Overview

The COVID-19 pandemic has driven significant changes in consumer behaviors, necessitating new strategies for customer experience (CX) and customer relationship management (CRM). Digital transformation initiatives and customer-centric CRM systems are essential for enhancing CX and employee experience (EX), particularly in retail and CPG industries.

CRM landscape trends include an increased focus on artificial intelligence, analytics, mobility, data management, usability, integrations and digital self-service options. As the emphasis shifts towards EX and CX, CRM systems must be accurate, scalable and customer-centric. This paper highlights the critical role of next-generation CRM in reshaping the customer experience landscape.

HCLTech’s next-generation consumer care CRM solution, ConsumerCX, is powered by Salesforce. This consumer care and support CRM software is designed on a platform aimed at resolving consumer queries more rapidly and across various channels. Built upon the Salesforce Service Cloud platform, ConsumerCX offers a highly customized version of the service cloud, catering specifically to CPG business needs. By integrating related consumer data into a single screen with multiple frames, the tailored CRM console enhances agent productivity while streamlining operational processes, ultimately leading to an improved customer experience.

Industry trends

In the industry, the most substantial and foremost change in the B2B and B2C marketing scenario is that the control is now in consumers’ hands. Secondly, CX is now a top sales metric. Predictive analytics and data analytics are key components to meet customer-centric goals. Artificial intelligence will soon supersede most of the sales conversation. Lastly, IoT and CRM integration will overpower a personalized experience, streamlined replication time, customized marketing campaigns and on-time data to CRM systems for better business results. CRM software is the most critical function of any business. When implemented strategically, it assists with winning your customers, benefiting retention and ultimately leading to business growth.

The indispensability of CRM software in today's digital era is evident, especially with teams in sales, marketing and consumer care. CRM systems must employ precise data and predictive analytics to understand customer needs. Integrating artificial intelligence into CRM invites data-based solutions enriched by machine learning and business intelligence, placing CX at the forefront. Changes in customer behavior demand a transformative CRM solution that leverages APIs for integration and provides valuable customer insights, crucial for creating scalable strategies that deliver superior CX.

Emphasizing CX should be fundamental in CRM strategy formulation. Ensuring the happiness of existing customers and attracting newcomers is achievable only with thorough quantification of customer preferences and perceptions. The richer the customer data and marketing insights we gather, the more effective the implementation of strategies becomes, leading to enhanced CX, customer loyalty and fostering growth.

A 2020 Salesforce survey revealed that 80% of participants deemed experience as critical as products or services. CRM platforms of today have become significantly more robust, equipped with an expanded array of tools designed to bolster CX strategies.

Artificial intelligence and analytics: The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a CRM system marks a pivotal breakthrough in the industry. By uniting AI and CRM, we can gain superior insights into consumers and customers, including their purchasing behaviors, frequency, volume and support needs. AI can be harnessed to forge a more personalized customer experience. The scope of AI encompasses automation, conversational tools and predictive analytics/data intelligence.

“M” factor/mobility: With smartphones continually improving in power and their prevalence increasing daily, the significance of mobile CRM cannot be overstated. These solutions provide robust security features, user-friendly interfaces and platform-independent apps. In a world reshaped by the pandemic, where remote work has become the norm rather than the exception, the implications of mobility on operations warrant careful consideration.

Data management entails handling data that permeates every corner and takes on numerous shapes. Marketing teams rely heavily on data-driven approaches for customer engagement. Hence, the three key focal areas for them are data management, data integration and data analysis, all aimed at achieving a holistic organizational perspective.

Integration serves as a leading trend in CRM today. Employing integrations can bring significant value to your organization by allowing data pull-ins from beyond your CRM, leveraging technologies like APIs. Integrations also play a crucial role in digital assistance; it is vital to embed social channels within a CRM platform strategy. Integrating a CRM system with social platforms can boost the customer experience (CX). Customers should have the freedom to select their preferred contact channel to engage with an organization, underlining the importance of flexibility and integration in a CRM.

User-friendliness: Emphasizing EX, or Employee Experience, is key to ascertaining that the system provides an exceptional user experience for those employing it. CRM systems need to be user-friendly and intuitive to guarantee optimal efficiency.

Self-service: Modern consumers prefer to find solutions to their inquiries without human assistance. Consequently, businesses are increasingly funneling resources into self-service tools, enabling customers to address their concerns.

Business Challenges

Fragmented case management and decentralized data: Monolithic issues in case management often arise from a breakdown in coordination between customer support and varied business functions within an organization or its branches. This occurs due to the absence of a centralized case management hub for automated case assignments, hindering visibility into the assignment process. Implementing a CRM solution would centralize all your data, simplifying the process of finding the exact information needed, right when it is needed.

Repetitive customer issues and inquiries: By nature, customer support receives a plethora of customer queries and inquiries, ranging from product utility to functionality and usage. Many of these inquiries possess previous resolution records; however, constantly addressing these cases may prevent customer support agents from focusing on more complex queries. Introducing a self-service mechanism like a responsive web-based FAQ can help customers find answers to common questions.

Subpar 360-degree customer view and reporting: One common issue with traditional CPG CRM systems is the lack of a standard API required for integrating external systems. This presents a challenge for companies that utilize myriad tools and aim to integrate everything into their CRM tool. Lack of integration could negatively affect the customer experience (CX). An integrated system ensures consistent communication and provides agents access to comprehensive customer information. This, in turn, empowers them with the resources to deliver a superior CX.

