While we’ve made our name as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, it’s become clear to us that the term creates more confusion than clarity. Customer Experience Management (CXM) is a far better description for the full range of services we offer, and we want to explain exactly why that is – and what it means for our clients.
What is the difference between CRM and CXM?
CRM systems focus on improving the experience of the people managing customers – that is, you. It makes office tasks easier, reminding you of important dates or helping you keep track of documents. And that’s really important: the office efficiencies you gain from CRM systems, as we’ve discussed before, can be extremely powerful.
CXM systems, however, offer everything standard CRM systems do, but with extra features to engage customers and create smoother customer journeys. Active Agent, for example, helps you actually time the sending of emails and texts, so that they arrive at the exact right moment for your customers, creating a smoother experience and increasing the chance of making a sale.
Popular CRM platforms like Alto are fantastic for improving efficiency and bringing your agencies into the 21st Century. But as more and more other businesses make use of the same basic features, such platforms no longer provide a serious competitive advantage.
This is why we’ve strived to ensure Active Agent offers all the trappings of a full CXM system: to provide clients with a real, tangible advantage over their competitors.
Why is Customer Experience so important?
There are numerous reasons Customer Experience (CX) is important to estate and lettings agencies, but let’s consider some facts:
Companies that prioritized and effectively managed CX were three times more likely than their peers to have significantly exceeded their top business goals in 2019. (Adobe)
CX drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, outperforming brand and price combined. (Gartner)
72% of customers who have a positive experience with your agency will actively put a good word in with friends. (Esteban Kolsky)
Clearly, there is a vital business argument for focusing on improving CX – and we’ll elaborate on exactly why this is in a future post. The central point here is to see that a CXM system provides far greater – and broader- value than straightforward CRM systems can.
Do I need both CRM and CXM?
If you currently use a CRM system, switching to a CXM system might seem risky, or unnecessary. But the reality is this is not an either/or question – you need not get rid of all the existing benefits of your CRM system in order to gain from implementing a CXM system.
It is not a question of one replacing the other; it is a question of CXM system augmenting and improving the existing function of a CRM, so that users are able to generate more customers and provide them with a much more polished, impressive overall experience.
While you could theoretically run both at the same time, most agencies opt to have a CXM simply absorb the duties of their existing CRM system, so that all of their processes – from simple office management and admin automation to complex customer journey mapping – lives on a single platform, easily accessible at all times.
Conclusion | Active Agent helps you do more with less
Ultimately, Active Agent is designed to help estate and letting agents step up their game in terms of digital customer experience. We’ve integrated everything you love about your experiencing CRM system into a more powerful, more effective framework.
We built it for ourselves, because we saw first-hand that nothing else existed in the market to help estate agents achieve this level of customer experience. And we’ve seen, first-hand, the huge impact it can have on your bottom line.
If you’d like to see how it works and what it CXM could mean for your agency, click here to book your free demo today.