Customer Management System

What Is a Customer Management System?

Businesses live or die based on their customers and customer experiences. In a world of global competition, poor CX can lead directly to lost customers – but a customer management system can turn that around.

Customer management systems are a type of knowledge management system. They pull together all the information you have on your customers. This includes their basic details, along with transaction history, call center contacts, social media interactions, and more. This data is combined with robust analytical systems designed to improve management by giving you actionable options based in hard data.

You get a unified view of all your customers' interactions, and a big-picture overview of your customer management situation. This enables optimization and cost-cutting without impacting the customer experience.

Customer Management System vs. CRM: What Is the Difference?

The differences between a customer management system and a CRM are small, but significant.

The biggest difference is of focus. A CRM could be called customer-focused, in that it's about tracking customers across their lifecycle while looking for improved sales and marketing opportunities. For example, a CRM might be used to set up automated email drip-feed pipelines, sending deals directly to customers, based on keywords or metrics in their transaction history.

A customer management system is more focused on business management. It stores customer data along with all their interactions with a company, allowing for analysis of those interactions. The intention isn't so much improving the experience for any particular customer, but rather bringing better oversight of the entire customer contact pipeline for large-scale optimization and refinement.

"Customer management system" is also a more flexible term, one which can cover a wide range of systems all linked together to improve customer management. Whereas, again, CRMs are typically focused on transactional situations and marketing management.

In the end, both a CRM and a customer management system work together to create better customer experiences, improve caller satisfaction, and reduce customer churn.

What Are the Core Components of a Customer Management System?

As mentioned above, the definition of "customer management system" is a bit flexible, so your own customer management system could have different components or modules depending on your needs.

However, these are the most common components:

Customer Database

This is the heart of your customer management system, a full database of all your customers, contacts, and their interactions with your company. Ideally, this database should be omnichannel, tracking every possible touch point a customer might have. If possible, even get social media contacts in there, if you can obtain the customers' usernames.

The more you can cross-link omnichannel information about your customers, the more effective your customer management system will be.

Customer Service Systems

Your main CS interface should be directly linked to the customer database, with contact center agents able to quickly and efficienctly search each customer's history. The more effective your CS team, the better your customer service experiences will be.

Billing / Sales

A good customer management system will incorporate features for making sales and handling billing. Billing systems should be backed up by automation or AI oversight to flag anomalies, send automated reminders, etc.

CRM Integrations

Customer management and CRM work side-by-side. Even if you already use a major CRM system such as Salesforce or Hubspot, an integrated customer management system can enhance it with improved data collection, analytics, and larger-scale management optimizations.

What Benefits Does a Customer Management System Bring to Service Teams?

The overall benefits to your operations are numerous, when you implement a better customer management system:

• Better customer service. First and foremost, the experience your customers receive will be improved by a better customer management system. The more easily agents can locate information and provide it, the more satisfied customers are likely to be.
• Product development insights. By tracking customer comments, complaints, tech support, etc, you gain vast practical knowledge about how your products/services are being used and how they can be improved.
• Omnichannel customer tracking. Customers may contact your business through numerous routes, from direct calls to social media. A good customer management system allows you to track and collate all these customer touches for a full view of their interactions.
• Improved CS management. Deep analytical tools allow you to get a high-level overview of your entire CS system. This leads to better decisionmaking based on hard data.
• Sales tracking. While not as useful as a dedicated CRM for sales, customer management systems still allow you to track and analyze sales patterns for improved marketing outreach.

In the end, this leads to the most important benefit: better customer retention, and happier customers recommending your business.

Frequently Asked Questions

Boost Your Customer Experience With a Better Customer Management System

When new customer acquisition costs 5-10x as much as customer retention, smart money is on investing in retention. A better customer management system can significantly improve your CX and custsat scores, while also enabling smarter and more efficient contact center management.

KMS Lighthouse are your knowledge management partners! Our cutting-edge AI-powered customer management systems are trusted by companies around the world, improving outcomes while cutting costs.

Contact us to learn more, or schedule a free demonstration.