Upgrade from Content Management to Customer Management
Customer Service
One thing that’s become evident about the modern business world is that companies and other enterprises often upgrade their IT architectures and digital systems in stages. With the speed at which innovation is happening, it’s a common-sense assumption that it takes time for the average business to evolve; most senior management teams can’t just snap their fingers and transform their processes overnight. However, taking a look at the ways that businesses build ultra-modern sales and support processes in steps can give executives and others a good idea of how to compete in today’s increasingly digitized and automated world.
Content Management Systems
Not too many years ago, the content management system or CMS was really in vogue. As businesses migrated a lot of their communications from print to the Internet, the content management systems served a vital role in keeping all of that content organized and ordered, as well as providing key directions for employees building a digital warehouse of information. In fact, the CMS still plays that important role, but increasingly, new elements are getting added to what a company does online or over a local network.
Adding Customer Relationship Management
Content management systems are very good at helping the leadership team to put together a coherent and consistent body of messaging, and even in promoting organized outreach to customers and others over the web or through other digital platforms like smart phone and tablet apps. What a CMS doesn’t do, though, involves creating a better picture of how that outreach happens, and making what happens on the digital playground more interactive. This starts with building intelligent customer profiles that a company’s employees use in future interactions, but it’s also expanding to include the handling of a customer’s “experience” over multiple channels or across multiple platforms. By aggregating data about what happens on the web, on a company’s internal site, on social media sites like Facebook, or over the phone, a good CRM resource provides a comprehensive record that drives a very different kind of “face to face” relationship.
Even smaller companies don’t have to be frightened of adding this kind of functionality to an existing system. Vendors can help SMBs to add new CRM modules or elements to “legacy systems” that have worked well in the past. In other words, taking the next step to more interactive digital management doesn’t have to mean scrapping an existing structure and leaving experienced workers in the dark or struggling with the learning curve for an entirely new system. These days, many businesses are looking at taking their operations to the next step with tech add-ons that use and evaluate data in new ways. Big data analytics is becoming more affordable and a bigger market is developing, giving managers new choices. It’s a good time to look at whether a “legacy” CMS is really serving a set of business processes in the best way.
Justin Stoltzfus is a freelance writer covering technology and business solutions at Techopedia, Business Finance Store and Ringio, focusing on emerging trends in IT services.
Leave a Reply