Digital Disruption from EX²

CRMs Enable a Personalized, Multichannel Customer Experience
Several surveys over the last few years have shown that almost 9 out of 10 buyers today are willing to pay more for a superior customer experience. A well-designed Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) will enable you to deliver an individualized customer experience to every customer, allowing you to develop customer loyalty and virtually guarantee repeat business.

The way businesses touch and interact with customers is expanding. Digital and social channels, especially, give a business massive amounts of data about customer interactions. But how to manage all of this information, and how to decide which data is important to driving your business? A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is a key tool to help 21st century businesses understand and react to their customers.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 as a standalone platform or combined with Sitecore is a powerful tool for contextual marketing and digital transformation. By bringing together AX or NAV, and CRM into a complete enterprise solution, Dynamics unifies the capabilities of CRM and ERP.  Although marketers can clearly see the benefits and possibilities that it holds for digital transformation, licensing and scalability have proven to be somewhat more challenging to grasp. To get a handle on these aspects requires a basic understanding of the broader choices with Dynamics 365.

CRM solutions that are capable of agility and speed in terms of end user access are critical to boosting sales and overall salesforce empowerment. But for the many organizations that installed CRM software when the company was small, system challenges and limitations have begun to sneak up on them as the business grows.

As global competition has become more intense, most businesses have increased their efforts to retain existing customers. Acquiring a new customer can cost as much as 25 times more than retaining a current customer. To help them reduce customer churn and improve their retention rates, marketers have increasingly turned to CRM technologies. The unprecedented growth of the CRM industry reflects the importance of providing meaningful, engaging experiences to customers as well as the constant evolution of CRM technology. This evolution will continue to bring new trends and innovative technologies during the coming years, but there are several enhancements that you can expect to see in 2017.

Microsoft's history has shown that the company never does anything without a clearly defined purpose. This is not to say that the company always achieves its purpose; Microsoft has had its share of failures. However, you can bet that before Microsoft shelled out more than $26 billion to acquire LinkedIn, it had already planned a way to profit from the investment. 

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, has made it clear that his mission is to transform Microsoft into a pure cloud platform and company. The announcement in July 2016 that the company was releasing Microsoft Dynamics 365 seems to fit perfectly with the company's move to push its customers into the cloud.

Marketers have known for years that an engaged customer tends to be a loyal customer. Loyal customers are more likely to make return visits, and their average purchases tend to be higher than the purchases made by first-time buyers. The most common method used by companies to encourage customer loyalty is to buy it through reward points, members-only sales or other financial incentives. While such loyalty programs worked for many retailers in the past, today's customers want more.