A better customer experience
Why CRM alone is insufficient for competitive differentiation
Executive summary
A superior customer experience is the critical competitive differentiator in today’s hyper-connected marketplace. Consistently positive experiences keep customers loyal. And those customers are willing to pay extra for superior service – which means you will maintain healthier margins. On the other hand, customers will leave you in a heartbeat if you don’t treat them right – even though they may like your product. And they will probably let their social network know about your bad service. That kind of negative word-of-mouth will cost you future sales and erode your brand value.
CRM applications are essential for delivering quality experiences across all customer-facing touch-points. With CRM, you can maintain up-to-date customer records, effectively handle active customer issues, and generate historical data that helps you understand both individual customers and broader market trends. And perhaps more relevant to CRM systems, your Sales Management will benefit from enhanced sales reporting and roll-up reports.
But a CRM application alone is insufficient for ensuring that your company is more rigorously attentive and responsive to your customers than your competitors are. To achieve that kind of competitive differentiation, you need to empower people in your company to act on any and all information that relates to your customers – not just the data sitting in your CRM database.
When you think about your customer experience, think about getting the exact right piece of customer-relevant information to the right customer facing professional in your organization at exactly the right time, no matter where it exists in your company, or even outside your company. Two capabilities are especially important for achieving this differentiated customer experience:
• Giving people ready access to the specific customer-relevant
information they need, when they need it – regardless of its form or location – and without having to remember to reach out and look for it
• Enabling people to quickly and easily search and socialize that
information so they can collaboratively deliver the best possible customer experience
In other words, your company’s competitive differentiation depends on much more than CRM – especially since your competitors all have CRM, too. Differentiation requires something different. And that something different is the information access and socialization that Vivisimo CXO can enhance and complement existing investments in CRM with information access and socialization.
“But we have CRM!”
Every company has made substantial investments in CRM technology during the past decade. This was good and
proper, since CRM is essential for optimizing interactions with customers. CRM applications enable companies to respond to customer inquiries in a timely manner, detect trends in customer behaviors, and improve the efficiency of service-and-support operations.
CRM applications, however, do not do everything that companies need to do in order to achieve a superior customer experience. Two deficiencies in particular stand out:
• CRM applications are not very good for aggregating all the
information customer-facing professionals (CFPs) need to do their jobs exceptionally well. Instead, they are primarily designed for exploiting the information stored and managed in the CRM system.
Of course, it is possible to import data from other structured databases (such as ERP) into your CRM application. The problem with this is that such integrations tend to be both functionally limited and expensive to maintain. Every time you upgrade either your CRM environment or any of the structured database sources from which your CRM is drawing data, your integration canbreak. So the more sources of data you integrate, the more you spend and the more you expose yourself to the risk of a glitch.
Worse yet, CRM applications provide little or no means of effectively incorporating the rich range of unstructured data sources within and beyond the enterprise – including content management systems, documents and other content stored in SharePoint, emails, web content and social media – into the CFPs workspace. This means that CFPs who depend exclusively on CRM are invariably cut off from much of the insight they need to better understand customers and anticipate their needs. And this approach assumes 100 percent of the information your CFPs need exists in your CRM + ERP system, which is not the case. CRM applications are not very good for searching,
socializing or contextually filtering large amounts of diverse structured and unstructured information. Instead, they are designed to populate pre-defined screens with predefined data for pre-defined workflows.
CFPs don’t actually need more information. They need the right information. So they need their desktop tools to do more than just aggregate all sources of potentially relevant information. They need it to quickly guide them to the right piece or pieces of information for a given situation or context.
CRM doesn’t do this. CRM applications can’t find all of the emails your salespeople have received from prospects explaining why they’ve chose a specific competitor’s product over yours. They can’t tell you if someone in another business unit has already done a distribution deal in Brazil that you can use as a template for yours. CRM applications can’t locate the right collateral piece from your Marketing database, the right service report from your SharePoint,
CRM applications also don’t provide the ability to socialize information resources. They can’t dynamically rank documents and other information resources based on how useful people have found them. They can’t determine from document data that someone in some other office is actually quite the expert on the particular issue a CFP is grappling with at the moment – and that it might be a good idea to give that person a quick call, instead of just reading some documents he or she has authored.
Simply put, CRM – while clearly essential for caring for and understanding customers – can’t cut through the massive haystack of corporate data and documents to immediately give people the one needle of knowledge they need to delight any given customer at the very moment it’s most essential to do so. CRM alone is therefore insufficient for differentiating your company’s customer experience
The Vivisimo CXO difference
Vivisimo CXO is an advanced information delivery solution that directly addresses the shortcomings in CRM functionality. It is built on a platform that provides highly scalable, highly intelligent high-performance indexing, searching and relevance ranking for all types of content. So it is able to quickly pinpoint information resources that are most relevant for any given business context or situation.
But Vivisimo CXO is much more than just a search tool. It is a robust solution for sharing, socializing and flagging
information in all the ad hoc ways that are important to the effectiveness of individuals and organizations. For example, with Vivisimo CXO, users receive an Activity Feed showing up-to-the-moment information on what’s going on with all of the accounts, products, team members and topics that are of interest to them. Updates can come from any of the many systems that CXO can access, as well as from team members who add comments directly to the feed. So just as CFPs can engage through Facebook and Twitter in their personal lives, they are able to use that same model of interaction to stay on top of things in their work lives.
In this way CXO automatically delivers specified types of information to the right users’ desktops whenever a new piece of information becomes available or an existing source is changed. This provides users with their own customized “news tickers” that pro-actively keep them alerted and aware of the status of important issues without having to remember to proactively check on specific customers, markets, product families, marketing programs, etc.
