The new demands of customer experience (CX) are reshaping the contours of CRM. Larger, more operational and more data-intensive, CRM is becoming a strategic platform for managing the entire sales relationship, far beyond sales force automation.

Purchasing habits are changing. The crisis (which has accelerated the development of e-commerce), the advent of new communication channels (mobile, social networks), regulatory changes (end of cookies, RGPD, etc.) have major consequences on the commercial strategy of companies, and in turn on CRM.

 In this context, the offers of the major market makers are changing radically.

1 - From CRM to a CX platform

The first evolution can be summarized in one formula: CRM is moving to CX. In other words, CRM is no longer simply a sales force automation (or SFA) tool as it has been historically. It is no longer simply a repository of sales contacts, emails sent, calls made, leads identified, and sales made. It still does this, but CRM now extends to customer interactions with the company, upstream and downstream of the purely commercial exchange, to cover the entire "customer experience" (CX). We now speak of "marketing CRM" (marketing automation) and "CRM for services and support". This evolution towards a "CX platform" also aims to unify data and customer knowledge (the "360° view of the customer") with an integrated analytics and BI layer (dashboard, real-time KPIs, etc.). Unification - or deeper integration between these three CRM families - allows, in addition to analytics, better internal collaboration between company departments.

2 - New sales and communication channels to manage

The crisis has been a gas pedal of e-commerce and distance selling. Including for local shops and in B2B.CRM suites are adapting to this and are increasingly offering bricks to create an online store (such as Demandeware/Commerce Cloud from Salesforce and Magento from Adobe), or integrations with specialists in the field (Shopify, etc.). The democratization of mobile shopping (m-commerce) is forcing brands not to limit their initiatives to websites only and to be able to interface with a mobile application if necessary. Another consequence of mobility is that CRM is enriched with an additional piece of data: location, which can become a sales lever. This double evolution is in line with the support of new marketing and distribution channels favored by the new generations: social networks.The "influencers" on these networks - these digital sandwich men and women - are modern sales representatives whose results must be evaluated by CRM (sales, new brand followers, positive and negative interactions, etc.). The same goes for communications on a company's official accounts, and its ads on Facebook or TikTok. Finally, Instagram or YouTube have become real sales channels, sometimes with flash offers and promotions. This major evolution in usage explains the arrival of so-called "social CRM" functionalities, particularly in B2C.

3 - From mass marketing to ultra-personalization

B2C or B2B, it doesn't matter: customers no longer want to be spammed or called three times a week by a company. Instead, they appreciate "reasonable" marketing and, even more, messages that really correspond to them. Marketing has therefore moved from a statistical analysis of markets as a whole to understanding each customer, with their own individual characteristics. In order not to degrade the CX and the brand image, "personalization" must be transformed into "personification". For the record, the former ranges from sending emails with the recipient's name included in the text, to target pages (in "lead gen" campaigns for example) tailored to prospects. It moves marketing from a mass logic to a "one to many" logic. Personification" takes this logic one step further with an extrapolation of the target's profile (based on his or her browsing habits, the data provided - on age, social class, etc.) to refine the segmentation and achieve a true "1 to 1" relationship between the company and the buyer. As a result, data science applied to CRM, DAMs and other headless CMSs are becoming technological "partners" of CX.

To conclude, CRM is today the center of a convergence of all IT tools useful for CX.