It has long been recognized that content customers are essential to a flourishing business. Customer relationship management, or CRM, allows just that by supporting businesses involve meaningfully with its customers, growing profitability while reducing costs. 

With companies ​paying​ $48.2 billion on CRM software in 2018 alone, which is 15% more than the previous year and a prediction that CRM will ​become​ the most comprehensive segment in the software market till 2020, it’s interesting that only ​46%​ of companies invested in such solutions last year.

CRM is hindered by the failure to combine relevant data to real, actionable insights

The reasons for the obscure retention differ, but some patterns appear obvious:

1. Observed value
2. Inaccurate, incomplete consumer data as a result of complicated implementations
3. The need to reconstruct the same models over and over again for each business and to build local data silos​ rather than a global data network
4. Cumbersome integrations: high overhead costs in management, analytics, and operations

Cost as a bar to entry is genuine. Businesses often symbolize that some of the most significant pain points in embracing a CRM platform are the time and cost required for setup.

Moreover, company data is fragmented across various discrete systems that cannot interact well with other systems. An average company in the United States ​understands​ that up to 25% of its recorded data is incorrect, building customer misinformation rather than consumer insights.

An Introhive survey reveals that 70% of sales professionals are spending a minimum of four hours per week on data entry for their CRM systems, and 60% spend another four hours deciphering that data. Of all the sales and business development professionals surveyed, 60% use CRM daily, and just 23% of them consider gaining insights from their CRM an easy task.

New CRM system design for a comprehensive picture of the customer journey

The solution to forming an accurate consumer profile isn’t one-dimensional. It takes a complete overhaul of all consumer information touchpoints — from making it simple to enter, access, and analyze data to being able to share that data and collaborate across businesses and industries securely.

Mastering the torpid pace and conditional pricing of conventional CRM technology as well as adjusting to changing market trends and consumer needs a new infrastructure for delivering and combining data and services.

Blockchain, by excellence, resolves the deficiencies of the CRM infrastructure by the following ways:

1. Allowing the expedient, transfer of accurate data in a cost-effective way
2. Incentivizing data accuracy and integrity
3. Empowering extraordinary cross-platform and cross-brand services that were previously impossible

Nevertheless, only a few companies are examining distributed ledger technology in the CRM range. ​Nucleus. Vision​ is currently providing businesses access to real-time consumer insights through their ION IoT sensors that seize granular data such as footfall per department and time spent in a specific section of the store. 

United, with its Neuron AI, a real-time analytics engine, the company is leveraging blockchain to build a platform where companies can access the most appropriate data to drive a genuinely customer-focused campaign.

A prosperous few others are concentrated on loyalty programs and other extraneous services for consumers. Loyyal, a blockchain loyalty platform that maintains some of the Fortune 500 companies, is proceeding to grow globally, with added investments from Line, Recruit Co., and Monex Group. 

Qiibee blockchain loyalty platform supports businesses to transfer their cumbersome and costly loyalty programs onto the blockchain. It has associated with Coinify and IBM, among others, to administer the loyalty industry with low-cost, high-value solutions.

To help relate all of these ecosystems and more, Cere Network has broadly restructured its CRM platform by building a network providing interoperability within all business partners and vendors for collaborating on relevant, reliable customer data, from which real penetrations can be extracted, all at a considerably lower price point.

The trend is developing with other industry leaders like Salesforce, who are attempting to leverage blockchain technology to build their service infrastructure.

Companies are spending heavily on a machine that usually presents a low dollar-to-value ratio when analyzing the low productivity and high prices of these services and products. As Salesforce once stated, “The value of CRM isn’t in the product; it’s how you use it.”

We are presently observing blockchain — a different and innovative technology — redefine the standards of CRM. Reliable, holistic data networks will transform how we operate our businesses forever. It provides all network participants, two of the essential things CRM needs currently: a comprehensive consumer profile and genuinely interoperable data infrastructure. 

As progressive projects are just growing off the ground to restructure customer relationship management, the real value of this advance industry solution will begin to unfasten.