CRM, CX, and CS sound very familiar to most people in projects and management. But they can also be confusing to project teams and stakeholders. While all of these terms are related to customer value, they are not the same. You can help to keep you project, team and stakeholders on track with a clear understanding and use of these key terms.

Let’s review the terms, how they are different, and how they relate to each other.

What are CRM, CS, and CX?

A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.

- Michael LeBoeuf, businessman and former management professor

A happy customer is the foundation of your successful business. And the foundation of a happy customer is the end-to-end experience created as part of the product and services projects your business executes.

Businesses know that implement CRM, CX, and CS properly will maintain a healthy relationship with your customers and offer an excellent user experience. Customer Relationship Management, Customer Experience, and Customer Service need to work together to optimize customer value. But first, we have to be aware of what they are, what they do, and how they fit together.

What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

CRM often refers to a software systems, such as Salesforce or Scoro. These tools provide processes and data analysis that make up your Customer insights and strategic planning. Allowing you to track of your target market and competitive landscape as a whole, and your customers as target groups and individuals is the power of these systems. The focus of such as system is to understand what customers (and the marketplace) want and provide it. Data-driven improvements helps businesses to nurture and increase current customer loyalty. Marketing on the right platforms and addressing targeted needs helps to attract and retain new customers. Businesses that build the right projects will include these insights into their scope. This will help to implement products and services that your customers value. But even without a CRM tool, smaller businesses can use other means, such as google analytics if using any web tools. With basic analytics and use of Social Media, businesses can track key indicators to track awareness, click through rate on websites, and product views. Using Social media, marketing strategies and CRM can create deep insights into who your customer are and how they want to engage with your products. In this data-driven approach, you can bridge the gaps between the customer and your software product by addressing the users' pain points and needs.

You need to have a very good knowledge of segmentation to target where you should and address that appeals. A good project manager always plans the best CRM strategy to deliver superior customer value and achieve goals.

Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where the two meet.

– Kevin Stirtz

What is CX (Customer Experience)?

Customer Experience cycle is essentially the sum of individual product or service user’s experience. It starts with awareness of your company and products, through to customer assessment, buying decision, ordering, shipping, receiving and use of the project. How users experience the product in solving their problem or answering a need will determine your value to them. Tied up in CX is also branding and the emotional connection with your product, such as Apple has developed with their customers. with your software throughout the user lifecycle. Customers care about the companies they buy from more than ever, so beyond the product is the company itself. What your company does, stands for, and how it treats its employees and the environment are all part of the Customer Experience.

Projects that are executing developing of products or services therefore need to be aware of the CX goals of the right product, at the right price, for the right customer. This includes the user's emotional, psychological, and physical requirements during the experience cycle. Keeping a competitive edge, demands that companies and project management consider all of these objectives when planning their charter, staffing, budgeting and testing.

Project Managers need to prioritize the user experience as the critical success factor for project outcomes. Project that start with a user-centric experience, such as a Design Thinking Workshop have a better chance of meeting all of these needs than projects that don’t take this approach. Click this link to get my free downloadable on running your Design Thinking Workshop.

Organizations that lead in CX outperformed laggards on the S&P 500 index by nearly 80%.

- Forrester Study

What is Customer Service (CS)?

Customer Service is an integral part of building the users' loyalty towards your business and product. In CS, you actually solve your users' problems and answer all the queries even after the sales. But it is more than that, it is not just what you do, it is how you do it. Most customers want to speak to a real person, want their issues acknowledged and when possible, want things solved ‘first time right’. But companies can go beyond this expectation by asking their project to work toward customer excellence.

Customer Excellence focuses on addressing problems and proactively solving them before the customer complains. Good communication, transparency processes and interactive and easy to use technology help. In addition, the way that every customer is treated when interacting with the company, even when making a complaint (or especially when making a complaint) can actually increase customer satisfaction. Projects and departments that keep this mind when creating new or updating existing services and processes will likely see a better outcome over time. Customers have more choices than ever. To retain customers who provide positive product feedback to social media and word of mouth, business need to “go beyond” expectations. That includes providing the right help at the right time, while being fast and friendly. A study in the US shows that 7 out of 10 people believe in spending more money on good customer service companies. While increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits anywhere from 25% to 95%.

Customer Service is not a department, it is everybody’s job

- Jeff Bezos

What is the difference between CRM, CX, and CS?

Now that we have fully understood these three terms let's move on to their differences.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM lets you understand your customers, their habits, and requirements.

This approach is used to create strategic choices about how to interact with your customer’s and the right product placement in the market. The goal is a lasting customer relationship with the best overall experience.

CRM also uses data and insights analysis to continuously improve the customer experience to increase the customer lifetime value (LTV), and decrease the costs of marketing, and mining new customers.

Customer Experience (CX)

The Customer Experience cycle is the start to finish journey a customer takes with your product or company. It is every impression, follow, subscribe, like, and review. It drives initial and return sales. It creates loyalty and builds the brand one customer at a time.

Its main goal is to address customers wants and needs, meet their emotions connection with the product and build brand loyalty. Since once basic needs are met they often increase, and competition will also be improving their products. Continuous improvement here is key to long term success.

CX is the way of understanding how your user will perceive, use and grow with your products and services.

Customer Service (CS)

Customer Loyalty may start with the Experience, but it is sustained through great Customer Service. This can be anything from answering a simple install question, to dealing with returns and warranty issues. Product trust and reliability are key to satisfaction. But all systems and products will fail at some point, the differentiator to customers is how the companies address and resolve failures (either of the product or the customer).

Companies that create projects to review and improve customer service by talking with customers and the employees responsible for providing services. Companies that take time to gather information from the ‘front lines’ and then act on what they find and follow up on the outcomes, are more likely to reach the goal of customer excellence.

How Customer Experience, Service and Relationship Management Relate

As discussed these terms represent different views of the Customer value. How to they relate?

Customer Relationship Management is the foundation of this process to ensure that internal processes and data help to understand your customer and what they want. By looking at customers and products at a larger scale, strategy for the market place is created.

The Customer Experience starts with awareness (advertising) and includes the brand, product, and use case that allows the final product to perform exactly how the end user or customer needs.

Customer Service may start when the customer asks a question before purchase or addressing and after-care issue. The performance of the customer service team can create brand loyal and a long term connection with the product and company.

3 Customer Centric Tips to Remember

Conclusion

Business’s need to focus on the bottom line and revenue generation. But those that focus on ‘customer delight’ and the customer experience cycle across every department, project and team can actually grow. Businesses with happy customers generally have happy employees and stockholders. And that is not by accident, it is by design. So the next time you are planning to start a project for CX, CS, or CRM think about how to include the right people, processes and goals to increase customer delight from every new product, service or solution.

I hope you liked this blog post. If you did, then please don't forget to share this with others and leave any suggestions or queries in the comment section below. See more on the User Experience, Customer Experience and more at ProjectSkillsMentor.com/user-journeys.