without calling them and asking them to explain it again?"
If the answer is no, there is probably a Customer Memory Gap. This becomes even more important as businesses become more digital.
Digital transformation has made it easier for customers to contact companies. But adding more channels does not automatically create a better customer experience. In fact, if those channels are not connected, they can create more fragmentation.
A customer may start with a social-media message, move to WhatsApp, receive a phone call, send an email and eventually visit a branch. To the customer, it is one journey. Inside the organization, it can become five tickets, three departments and several employees. That is the problem CRM was supposed to solve.
The future of CRM should therefore not simply be about collecting more customer data. It should be about creating better organizational memory.
Artificial intelligence will help with this. It can summarize conversations, identify common complaints, detect sentiment and highlight patterns that may otherwise be missed. These capabilities will be useful. But technology cannot solve the problem if the organization has not decided what is important to remember.
The goal should not be for the CRM to contain everything. The goal should be for the organization to remember what matters. What has the customer complained about before? What did we promise? What have we already tried? Has the same problem happened before? What does this customer expect from us now? Those questions take us closer to what CRM should really be about.
Customer Relationship Management should not become Customer Record Management
A customer is more than an account number or a ticket. An NPS score is useful, but it is not the customer. A complaint is useful, but it is not the whole story. A closed ticket is useful, but it does not necessarily mean a happy customer.
Behind every piece of customer data is an experience. Our job is to understand that experience and learn from it.
The customer is already speaking. The information is already being collected. The technology is increasingly available. What is often missing is the ability to connect the dots. The biggest failure in customer relationship management is not bad technology. It is failing to turn customer information into organizational memory.
Your CRM may not actually be lying to you. But if it tells you that a customer ' s problem is resolved because the ticket is closed, while the customer remembers being delayed, ignored or forced to repeat themselves, then the system is only telling you part of the story. And in customer experience, half the story can be the most dangerous story of all of all time!
Tamara Betty Asonga, is a Customer Relationship Management Executive for Equipment Business at Car & General Kenya Plc. You can commune with her via email at: Tamarabetty @ gmail. com.