Customer Engagement Platform vs CRM 

Customer relationships are difficult to manage without a little extra help

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Customer Engagement Platform vs CRM 
CRMReviews

Published: December 14, 2020

Rebekah Carter

Around 96% of customers say that great service is essential to their loyalty for a brand. Unfortunately, the more customers you have, the more you need to work to keep track of their likes, dislikes, and preferences. That’s why software tools exist to support teams in managing meaningful interactions.  

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms and Customer Engagement Management (CEM) platforms are two solutions designed to support better customer experiences. However, there are still many professional business leaders who don’t know how to separate the two.  

So, what is the difference between CRM and CEM? 

What Are CEM and CRM? 

Customer relationship management is a model for managing company interactions with existing and future clients. Ultimately, it’s a software solution that business leaders use to automate their customer service efforts, collect customer data, and even examine trends in satisfaction.  

In the CX space, the CRM is essentially a database that enables organisations to collect crucial information from interactions with a customer. Each customer profile includes information on things like a client’s name, their product preferences, previous payments they’ve made, staff members that they’ve interacted with in the past, and so on.  

With a CEM or Customer Engagement Management system, companies use technology to design experiences that increase customer loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy. CEM means getting to know your customers by collecting data from every touchpoint, then deciding how you can use that data to make the experiences you have with clients more effective.  

Some CEM systems come with tools that automate interactions across multiple systems, and aggregate data from various tools on behalf of a business. Customer engagement management tools inform the marketing and sales teams who search for ways to “engage” customers with customised deals, personal messages, and targeted experiences. While CRM tools focus more heavily on service, CEM solutions are about brand-building and marketing.  

The Overlap Between CRM and CEM 

Clearly, there are some natural overlaps between customer relationship and customer engagement management tools. Both of these solutions are dedicated to improving the connection that you have with your target audience and ensuring that your brand reputation thrives.  

CRM tools enable sales teams and service experts to provide a higher quality of service, personalised to the needs of the customers. Sales teams can use CRM systems to automate various sales processes and improve conversations with clients. On the other hand, CEM, or customer engagement management tools, allow marketers to provide a more personalised experience to customers through insights into their behaviour from various touchpoints.  

Customer engagement management reduces customer churn, improves your ROI, and helps you to strengthen the connection you have with your audience. Both of these tools work side-by-side as database-driven platforms committed to the understanding and storage of customer interactions. Because of this, it’s impossible to define one management tool as being better than the other. The CRM and CEM solutions usually work side by side to simultaneously enhance your brand reputation, encourage loyalty, and boost customer satisfaction stores.  

 

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