CRM challenges related to maintaining a dynamic 360-degree customer view include:

• Data migration
• Lack of business insight
• Lack of integration capabilities
• Lack of robust knowledge base
• Absence of the right tools
• Challenges meeting customer expectations
• Lack of customer journey

Solution needs

• Holistic customer view
• Automation-led customer experience
• Personalized and customized view
• Innovation to drive customer loyalty
• Omnichannel customer view
• Multi-triggered timezones availability for support
• Chatbot integration to deliver real-time differentiation
• Unified communication for digital transformation
• Live engagement with consumers for issue resolution
• Machine learning-driven mechanism for customer success

Existing solutions available

As a service provider deeply rooted in consumer care, we have worked with and experienced various CRM systems commonly used in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. We are well-versed in the most popular CRMs in the consumer care sector. These products offer standard CRM functionality for integration, while often requiring extensive customization and incurring additional costs. Upon using these products, we discovered they have inherent limitations.

HCLTech’s ConsumerCX solution leverages customizations that encompass functionalities similar to traditional consumer care CRM systems but with a design layout and customizations optimized for efficiency. Traditional consumer care-focused CRM systems exist in several versions, with some no longer supported from an upgrade standpoint. Additionally, periodic system upgrades for those still supported cause downtime that disrupts contact centers' operations, prompting them to employ manual processes for managing consumer interactions during system upgrades—ultimately affecting consumer experience and business operations. The interfaces of these traditional systems are outdated and demand significant customization to modernize them. These systems also lack a user-friendly universal search feature to enhance productivity. Considering these limitations and more, our team devised a custom Salesforce implementation (ConsumerCX) tailored to the CPG industry, enabling agile support and control to meet the clients' needs.

HCLTech Solution

Forged from years of institutional understanding of varied CRMs and processes, ConsumerCX is a highly customized rendition of Salesforce Service Cloud. It is a deeply integrated platform where marketing, service, sales and commerce maintain a unified, comprehensive view of each customer. It delivers personalized experiences to customers, enabling quicker and more dependable case resolution with a 360-degree view of each customer. Salesforce CRM empowers us to tackle various issues across multiple channels, enhancing agent productivity by streamlining operational processes leading to an improved customer experience. Moreover, we have incorporated fulfillment processing functionality (letters, checks, envelopes and POD coupons) directly into the platform. The Salesforce Center of Excellence (CoE) team provides platform support for ConsumerCX offering.

Some of the advantages of being built on the Salesforce platform include:

• Salesforce automatic platform upgrades are seamless, ensuring that updates do not affect existing functionalities and customizations.
• Salesforce provides more robust reporting with its core functionality, free of additional cost.
• In cases where functionality integration is necessary, you have complete control over development, both technically and financially. Advanced reporting visualization tools, analytic tools and omnichannel tools can be integrated into Salesforce via an Open API.

ConsumerCX features an advanced address lookup function, which validates an address with USPS, thus streamlining the process of entering and verifying a consumer's address and subsequently lessening instances of undelivered/returned mail.

The most critical value proposition for the ConsumerCX solution is that all Salesforce core updates are available at no additional cost and do not affect your existing configuration. This distinguishes it from other CPG CRMs, which require you to pay for upgrades and necessitate a thorough testing protocol to ensure system stability post-upgrade.

What is HCLTech’s solution on CX?

Salesforce’s innovative cloud-based platform is the world’s number one CRM solution, which dovetails both companies and customers together. C3i Solutions leverages an integrated approach toward business processes, technology, applications and data to drive business transformation. HCLTech’s Salesforce support team distributes end-to-end solutions for consulting, implementation, support and integration accommodations. It has well-distributed and innovative Salesforce solutions for customers in the industry.

HCLTech’s organization supports global enterprises to leverage e-commerce and configure, price, quote (CPQ) solutions to:

• Create an end-to-end omnichannel customer experience
• Maximize and enhance sales team approach, personalized experiences, accurate sales information, streamlining sales and finance operations

While CX drives the industry transformation, we are here as a partner to digitize experiences and offer industry-leading CRM solutions. HCLTech’s ConsumerCX powered by Salesforce tool for consumer care, allows for optimized insights to enhance customer engagement and customer experience strategies. As a Gold Consulting Partner for Salesforce, we offer a team of experts to accelerate business transformation on the cloud by providing an integrated approach covering people, processes, technology, applications and data.

Authors:

Louis Milevoi Vice President, Product Development Retail and Consumer Product Goods

Lou Milevoi is the VP of Product Development and has been with C3i for 20 years. He leads the CRM development teams along with surrounding technologies including application development, portals, databases and enterprise reporting. Lou realized C3i’s years of CPG CRM development\ support expertise and created a team to develop a scalable enterprise solution to cater specifically to the CPG business. He leads the ConsumerCX, Salesforce development effort to build the solution over the next year, which was released with success.

Sagar Vaid Customer Success Partner Retail and Consumer Product Goods

Sagar is a customer success partner at HCLTech and is managing multiple CPG accounts from growth perspective. Sagar is responsible to help identify and solve customer business problems with the relevant technology solutions and has been actively working with customers to help them understand and move towards implementing ConsumerCX as their preferred CRM solution.