Collaborative CX Strategies Built Upon Unified CRM Platforms Are Key in an Evolving Marketplace

In today's fast-paced business landscape, exceptional customer experiences are the cornerstone of success. A strong CX program helps businesses stand out amidst tough competition in the market and build brand loyalty and advocacy. Getting CX right requires staying constantly abreast of evolving user preferences. Today's customers expect a seamless, connected journey from initial contact to ongoing support. To meet these expectations, companies must ensure everyone—from marketing to customer service—has access to a desiloed and unified as well as context-rich CRM system, which allows for a consistent CX across all touch points.

Traditionally, businesses have seen CRM systems as tools for sales teams to track leads and manage deal pipelines. CRM software was built historically by IT departments to purely support sales workflows. However, this limited, single-department view no longer aligns with the realities of today’s market, where customers expect much more from the companies they engage with. Given how the need for CRM solutions has evolved today, traditional CRM tools' siloed approach can lead to back-end inefficiencies like other functional teams (marketing, legal, etc.) not having access to a customer's full history. This can in turn create fragmented customer experiences.

Zoho CRM for Everyone—the solution to building an interconnected CX strategy

Zoho CRM, an enterprise-grade cloud-based CRM platform, addresses these challenges by providing "CRM for Everyone"—a set of industry-first capabilities aimed at democratising CRM access to all teams involved in customer operations activities. Zoho CRM for Everyone helps streamline collaboration across teams by opening up access to the CRM system and providing a dedicated workspace for each team to manage their unique tasks. This also improves visibility into the customer journey for all internal stakeholders, helping mitigate gaps in cross-departmental coordination.

How Zoho CRM for Everyone breaks down data silos and connects teams

Customer service, marketing, technical support, community outreach, and onboarding teams are as essential as sales in shaping customer perception and ensuring satisfaction. By enabling cross-functional access to CRM, Zoho CRM for Everyone allows all of the aforementioned teams to communicate and coordinate from a single place rather than having disconnected conversations. For instance, sales teams can easily involve solutions engineers for tailored product demos, while customer onboarding specialists can track the seamless roll-out of new services. Marketing teams can even leverage the CRM to analyse deal wins and losses, uncovering valuable insights for future campaigns. With information readily accessible to everyone, communication bottlenecks that frustrate customers are eliminated, significantly accelerating response times.

Modern CRM capabilities that offer a competitive edge in the market

A growing demand from customer-facing teams is the ability to customise their own workflows without relying on IT, making the system flexible and adaptable to specific business needs. Zoho CRM for Everyone makes this possible by allowing teams to create their own team-level data modules (in addition to organisation-level modules) by themselves while being governed by IT teams. For instance, marketing teams can establish modules to track customer engagement across campaigns, while customer service teams can monitor and resolve support tickets. The overall customer profile remains visible meanwhile, ensuring a unified view of interactions across the organisation.

Equally important is the user experience within CRM systems, particularly regarding accessibility and ease of use. As more businesses transition to low-code or no-code environments, CRM platforms should increasingly focus on enabling non-technical users to customise their own processes. This is especially advantageous for smaller companies or teams with limited IT resources. Systems that provide intuitive interfaces lower the barriers to entry, ensuring that businesses of all sizes can implement robust CRM strategies without requiring extensive technical support.

By embracing CRM systems with these capabilities, companies can step up their CX strategies and manage customer relationships across the entire organisation.

A new era for customer relationship management

Today’s customers are more informed and empowered than ever before. They expect businesses to understand their needs, anticipate challenges, and provide solutions in real-time. Successful companies are those that recognise the holistic nature of customer relationships. The old model—where sales teams were responsible for managing relationships while the rest of the organisation remained siloed—must be replaced by a more collaborative approach. This shift reflects an understanding that every department contributes to the customer experience and, ultimately, the success of the business.

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Source: Legit.ng