How Collaborative CRM Improves the Customer Journey

If your business goal is to improve the process supporting the customer journey, then consider a collaborative CRM approach. Collaborative Customer Relationship Management (or collaborative CRM) is where internal teams such as sales, marketing, support, finance and operations more effectively and efficiently serve customers through integrated and synchronized communications that are tied to the current and future customer journey.

“Collaborative CRM is an approach to customer relationship management (CRM) in which the various departments of a company, such as sales, technical support, and marketing, share any information they collect from interactions with customers.”

—Whatis.com 

Does your company emphasize enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty through tools, processes and strategies? Does your team use email, Asana, Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox and other tools to manage knowledge, communicate and collaborate in real-time around customer engagements? Or, does your company rely on document and project management solutions to track contributions and manage deliverables?

Why Disconnected Collaboration Tools Fail

Email is Omnipresent Yet Isolated

Frequently, collaboration occurs over email. Email is a well-used and decades-old process. Email collaboration has its benefits — messages are audited, searchable, and contributions can be made by any person. However, the disadvantages of email collaboration can cause a derailment within the customer journey. Collaboration over email is not influenced by real-time and constantly changing customer data or activity. Secondly, email does not alert or escalate problems automatically when the customer journey is going off-course. Email is dependent upon human contribution and human monitoring – and that is its vulnerability to serving the customer journey.  

Collaboration Apps Attract Engagement Yet Disjointed

Internal communications software has rapidly grown in popularity to compensate for email shortcomings and accommodate the one-sentence style, peer-to-peer message format. Often these tools have project management dashboards that measure participation, conversation and contribution.

However, these collaboration tools have their downfall when it comes to understanding and adjusting conversations according to changes during the customer journey. The customer journey data points and workflows are not originating from applications such as email, Asana, and other stand-along collaboration tools – that information is stored in CRM and marketing automation solutions. These third-party collaboration applications attempt to address the disjointed data problem by offering after-market integrations, and place the burden of establishing and maintaining the APIs, alerts and escalations upon the company’s shoulders

Indicators that Your Company Needs a Collaborative CRM

Collaboration tools bring real-time collaboration of internal resources together to resolve a problem, maximize profitability or increase satisfaction involving a constantly changing situation. Collaborative CRM expand upon those benefits, to include:

• Enabling a new level customer interactions across all communication channels

• Combining web, email, chat conversations to reduce service cost and knowledge loss

• Provide a platform for storing collaborations within the customer data structure to ease access

• Integrating customer interaction with call/contact centers to allow multi-channel interaction with customers

• Current and predictive view of the customer’s details, influencing collaboration direction and goals

X2CRM Provides Collaborative CRM Through X2Collaborate

It is clear that through proper collaborative CRM customers, processes, strategies and data together to propel a successful customer journey/experience. Read more about X2Collaborate functionality.

X2CRM is an enterprise-ready, unified platform providing businesses a cohesive CRM, marketing automation and workflow solution that provides collaborative CRM. X2Collaborate is included in X2CRM Enterprise. X2Collaborate unifies processes, strategy and knowledge around the customer data, and helps peers from any department work together to improve the customer journey and experience. Should the project involve a customer or client whose behavior influences business, X2Collaborate automatically integrates those behaviors. The results are available in every module in the form of:

• Activity feed streams

• Document management and auditing

• Project management

• Collaboration auditing and knowledge base access

• Workflow alert and escalation paths

• Task creation and management

• Centralized calendaring

• Contact, account, opportunity relationship tables

• Email correspondence manager

• Collaboration reporting and peer insight

X2Collaborate is a robust collaborative CRM, because it increases a team’s efficiency, talents and strengths.

Develops and cultivates employee skills

By implementing X2Collaborate, users improve skills and abilities through knowledge sharing, workflow routing and internal conversation.

Expedites resolution

X2Collaborate improves problem identification to resolution. X2Collaborate allows internal teams to review the same data, interact on a plan, and track the outcome — all within a single platform

Connects back-office activities to front-office outreach

Back-office processes and questions affect the customer journey and how marketing and sales should proceed with the customer or organization. These collaborative functions allow IT, billing, fulfillment and finance a direct way to signal marketing and sales the status of the relationship.

Maximizes Profitability

By combining collaboration around customer-oriented sales strategies, teams can work together and understand the customer’s intention in real-time avoiding disjointed communications due to the lack of accurate customer insight.

Improves Customer Satisfaction

Technical support is often in the lead of improving a customer experience that may not be an optimal situation. X2Collaborate is a great tool to allow support to update marketing and sales in real-time about problems and work as a cross-department team on how to handle the situation.

Measures Collaboration Efforts

All activity occurring within X2Collaborate is monitored and is secured. X2CRM can alert the proper personnel should collaboration stall or be completed. By allowing the X2CRM system to manage all communications — both internal and external — within the project, team leaders can understand who is participating and contributing and can ensure these messages are tracked, searchable and audited.

Interested to know more about how X2Collaborate delivers enterprise-ready collaborative CRM? Contact us for a demo today.