To begin with, acquiring a new customer can cost 25 times more than maintaining existing ones. Therefore, the marketing and sales departments which acquire and maintain customers effectively, have a competitive edge. However, these disciplines miss resources to deeply understand their customer journey through advanced data. Consequently, they fail to foresee trends, predict customer behaviour and dynamically adjust marketing strategies. Therefore, the lack of knowledge about customers, their desires and journey negatively impact customer satisfaction. Undoubtedly, they expect a premium experience with personalised interactions. If that is not offered, you lose customers to your competitors.
Furthermore, the absence of streamlined inter-departmental information channels are the most obvious areas to implement a digitalisation strategy. A CRM system jumps into this gap. Nevertheless, CRM often fails to reflect reality. Lacking user-adoption results in incorrect information, use of system shortcuts and a reliance on Excel. Thus inefficient collaboration leads to bad handovers, missed follow-ups and a sub-optimal customer journey. Consequently, customers are unnecessarily lost and will be expensive to replace.