGHT employee with RELEVANT customer data at every step of the journey. Consider it a psychological briefing on each customer that employees can leverage to guide the interaction.

B2C CRM Innovation: Platform Agility

Traditional CRM providers have been begun repositioning their offerings around customer experience, but they are still generally built on a 20-year-old B2B CRM backbone or are a combination of many acquisitions that have been stitched together. Neither scenario creates the agility or responsiveness needed to address the demands of today’s consumers. The Relationship Cloud customizes intelligence in real-time and gets smarter at every touchpoint by processing and analyze real-time customer lifecycle behaviors and events.

There are plenty of CRM solutions out there vying for the B2C market, but unless the platform is purpose-built to deliver personal relationships with customers at scale, can it call itself B2C? Today’s consumers are hungry to be understood; they crave it and respond to it. By implementing a true B2B CRM into their suite of technology, companies can develop more engaging and transformative relationships with customers, and that’s a key competitive differentiator and component for sustainable success.

You can learn about the core components of B2C CRM and how to enrich the customer experience by taking a look at our whitepaper, Why a Customer Facing Business Needs a B2C CRM. Because we know seeing is believing, you can also schedule a personal demo here.