2024 CRM Challenges, Opportunities and Top Tips with Kim Anthony @ TIDE
An excellent CRM strategy can be the backbone of the success of any business. Done right, it can build powerful relationships with customers and generate millions in revenue uplift, reduce churn, and create lifelong customers who keep returning for more. However, as CRM and Marketing Technology both grow in maturity so do the opportunities and complexities today’s marketers must overcome.
To shed light on the challenges and the opportunities, I’ve been speaking with brand marketers from some of the world’s greatest brands, who live and breathe CRM to uncover insights that might help with your CRM strategy today, and into the future.
In this interview, I speak with Kim Anthony, Head of Engagement, TIDE.
Emma Woodward - Head of Agency - CRM
What are the key challenges for CRM in 2024?
Personalisation vs Privacy. Achieving the right balance between hyper-personalisation and respecting data privacy/boundaries can be tricky. Customers expect us to know what they want before they even know themselves and provide truly tailored services, but they are also so much more savvy and increasingly concerned about the data they share with businesses and how this could be misused.
In Financial Services, this is even more challenging as customers are understandably (and rightly so!), much more protective over their financial data. But with many of us testing the waters with AI and predictive models in our targeting strategy for 2024, this is only going to push those boundaries even more so it’s crucial to pay attention to how your customers engage and continually test and learn to find the sweet spot of avoiding being invasive but intuitively adding relevant value.
What are the key opportunities?
Even though we’ve always known that data is the key to optimal CRM, many of our organisations still haven’t found a way to break through org/system silos to create a truly real-time 360 single customer view. So to me, customer support integration is a huge opportunity that shouldn’t be kept on the backlog for much longer. Whether its providing your customer support function with full visibility of what has been communicated to customers so they can provide enhanced levels of support, creating the ability to tailor comms and engage, or, often as the case may be, stop engaging, based on customers behaviours or when they’re having contact with call centres/chatbots/in-store/branch etc. or allowing customers to seamlessly communicate to you via any channel and have the same optimal experience - nailing this opportunity will allow businesses to transform not only their CRM but CX/CE/CS and more.
A top CRM tip from you, the expert.
Now more than ever, It’s easy to get swept up with the latest trends (hands up who lost count of how many times you heard chatGPT in 2023!), platforms, integrations etc and of course it’s easy to see why - there’s so many exciting developments and ever-expanding capabilities that are here to improve our world of CRM and let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to be seen as leaders of the field by staying ahead of the curve?
Having said that, my top tip is to always keep laser focus on your existing CRM landscape before rushing ahead to expand. In my experience, there is always untapped potential for improvements across campaign automations, targeting enhancements, data quality, platform utilisation, messaging strategies etc - even in the best performing orgs and teams. While there’s definitely a place/need for new CRM enhancements, we must ensure the fundamentals are consistently being tested/optimised too and not let those slip at the expense of rushing to implement the next hottest trend.
Would you like to be part of our CRM Collective, Expert Perspective & Insights series? Contact us here.