To an increasing extent, managers are trying to find ways to improve their em-ployees’ experience, but also on how customer experience could be improved to make the whole customer service process better. This study gives several recom-mendations for managers on how sales and marketing tools can be utilized to develop employee and customer experience. Managerial purpose of this study was to deepen understanding of sales and marketing tools’ effect on employee experience and if this employee experience is in relationship with customer ex-perience. To examine this subject, employees from different companies were in-terviewed to gain insight on their CRM utilization and their perceptions of above-mentioned matters. In addition to CRM end-users, management representatives or persons who are well aware of certain company’s CRM strategy and processes were interviewed as well to form an understanding of the subject from alterna-tive point of view.
At first, based on the results of the study and previous research literature it can be argued that sales and marketing tools, such as a CRM system should be made as easy-to-use as possible for its end-users, in this case employees. This is due to reason that employees cannot gain benefits in a similar extent if the system is complex by the nature or its features and integrations do not work well. Addi-tionally, the system should be tailored and customized for employees to find it useful for them. These two factors are the first key elements that management should consider if they want to improve their employees’ experience. Every em-ployee wants to have tools that enable him or her to success at their work and
increase their satisfaction. Employees can easily, become unsatisfied to utilize the CRM system if it does not serve them or ease their job at all. This in turn, can lead to resistance to change or resistance to adopt the system on their daily routines.
Eventually, this can have a dramatic impact on their overall employee experience and hamper their ability to utilize these tools. Thus, sales and marketing tools that are well functioning, easy-to-use and useful play an integral part in forming a better employee experience.
Communication’s role should be emphasized, since it helps employees to understand better what for the system is used, but also employees can communi-cate with the management what should be improved in the system or what kind of features or integrations they would like to have in the system. Management should sensitively listen their employees’ suggestions and opinions about their sales and marketing tools, since this helps them to become more committed sys-tem users when employees have a feeling that they are being listened and their thoughts are taken into consideration. This is also a suitable way to engage em-ployees with the system itself more when feedback is gathered from them based on their system utilization. Ideal situation would be to engage employees throughout the whole CRM system implementation and development processes, by taking them to develop the system or involve them into the project team itself that is developing the CRM system. This could ensure that grass-roots perspec-tive is considered at the very beginning and then the system can be developed according the real employee needs and not just from the management’s perspec-tive. Furthermore, when employees are engaged in these development processes they are more competent and familiar with the system and its features, which increases their ability to use it and perform various tasks in the system with less effort.
The results suggest that training employees is one of the vital success fac-tors for developing their personal experience as well as developing the overall customer experience. Giving employees adequate amount of training ensures their ability to work with the system as well improves their computer self-effi-cacy. This training can be conducted through having training days related to the CRM system or regularly keeping them up to date of its new features and possi-bilities. When employees understand well enough the system and can use it ef-fectively, it can lead to increased work performance when conducting customer related tasks, since CRM saves their time and information can be found more easily. Thus, as employees are able to perform their work better and faster, they can serve and provide more comprehensive service experience for their custom-ers eventually. Employees’ pcustom-ersonal motivation to use the system might also rise when they feel that they know how to use the system and they are able to achieve significant results and gains from using it. CRM should be seen as a more than just a technology, management should highlight that CRM encompasses the whole customer process and conceptualize it for their employees in a way that employees understand the customer experience as whole process of employees’
personal input and tasks to perform certain customer related operations.
Sometimes management’s view of the usefulness or utilization of CRM is not in line with the employees who are eventually using the system. It is also possible that management views the CRM system from completely different per-spective than employees or they think its purpose of usage differs. Therefore, the whole organization should have a coherent view of their CRM strategy and cus-tomer orientated processes to make sure that everyone see the CRM’s role simi-larly.
Customer experience can be developed indirectly by improving and de-veloping the employee experience and employees’ abilities to use sales and mar-keting tools. If customer experience is needed to be developed directly, then larger investments and measures need to be conducted. Customer experience can be develop in CRM context if companies can use more AI-based technology so-lutions that provide instant information and answers for their customers, such as sophisticated chat-bots that are linked to the CRM system. Moreover, forecasting customer changes and behavior based on customer data in CRM system and us-ing this data could help employees to form better understandus-ing of individual customer needs, but these kind of solutions would require more investments and their positive impact is yet to be investigated. However, mCRM solutions can speed up the customer processes and experience when employee is able instantly perform certain tasks at the CRM system, such as establishing new customer ac-count. Utilizing mCRM extensively can at least quicken the customer experience, which can affect positively the whole customer experience.
Therefore, it can be argued that management’s role is vital in developing the employee and customer experience in CRM context. Robust and engaging CRM development and implementation processes enable employees’ to get fa-miliar with the system and enhances their adoption and satisfaction for the sys-tem when their opinions are considered. Developing the syssys-tem and its features according to the employees’ suggestions makes it sure that the system provides benefits for its users and they feel it is convenient to use. Ideal case would be if employees’ had a feeling that they would not use CRM at all, just managing and nurturing customer relationships, which is eased by the CRM system. When CRM’s benefits are communicated, and its features are trained for employees’
then their personal experience will develop and they can reap advantages from its utilization. Ultimately, these advantages gained from the system can affect the customer experience, when employees can serve their customers more compre-hensively and provide more tailored experience. Then customer satisfaction can increase which in turn can lead to certain positive outcomes and affect the busi-ness performance.