VMF 2021: CRM On Steroids - The New Age Retention
Surviving the new age digital battlefield is nearly impossible without a powerful hold on CRM. Elaborating on CRM and the new age retention was Devam Saxena, Group CRM Lead, M.H. Alshaya Co. Being a seasoned retention professional with over seven years of experience in Digital Marketing, Customer Relationship & Experience Management, Saxena discusses the fast […]
Surviving the new age digital battlefield is nearly impossible without a powerful hold on CRM. Elaborating on CRM and the new age retention was Devam Saxena, Group CRM Lead, M.H. Alshaya Co. Being a seasoned retention professional with over seven years of experience in Digital Marketing, Customer Relationship & Experience Management, Saxena discusses the fast evolving CRM.
‘Often we see that marketers don’t listen. Listening can tilt the scale in marketers favour. When a marketer adopts the three-pillars of CRM strategy, their business can succeed.’
The Three Pillars:
- Listen – Marketers need to capture every detail of the data that might come handy at present or in future
- Understand – Make sense, analyse the data that has been collected, does it fulfil the marketers criteria?
- Action – Data that has been captured cannot be left in silos or databases without utilisation. The captured data must be used by marketers to predict consumer behaviour, and deliver personalised services. If that is not done, the purpose of collecting data gets defeated.
Talking about the evolution of CRM from emails and SMS communication to a largely data-driven approach today, Saxena explained the importance of change in skill requirements. He said, ‘CRM users have seen a skillset overhaul. The skills required earlier included understanding of Content, Design, HTML/CSS, Tool/Agency Management. However, the skills required today are different and require a sound knowledge of Content, Design, HTML/CSS, Tool Management, Data Analytics, SQL, Java Script, Tag Management, UX, Prediction Modelling.’
Also Read: Best CRM Software for Every Business
Talking about the other changes, Saxena stated, ‘The teams handling CRM earlier had to have a lead, managers and executives. Today, the structure is different and much more open. The team needs to have a skill-specific focus. Analytics is also extremely important to create a robust CRM. It can help managers take quick decisions. The KPIs have changed significantly too. Previously, the focus was on Open rate, Click rate, Delivery rate, and conversion. Today the skill sets have grown and have become very diverse.
Saxena moved on to talk about the CRM ‘steroids’. The necessary elements of new retention systems have to include ways to divide customers into various profiles or segments, one size fits all policy doesn’t work anymore hence, personalisation is required, and don’t wait to understand customer behaviour. Use data to predict, churn, CTR, and purchase.
Saxena ended his session with tips on stockpiling the best ‘ammunition’ to build a robust CRM. They are
- Tag manager – Helps inject elements in the website, feed information from the CDP
- Webhooks – Allow API connections to new channels that are not natively integrated to the CRM
- Match and Merge – Help dedupe the data to create unique user records
- Campaign orchestration – Stitch different channels into one seamless flow of action
- AI/ML – Make predictions and recommendations work
- SDK Integrations – Capture real-time data from the web and applications
Presenting cutting edge MarTech solutions with a practical approach, Vibe Martech Fest (VMF) is presented by Sprinklr and hosted by Martechvibe – the region’s only and world’s fastest-growing MarTech media brand. The other key event partners are Tealium, Sitecore, OneTrust – PreferenceChoice, SAP, and Merkle. The media partners are EnterpriseTalk, Talk CMO, and ITSecurityWire.
Written By: Khushbu Raval, Chandni U, Soumyadeep Roy
Edited By: Soumyadeep Roy
