Marketing and Support executives have a tough challenge in the information age as the number of customer touchpoints and speed at which information flows continues to increase.
The holy grail of CRM is to integrate all channels in real-time and ensure your customer dialogues are always relevant.
Achieving integration of the whole requires businesses to first begin with integration of each individual channel.
In the Internet channel alone, there are several services that customers are increasingly demanding from their suppliers and vendors.
Many solutions have emerged to offer these services individually and businesses may often defer integrating any particular self-service solution until there is significant demand or ROI to justify the integration costs.
Over time, the accumulation of disparate Internet marketing solutions leads to a fragmented solution that de-personalizes the relationship with the customer and leaves the businesses incapable of effectively integrating the Internet channel with the broader CRM strategy.
A unified Internet Marketing solution integrates the commonly used Internet services into a single, cohesive solution that keeps all interactions relevant and provides a single integration point back into the larger CRM solution.
These integrated customer portals may be outsourced to a service provider or hosted in-house, depending on the architectural system constraints.
By taking these steps, it becomes for each customer interaction to be highly relevant and personalized, regardless of channel source.
The grand goal of achieving a 360 degree view of the customer may be challenging, but it can only be achieved by taking several smaller steps towards an integrated solution.