Uniting the Front Office for the Social Age

When I first experienced customer relationship management (CRM) technologies 15 years ago, we lived in a different world. Companies had control over the few channels they used to communicate with customers, so it was relatively easy for them to “manage” those relationships.

Those days are long gone. In today’s connected world, customers are in charge – they’re now the ones managing their relationship with brands.

Modern customers, empowered by social media and the ease of communicating anytime and anywhere, expect seamless experiences with businesses – on their terms – across an ever-growing number of channels. For companies using legacy CRM applications, that shift has led to a foundational, enterprise-wide challenge in the form of disconnected organizational silos, multiple instances of customer data, and overlapping business processes without a single unified view of the customer. The result is inconsistent engagement with customers and damage to brand equity.

The moment social arrived, CRM systems as they exist today became obsolete. Businesses are operating in an entirely new, customer-centric paradigm; one where segregated “systems of record” are useless without an overarching technology infrastructure that bridges every customer-facing department and connects their data and workflows to one unified system for engaging customers.

To survive, enterprises need much more than a repository for relationship data. They need a platform that allows employees across the entire front office to collaborate and more effectively engage with customers across all channels, using one centralized system. They also need a foundation that models not just structured customer fields, but unstructured data as well from all core constructs of the front office. That includes content, campaigns, media buying, case management tools, collaboration, analytics, automation, competitive benchmarking, governance, and everything in between.

Today, I am thrilled to announce that Sprinklr has partnered with SAP, the market leader in enterprise application software, to provide the core social component of SAP’s new customer engagement solution. This solution is designed to modernize and unify the front office by affording businesses a single, contextual view of their customers while also giving each customer a consistent, personalized experience across all channels.

Social changed everything about the way businesses and customers interact. That’s why, when we set out six years ago to build a new class of enterprise software to improve the experience of customers, we didn’t treat social as a bolt-on – it was the bedrock upon which we built our foundation. SAP shares that vision, and by bringing our technology together with their position as one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world, we’re excited to help the industry move beyond CRM.