In recent years, organizations of all sizes and sectors have begun to experience the acute urgency of digital transformation, especially since the recent abrupt and in some ways irreversible changes in the ways we work and play.
The business case for transformation is clear enough. Your organization can only grow and lead your competition by meeting the escalating expectations of your customers, partners, and employees.
But the right way to transform is not always so straightforward. If your business responds to mounting pressures by rapidly adopting new technology and personnel without ensuring that your infrastructure and operations can share data seamlessly across your organization, you run the risk of building a complex patchwork of platforms that can cause headaches for your employees and customers alike.
Employees feel the friction of a complicated infrastructure whenever data gets bottlenecked, inhibiting a common understanding of the company strategy, its mission, or what customers need. And when your teams can’t access the relevant data about a customer, that impersonal and inferior customer experience (CX) can become costly.
Streamlining and Scaling
Once the domain of customer-service representatives, CX is now everyone’s business. Sales, marketing, service, operations, information technology, research and development: in the digital era, every team in your organization now works in the front office.
That makes it critical that your organization use a flexible, scalable, easy-to-use customer-relationship management (CRM) platform that includes all the tools and data-sharing capability employees need to give their customers a seamless CX.
A streamlined CRM platform that unifies the automation, content, data, messaging, and reporting functions can offer several business advantages. It permits continuous evolution across the platform, so improving one set of tools improves the others. It helps users add features easily without having to relearn unfamiliar apps. And it gives all teams, using all tools, access to a single set of underlying data.
A CRM for Changing Times
In an unpredictable business environment, that ease of use can make a big difference. As customers’ expectations in categories including wellness, productivity, travel, and insurance continue to evolve, some growing businesses in these categories share a common denominator: a CRM that helps them address their customers’ changing demands.
Adoption of mindfulness apps like Talkspace and Calm increased dramatically during the early days of the pandemic. One app, Headspace, saw its downloads double in the first weeks of lockdown; over the pandemic’s first year, it grew its base of 2 million subscribers by 20%. Without a scalable CRM platform built to handle its wave of incoming data, the unexpected demand for Headspace might have become more of a curse than a blessing.
Technology also enabled the widespread shifts to remote school and work. The workflow tool Monday.com headed into the pandemic era with $120 million in annual revenue. But when millions of employees suddenly needed a smooth transition to remote work and collaboration, Monday.com was able to scale quickly, increasing its headcount by 27% between April and June 2020—and increasing its valuation to $2.7 billion.
As the travel industry changed unpredictably under lockdown, the travel-trailer brand Airstream pivoted to become a customer resource for pandemic living, launching virtual products to offer much-needed guidance. After repositioning its value proposition to better suit its customers, Airstream saw a 45% year-on-year sales increase in May 2020 and a 100% increase in June.
Insurance provider Lemonade builds social equity into its core mission, offering unusually flexible terms and donating unclaimed premiums to nonprofits of their customers’ choice. In 2020, Lemonade’s scalable CRM and smooth data distribution helped it quickly and efficiently permit its customers to switch their chosen nonprofit beneficiaries to help fight the coronavirus outbreak—and tens of thousands of its customers jumped at the opportunity.
Connected and Coordinated
“The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” The writer William Gibson’s classic aphorism might apply to the friction many organizations’ employees and customers feel when the data they need stays trapped in silos.
But by implementing a powerful, easy-to-use CRM platform, your organization can help eliminate that friction, ensuring your employees stay better connected and coordinated with themselves—and with your customers.
Learn how HubSpot’s CRM platform can help you scale your company without scaling complexity.