If your contact center solution is the heart of your customer service at scale, your customer relationship management, or CRM, system is the soul of your company’s reputation.

When I moved to Tennessee, I met the master of the CRM system. Dan Alcorn was my real estate agent and made our new home purchase the most enjoyable and memorable experience. The next year, I had gotten so busy that I totally forgot my birthday was coming up. The day before my birthday, Dan reminded me by sending two birthday cards: one for me and one for my son whose birthday was four days later. Inside each card was a folded $2 bill.

I was so impressed that he remembered my birthday while I had forgotten it. So, I met him to thank him for his attention to detail. I learned that he had kept a list of every one of his customers’ birthdays for the last 30 years. In fact, he keeps up with his supply of $2 bills through a specific bank that orders them for him 1,000 at a time.

Think of a CRM system as a sophisticated birthday list. At the most basic, it’s a repository of those special details about your customers and their interactions with you. But there’s more to the story for the CRM journey. Let’s walk through the various levels of sophistication that make a CRM system a must-have for your contact center.

Resiliency, Scalability and Personalization
Let’s start with table stakes for 2020. Before you do anything, get to cloud. Now move that birthday list from paper and on-premises to cloud. That gives you the power of distribution and all the other benefits of a cloud-based system, such as resiliency and scalability.

The next layer of importance is how easily you can add relationships to your system. You’ll move beyond the birthday list to keep points of affinity about your customers. And, as your company matures and the needs of the market shift, you’ll want new points of interest that bring meaningful relationships together to help you connect with your customers.

Up to this point, there’s a cloud CRM system that’s distributed for ease of access — and flexibly designed for growth. Now that you can get meaningful information in, let’s work on how to get customer experiences out of it.

That starts with a simple omnichannel example. When a customer calls to get service, record the customer ID and the interaction ID from your contact center solution within your CRM system.  Include a follow-up date as the final ingredient for a great customer.  If the outcome of the interaction was bad, make the follow-up date the next day. If the outcome was good, set a follow up for three days later.

The next day, your contact center asks the CRM system for all of your next-day (bad) customers and performs an outbound dialing campaign to connect agents with customers who need the most attention via voice. As the call dials, the agent receives the information of the bad experience by querying the details already stored in the CRM system.

If the customer doesn’t connect by voice, then the customer record is updated in the CRM system.  Now the CRM system is building a journey record. An hour later, your contact center sends an SMS message with an invite to connect with an agent. If the customer interacts by text, the CRM system tracks the customer’s response.

Later, if the customer calls, your contact center queries the CRM system about the customer — and the agent is given full knowledge of the voice-SMS journey so far. All of this happens without the customer having to repeat herself.

A well-designed CRM system takes on a new layer of sophistication beyond standard business use cases. A reasonable example in the medical field is to go beyond billing. The CRM system can also track things as important as patient prescriptions and health conditions. It would allow medical teams to alert patients proactively about updates that pertained to their health conditions. And they could give them options to refill expiring prescriptions by sending an SMS alert and allowing them to respond.

The personalization possibilities are endless. You could greet your Star Wars fan base with a surprise greeting of, “May the fourth be with you” at the appropriate time of the year. And you’ll find clever ways to wish your customers a happy birthday. A CRM system that’s designed for integrations, combined with a cloud contact center that’s designed for communication experiences, creates a company that’s designed for a sophisticated and great reputation.

I’ve been living in Tennessee for the last five years and have received a birthday card, faithfully, every year from Dan Alcorn. He’s not just my real estate agent (for life), he’s an example of customer service that I point back to many times throughout the years. I’ve also discovered that he’s one of the most discussed men in my area; he has created a reputation for generations. And all he did was follow up on a list of months and days penciled into a reminder book.

Just imagine the type of customer reputation your company could create if you combined the automation of the Genesys® PureCloud® application with a CRM system. Take the PureCloud guided tour to learn more.