Vivisimo CXO effectively:
• Expands the information potentially available to CFPs well
beyond the CRM database and/or some limited number of other integrated systems
• Gives CFPs easy, immediate visibility into the specific
This functionality can deliver a variety of valuable benefits. These include:
Better customer care
When CFPs have information about your products and services, the customer’s business and market challenges, available third-party/partner solutions, etc., at their fingertips, they can be infinitely more helpful. They can do much more than tell a customer when a product shipped or answer a frequently asked question. They can give expert advice and even proactively contact customers with helpful suggestions triggered by new developments inside your company, inside the customer’s company and/or in the broader marketplace.
Better account “farming”
CRM and sales automation tools are pretty good for hunting down leads and turning them into opportunities in
the pipeline. But to get the most business value out of your existing customer base, your CFPs need to be good
“farmers.” That means that they need to know everything that’s going on with your customers – and every way they
can better engage with customers to score up-sells, cross-sells, renewals and expansions. Vivisimo CXO can be the ideal tool for this kind of ongoing account “farming.”
Velocity, of course, does not just provide this integration for SharePoint. It unifies all types of content across the
enterprise into a highly manageable, highly optimized information environment where users can find what they need without constantly having to log into multiple systems. For organizations making a substantial commitment to
Increased collaboration and teamwork
The CXO Activity Feed helps all of your teams function more efficiently. For example, if one CFP notices that another person is working on an issue with a customer, they can move on to the next pressing issue. Similarly, if they have some unique insight or information to add to a situation, they’ll know the right team member to contact. The synergies created by this kind of visibility are almost limitless.
Improved employee productivity
When CFPs have to search multiple systems – CRM applications, SharePoint document repositories, Microsoft Outlook mail folders, etc. – they lose valuable time. And there is still a reasonable likelihood that they won’t even find what it is they need. This kind of time-wasting happens over and over, day and day out, in today’s information-intensive workplace. Vivisimo CXO can eliminate this lost productivity by radically reducing the amount of time CFPs spend searching
and dramatically increasing their success rates.
Lower IT costs
IT organizations can spend a substantial amount of time and money assessing information needs, building integrations, testing them, and managing them over time. Every upgrade of every system requires another round of assessment,
testing and/or coding. And, even then, information delivery is restricted to only the specific data that is known to be
available in a known place in a known system. Vivisimo CXO replaces this high-cost, limited-benefit model with a single, non-intrusive and secure method for giving CFPs access to any information they need, when they need it.
Why now?
While the benefits offered by Vivisimo CXO are certainly compelling, one question remains: Why now? After all, many potential investments are competing for every company’s limited resources. And, if nothing else, CRM is at least “good enough” to maintain the status quo. What urgency is there to complement current CRM environments with Vivisimo CXO’s functionality?
Brand perception is now decisive
Because your competitors are only a click away, your customers have to decide every day whether they want to continue doing business with you. That decision will be largely based on how they perceive your company’s concern for them. If you cannot consistently demonstrate that concern across all touch-points, they will take their spend elsewhere.
Mistakes are getting more expensive
Once upon a time, loyalty and the cost of change bought you a little wiggle room. And you didn’t have to worry about every error getting broadcast across everyone’s social network. Now, every incident of poor service has a huge reputational cost. So it is more vital than ever to aggressively minimize the
likelihood of those incidents occurring.
Markets are moving faster
In today’s increasingly volatile markets, you can’t afford to wait until a trend persists for a couple of quarters before you become aware of it. You have to know exactly what’s happening with your customers and your potential customers now. And any knowledge you have within your company about such trends and opportunities has to get socialized across the enterprise immediately. If you snooze, you lose.
Profit margins are at stake
In tight markets, you grow margins by optimizing revenue from your existing base while driving down your cost of operations. Vivisimo CXO helps address this business challenge by enabling CFPs to be more efficient and effective.
You are competing against everyone
Customers are no longer just comparing their experience with you to their experience with other companies in your
vertical. They’re comparing their experience with their bank to their experience with their favorite retailers to their
experience with their phone company. So you don’t just have to be a little better than your closest competitor. You have to meet the standard set by the top customer experience innovators.
Reduced cost of technology ownership
With resources tight and multiple priorities competing for IT’s attention, it’s essential to reduce both the cost of
SharePoint ownership and the overall effort it takes to achieve key corporate information optimization objectives.
By providing a single platform that delivers enhanced search, governance, integration, and productivity features
for SharePoint – and for every other content-producing application in current use or planned for the future –
Velocity enables IT to efficiently and aggressively drive down project costs, lifecycle content management costs, and the overhead costs associated with owning content-rich applications.
For these reasons and others, companies competing in today’s hyper-connected markets cannot afford to be complacent about their customer experience – and cannot depend on conventional CRM alone to grow, retain and full monetize their customer base. They need a better way of capturing and applying customer-related knowledge in real time, regardless of where that knowledge originated or where it’s needed. And Vivisimo CXO can help.
About Vivisimo, an IBM Company
Vivisimo, an IBM Company, is a leading provider of discovery and navigation software that helps organizations access and analyze big data across the enterprise. Vivisimo specializes in capturing and delivering quality information across the broadest range of data sources, no matter what form it is, or where it resides. The software automates the discovery of data and helps employees navigate it with a single view across the enterprise, providing valuable insights that drive better decision-making for solving all operational challenges.
Vivisimo is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has offices in Virginia, the United Kingdom, and France. Vivisimo was acquired by IBM in May 2012.
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